Dear members of the Intergovernmental Task Force for the New York Bight:
Major fishing community leaders are “sitting out” on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) Task Force meeting this week. As BOEM prepares to auction nearly 1300 square miles of the most valuable fishery grounds on the East Coast, Task Force members must act as responsible administrators of the public trust. Fishermen have shown up for years to “engage” in processes where spatial constraints and, often, the actors themselves are opposed to their livelihood. They have urgently advocated for the survival of their family and communities, in a context where all the rules are set (and changed) by newcomers interested only in a large-scale ocean acquisition who often don’t even treat them with common courtesy or basic respect.
This time and effort have resulted in effectively no accommodations to mitigate impacts from individual developers or the supposedly unbiased federal and state governments. Individuals from the fishing community care deeply but the deck is so stacked that they are exhausted and even traumatized by this relentless assault on their worth and expertise.
This meeting boycott is not because fishermen do not wish to be involved in decisions and research efforts about offshore wind–they’ve repeatedly come to the table in good faith and reiterated their commitment to do so in a letter to BOEM just last week. These responsible leaders actively engage in fisheries management processes, partner with environmental non-profit organizations and government agencies, participate in seafood certification and environmental programs, conduct cooperative research to improve fisheries management, provide platforms for scientific research about ecosystem health and climate change, hold positions of authority within their own communities, donate seafood and services to civic charities, work through a pandemic to ensure U.S. food security, employ large numbers of environmental justice populations, and more. They’ve provided time, data, and knowledge to countless offshore wind deliberations, only to see that information misappropriated, discounted, distrusted, or simply disappear. For every time they try to actively participate, there is a new roadblock thrown up in processes that are entirely controlled by those opposed to their interests, in which the overall structure has left no room for them to receive any compromise.
RODA has a Memorandum of Understanding with BOEM and the National Marine Fisheries Service to “effectively engag[e] local and regional fishing interests in the offshore wind development process” and “identify[] the most effective ways to bring fishing industry expertise and information into planning and development processes.” In stark contrast to this MoU intended to improve fishermen’s ability to act as co-stewards of the marine environment, BOEM is now actively eliminating their ability to even participate in public processes.
Fishing Communities Deserve Answers
Last week, nearly 1700 fishing community members representing almost 60,000 employees and members submitted a letter to BOEM suggesting reasonable measures to begin to reduce the impacts to fishing and the ocean environment from offshore wind energy development. They have received no response; instead, BOEM has since announced this Task Force meeting and several other actions to “fast track” offshore wind energy that continues to ignore or marginalize its severe impacts to small businesses and the communities that depend on them. Fishermen are expected to participate in daily meetings and submit written comments on (or, in the common terminology of wind proponents, “react” to) the environmental review of dozens of individual projects that all affect their livelihoods and families. There is still no coherent process for leasing and permitting. Worse still, changes to past practices are now being announced only in specific project announcements, such as that for Ocean Wind off New Jersey, which those most affected cannot reasonably track especially from other regions of the country.
The expectations placed on fishermen, fisheries scientists, and fisheries managers to participate in such processes would be absurd from time and resource constraints alone (of the billions of dollars touted in offshore wind, almost none has ever been earmarked for fisheries science or communications by the government or fishermen). That is especially true when these communities have yet to receive any meaningful response from the thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars they’ve already invested in responsible engagement at their own expense. All they ever hear amounts to vague commitments to consider these requests in the future.
The Public Participation Process Is Being Willfully Eroded
BOEM’s decision to “fast track” both existing and future lease areas without ever having addressed any of the reasonable, consistent concerns raised by fishermen and other environmentalists threaten the very survival of U.S. seafood production. While professing to “advance ambitious wind energy projects,” the actual steps it is taking constitute a major step backward in gutting public participation and transparency laws.
