Striped Bass Surge May Soothe Tax Bite
The "money fish" is what baymen once called striped bass because it was the one plentiful enough and valuable enough to pay the bills. But the money fish dried up, as contamination and regulation put bass beyond the reach of commercial fishermen for more than a decade.
In the past few years, the population of bass, now considered safe to eat by the state, has been exploding all along the East Coast. And while sport fishermen are taking advantage of the bounty, the more stringent regulations on the commercial catch have not been eased.
Local fishermen are hoping that a new approach to counting bass will persuade fishing authorities to boost the existing quota in the not-too-distant future.
Battle Over Taxes
While a more lenient management plan promises to help fill fishermen's pockets, right now they are concerned that the Internal Revenue Service is trying to empty those pockets. The baymen have been battling the I.R.S. over taxes owed on money received in the settlement of a legal battle with General Electric over its contamination of the Hudson River.
United States Representative Michael Forbes said Tuesday that he had misspoken last week when he reported that the I.R.S. had forgiven both interest and penalties on the unexpected tax bills received by New York State's commercial striped bass fishermen in the G.E. settlement.
Mr. Forbes said the I.R.S. had informed him that the cases of fishermen who did not pay income tax on their share of the $7 million settlement would be reviewed individually. The Government would waive the penalty part of the bill, said the Congressman, but is forbidden by law to waive the interest.
"It would take an act of Congress to change that, so that's what I'm looking into," Mr. Forbes said.
G.E. Settlement
Last year General Electric settled out of court with market and charter boat fishermen who had banded together to sue the company over its 40-year policy of dumping polychlorinated biphenyls into the Hudson River, home to striped bass. They had argued successfully that the P.C.B.s had contaminated the bass they depended on for their livelihood.
The $7 million settlement was split among several hundred fishermen. However, G.E. never sent the fishermen W-2 forms, used to report income to the I.R.S.
Fishermen assumed, therefore, that the money was being viewed as an award for damages and not as income. Not so. The bills were in the mail, and meanwhile many of the hard-pressed fishermen had used their settlement money to buy new boats and gear, or to pay old debts.
Loss Of Livelihood
Mr. Forbes has been "in constant communication" with the I.R.S. ever since the bills went out, he said this week.
There was no precedent, at the time of the G.E. settlement, for the tax treatment of the money. Since then, however, the Supreme Court has ruled in a similar case, involving the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, that fishermen who were reimbursed for lost income after the spill had to pay taxes on the money.
The argument that the G.E. money represented not reimbursed income, but rather recompense for damaged lifestyles and loss of livelihood, has so far fallen on deaf ears. And, Mr. Forbes said Tuesday, he will not attempt to introduce a private bill in Congress seeking an exception to the tax law, because the chances of approval are so slim.
Also unlikely, though less so, is the chance of getting the interest part of the tax bills forgiven by a special act of Congress. "I'm exploring to see if this is possible. I'm more optimistic, but it's still a long shot," Mr. Forbes admitted. "I could just introduce it and look like a good guy, but this is too serious for window-dressing. I don't want to play that game. I'm going to proceed, and if there's a ray of hope I'm going to follow it."
Counting On More Fish
Meanwhile, those who manage bass believe the fish have become so abundant that it's time to restructure the coastwide management plan. Some think there are so many striped bass around that their cumulative appetite is gobbling up the young of other species - a hard thing to measure.
Their first job - one that could have important implications for hard-pressed local baymen - will be to count the fish.
Arnold Leo, secretary of the East Hampton Town Baymen's Association, an organization advocating a larger share of the resource for commercial fishermen, said a new system could finally give baymen, and other market fishermen, a larger share of the striped bass pie. If put into effect, the new model would recognize the existence of numbers of fish which the old model did not, he said.
Too Conservative?
"In 1996 New York sportfishermen killed 6.5 million pounds," according to state figures, Mr. Leo said, "and commercial bass fishermen were held to an average of historical landings without the same flexibility to grow, despite the state of the stock." Last year market fishermen did not fill their 520,000-pound quota.
Recognition of the presence of more fish would make it much harder for anti-commercial lobbies to argue for maintaining the current uneven allocation system, Mr. Leo said.
East Hampton baymen have complained for over a decade that the current management scheme, designed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, was overly conservative because it used only the Chesapeake Bay to gauge the abundance of bass along the entire Atlantic Coast.
While allowing that the Chesapeake estuary, with its five contributing rivers, once yielded the largest share of the anadromous fish to the migratory schools, baymen argued the plan ignored the influence of other estuaries, particularly New York's own Hudson River.
For its part, the commission argued that individual year classes from the Chesapeake were important enough to the overall coastwide population to deserve special attention. Studies determined that the 1982 class of bass was the last big one before the population crash of the 1980s. It was used as a benchmark. Regulations were adopted to protect that and subsequent classes from the Chesapeake alone.
The minimum size limit given sportfishermen grew, starting with 24 inches in November of 1983 and increasing at a pace that protected the Chesapeake bass of 1982 "and all subsequent year-class females such that 95 percent were given an opportunity to spawn at least once." In New York, the minimum size actually went to 38 inches between May 1989 and September 1990.
Since the early 1980s, commercial fishermen have been given a quota - an average of historic landings. The fishing moratorium imposed between May of 1986 and September of 1987 and other restrictions prompted by polychlorinated bi phen yl contamination in the Hudson River complicated bass management for commercial fishermen in New York.
May Change Method
The current method used to determine the relative success of the Chesapeake spawn is called the "young-of-the-year index," and it, in turn, is used almost exclusively to gauge the numerical health of the entire coastal stock. Each year, using seines, scientists would catch and count the number of yearling bass (young of the year) in the Chesapeake's various estuaries.
If the striped bass board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission takes the advice of its technical committee, managers will soon manage by "biomass," that is, accounting for the entire body of fish, as they do in other fisheries, most notably the tuna and swordfish fisheries.
Using a statistical model called "Virtual Population Analysis," an estimate of the total resource is made. The new model uses much more information - contributions of bass from most of the estuaries on the coast, for instance.
Meeting In July
A meeting of the striped bass board scheduled for July will address the V.P.A. model and five possible ways the total bass pie might be divided first among states, and second among fishermen within states.
Victor Vecchio, a marine biologist with the State Department of Environmental Conservation, did not discount the political side of the issue, but agreed with the technical committee of the Atlantic States Commission that the V.P.A. approach would at least provide the opportunity to change allocation policy.
"You would hope that science and fairness would prevail," Mr. Leo said. "The problem is the political situation - sportfishermen want it all."