Cuomo Threatens Fluke Suit

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has asked the United States secretary of commerce to take strong action to alter quotas on fluke that he said are hurting New York’s commercial fishing industry. 

In a letter on Tuesday, the governor told Wilbur Ross that the state would take legal action to protect New York’s commercial fishermen if fluke is not more equitably allocated among states. 

The commercial allocations “are based upon incomplete data from 1980-1989,” the governor wrote. “As a result, New York is only allocated 7.6 percent of the coastwide limit, while the neighboring states of Rhode Island and New Jersey received allocations more than twice the size. Other states have access to as much as three times New York’s quota, causing an inequitable distribution that injures the state’s economy and prevents fishermen from feeding their own families. These outdated allocations have devastated fishermen, and will continue to impact the subsequent generations of New York’s commercial fishers.”

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission are scheduled to hold meetings in December. Governor Cuomo urged Secretary Ross to take action on the quota in advance of those meetings. “I cannot allow self-interest to grind this process to a halt, while an entire industry suffers as a result,” he wrote. “Regulators cannot continue to manage this fishery in a manner devoid of equity and flexibility. Accordingly, if the December meetings do not result in a process for a dramatic increase to the commercial fluke allocation for New York, I will commence litigation and secure from the courts the rights of New York’s fishermen as a matter of law.”

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. seconded the governor’s letter yesterday, noting in a statement that the Magnuson-Stevens Act of 1976 established a state-by-state quota allocation system for commercial fishermen. The quotas, he said, are “based upon faulty and incomplete collection data, which discriminate against commercial fishermen in the State of New York.