FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date Published: Thursday, August 12, 2021
Washington, D.C. — Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), a broad membership-based coalition of fishing industry associations and fishing companies, received a letter from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) director Amanda Lefton, on August 10, 2021, in response to correspondence dated April 6, 2021. The original letter was signed by 1665 fishing community members, spanning every U.S. coastal state and representing over 50,000 employees and association members, regarding the then-pending Record of Decision for the Vineyard Wind project. On behalf of those community members, we thank Director Lefton for her reply and are encouraged by the acknowledgment of the concerns expressed and the responses to their requests.
RODA greatly appreciates Director Lefton’s reply and applauds her efforts to open a door to direct communications with fishing communities that will be impacted by offshore wind energy development. We look forward to more frequent, transparent, communication in the future. We are especially grateful for BOEM’s responsiveness and its stated interest in “continuing and enhancing that spirit of collaboration” with fishing communities. We eagerly welcome a future of transparent, collaborative work with BOEM under the Memorandum of Understanding between our two organizations and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
As noted in BOEM’s reply, hearing from current users of areas being considered for offshore wind energy development; and learning from their traditional knowledge is of paramount importance to the fishing community and should be to potential developers. Our ability to feed Americans depends upon thoughtful approaches to such developments; and only through meaningful engagement can fishing communities have trust in the process(es) and outcomes. Once again, we value BOEM’s commitment to ensuring such.
BOEM’s responses to the topics raised in the letter indicate the agency acknowledges the existence of fishing concerns raised previously, though it provides little evidence BOEM has afforded fair consideration to alternatives that would minimize and mitigate impacts to fisheries and better coordinate fisheries and offshore wind science in the past. Perhaps most telling is BOEM’s deferral to certain project design parameters as “the basic responsibility of a prudent operator.” Recent events in which offshore wind projects in US and European waters have experienced operational failures, and the substantially higher oversight standards for large infrastructure projects in other industries, provide little assurance that these matters will simply work themselves out. Despite disagreeing with much of the content of BOEM’s letter, there is no obvious need to relitigate numerous highly complex scientific and socioeconomic questions in this response.
In the spirit of the above, RODA continues to hear and learn from our members about items that are important to them. This growing list of action items, which are ripe for collaborative approaches under the MOU and meet the goals that BOEM’s letter suggests we share:
- Remove Barriers to Participation in Planning and Permitting Processes
- Ensure Navigational Safety Support Seafood Business and Community Longevity
- Improve Communications with Fishermen
- Understand and Minimize Environmental Impacts
- Develop Solutions for Responsible Transmission
- Enhance Research
RODA will follow up with BOEM by providing a clearly identified list of priorities to achieve each of these goals in the coming days. This list, in the form of a living document, will be publicly available on our website where we can track progress on our joint efforts to address those priorities.
Currently, RODA is undertaking two initiatives to (1) identify fishing industry research priorities; and (2) develop equitable, inclusive approaches to determining fees for impacts to seafood production from offshore wind. We look forward to sharing the results of these efforts with BOEM and further incorporating actions based on their results under the MOU.
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About Responsible Offshore Development Alliance
Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) is a broad membership-based coalition of fishing industry associations and fishing companies — across the United States — committed to improving the compatibility of new offshore development with their businesses. The alliance works to directly collaborate with relevant regulatory agencies, scientists, and others to coordinate science and policy approaches to managing development of the Outer Continental Shelf in a way that minimizes conflicts with existing traditional and historical fishing.
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Contact:
Haley Steinhauser
+1(562)991-3170