The agency recently announced it will prepare an Environmental Assessment for lease issuance in the NY Bight, which is a component of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process. NEPA was enacted to consider significant environmental consequences of the government’s proposed actions and inform the public about its decision-making. A key step in the NEPA process is that of scoping: the public process of identifying the significant issues associated with an action. Scoping occurs when an agency issues a Notice of Intent where they inform the public of the process, decisions made to date, and other relevant information.
In a departure from the letter of the law, past practice at BOEM, and even the steps detailed in the American Wind Energy Association’s (now “Clean Power Association”) Public Participation Guide, BOEM has only published a press release in the Federal Register. This release, in lieu of a Notice of Intent and formal public comment period, is little more than an advocacy piece.
Not only has the public process been eliminated, but the Task Force meeting itself was publicly announced only eight days before its convocation. The timing directly conflicts with a New England Fishery Management Council, scheduled months ago, in which the fisheries oversight entity will utilize participatory governance to deliberate regulations for the Atlantic herring, skate, and scallop fisheries (all of which operate heavily in the Bight), sea turtles, revisions of habitat management areas, and even offshore wind development.
As fisheries managers, scientists, and community members have raised multiple times in the past without recourse, BOEM’s Task Force meetings do not allow any opportunity for public comment until the meeting has adjourned. Nor is there adequate representation of fisheries experts, including the regional fishery management councils, in the Task Force membership.
Delegation of Government Responsibility to Multinational Corporations is Indefensible
BOEM and states too often ask the fishing industry to work directly with wind developers to resolve disputes, washing their hands of their oversight duties. The limitations of relying on corporate social responsibility in order to solve natural resource management challenges are well documented and well understood by researchers and the public. Domination of natural resource markets by a small number of transnational corporations is commonly understood to lead to reduced social or environmental standards; it would be foolish to assume a different outcome simply because these projects are occurring under such companies’ “renewable” portfolios. Thus it is no surprise that we have not been able to mitigate this governmental abrogation of duty by working directly with offshore wind energy developers despite extensive efforts to do so.
At present most developers have chosen not to engage in transparent conversations with the fishing community. In 2019, at the request of fishery leaders, eight developers joined a Joint Industry Task Force administered by RODA. The goal was to provide a forum to identify areas of cooperation and solutions for areas of conflict. Despite some early focused successes, such as joint recommendations for aids to navigation, the Task Force struggled due to the developers’ narrow interest in permitting requirements, disagreements among developers on Task Force scope, and–from some–a desire for public silence from fisheries leaders with concerns about offshore wind. None of the developers extended Task Force agreements in 2021, leaving no regional forum for fisheries problem-solving and ensuring that fishermen can only engage in offshore wind in the exact manners and circumstances dictated by these multinational corporations.
On a project-specific scale, although some instances exist in which developers have proactively tried to partner with fishermen for mutually beneficial outcomes, more often than not these efforts have been frustrated by uncertainty regarding adjacent projects, new leases, political interventions that change permitting rules midstream, or federal-state disagreements. The government needs to utilize its public trust role to provide real leadership and solutions.
Next Steps
Fishing community members now request meaningful responses to the input they have already given, over thousands of collective hours and days taken away from fishing, before devoting more time to one-sided empty “engagement.” Again, BOEM has chosen to prioritize only one sector and actively promotes this behavior from others, encouraging developers to meet with fishermen as “stakeholders” of their projects, without requiring them to do anything in particular about it. If the government delegated its duty of managing public trust resources to hedge funds and multinational corporations in any other industry, while erasing opportunities for public comment and sending representatives of those companies to resolve conflict, the public would be outraged. But here, public relations and lobbying campaigns from goliath energy companies hold the government’s ear with deeply offensive messaging that fishermen are merely uneducated, environmentally irresponsible, and obstructionist. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The women and men who form the backbone of our coastal communities, economies, and cultures must not be treated as a box to be checked and they deserve better. They demand firm commitments from BOEM, states, and wind developers–in writing–of the steps they will take to recognize their importance as citizens and communities. Absent a clear answer, wind advocates including those in federal and state governments can only expect to see diminished participation in and increasing opposition to this broken system.