It was recently announced that a "Hastily Conceived" and "Amateurish" bill siting on the governor's desk may "take up to a year" to come to fruition, yadda yadda yadda.
For those that do not know, unlike many states NJ is one where ALL of our Saltwater regulations are done as a regulation, administratively through bodies like the NJMFC.
The one notable exception to that is striped bass regs. In order to help create the gamefish status that striped bass currently have in this state, legislating their management was deemed necessary by the groups fighting for that designation at the time.
Unfortunately, as was witnessed just a few years ago, NJ can be found out of compliance with federal management bodies and the federal commerce department if it doe not change its regs to match the FMP in place for a given fishery. With Stripers, it took an act of the NJ congress to make the last change to striper regs, barely avoiding a total shutdown of our fishery simply because congress takes forever to act.
Hence, all regs are done in a manner that is not at the whim of the political circus, knows no party lines and is part of the public process to boot.
It has been suggested that this route for the registry may delay its implementation. This is certainly possible.
But I ask this question:
Had the group that made this recent announcement and the groups on its board that ACTIVELY LOBBIED AGAINST THE LEGISLATION IN QUESTION for the past YEAR actually supported it, might we have had all last year to go through the regulation process??
Think about this folks. Groups like the federation and JCAA signed in to a senate hearing OVER ONE YEAR AGO on this bill as being OPPOSED to it, and NJOA has NEVER PUBLICLY SUPPORTED this legislation. It took nearly a YEAR to finally get the bill out for a vote, which then passed UNANIMOUSLY out of TWO senate committees AND IN THE SENATE and passed AGAIN in the assembly.
Obviously this bill was written to MOVE, with WIDESPREAD BI-PARTISAN SUPPORT FROM BOTH HOUSES OF GOVERNMENT.
How fast would it have passed A YEAR AGO if we had had the groundswell of support from all of those groups like we did from individuals recently?
Might we have had all or most of 2010 to go through the rest of the process???
Food for thought.
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CaptTB
