Out-of-pocket payments made by fishermen to federal monitors who accompany them at sea is comparable to the costs fishermen incur when they purchase new gear or equipment to comply with any other other regulations, government lawyers argue in a legal brief filed Wednesday in federal appeals court.
The brief in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Gina Raimondo, is the government’s latest volley in what has become a landmark case pitting NOAA Fisheries against a group of New Jersey herring fishermen after the Supreme Court in June rolled back a long-standing legal doctrine that gave deference to agencies like NOAA in disputes over a regulation’s interpretation.
The filing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit argues that all NOAA Fisheries regulations require industry compliance and that sometimes compliance “imposes economic costs on vessels.”
Moreover, the Justice Department argued the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs all U.S. fisheries, “authorizes the service to adopt measures ‘necessary and appropriate’ for the conservation and management of the fishery,” including “additional measures that are necessary and appropriate to collecting that data.” Adoption of industry-funded monitoring programs “falls well within the outer statutory boundaries of the necessary-and-appropriate authority,” the brief argues.
