Trawlers Find Something Fishy in Ruling

While the Blue Fox, a 75-foot fishing trawler based in Newport, Ore., was at sea last week, catching whiting for delivery to Newport Shrimp Co., Fred Yeck, the boat’s owner, and Mike Marshall, manager of the processing plant, were thinking about the federal government nearly a continent away. They were not happy.

The object of their anger was the fine print in the April 15 edition of the Federal Register, where the Commerce Department announced the “final rule” allocating this year’s whiting harvest.

The decision, published the day the season opened, was a complete reversal of the proposed rule the department issued a month earlier. The final rule gave 70% of the $100-million-a-year whiting catch to a Seattle-based fleet of large factory trawlers that catch and process the fish at sea rather than the 63% that had been proposed for local boaters and processors.

Yeck and Marshall and several others on the losing side cried foul, suggesting the flip-flop was the result of Clinton Administration intervention on behalf of a key Clinton supporter, Arkansas chicken king Don Tyson. Tyson Food last year bought Arctic Alaska Fisheries Corp. of Seattle, the largest owner of factory trawlers.

“Clinton and Gore just came out here to the timber summit and talked about regional management and solutions and then they do something that directly benefits his campaign contributor, Tyson Foods,” Yeck said. “No one is going to admit that, but we feel like the government has taken a payoff from big, deep-pockets corporate America.”

Tyson Food executives and their families gave $20,750 to the Clinton presidential campaign, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics from campaign finance reports.

Marshall, who said his customers canceled orders after the ruling because they could buy cheaper from the factory fleet, also expressed bitterness about how the Commerce Department divvied up the 142,000-ton catch.

“This is a horrible thing for the Oregon coast,” he said. “If this President is interested in providing jobs for people, he’s done the exact opposite here.”

Commerce officials deny politics played a part in the reversal, although the Washington state congressional delegation lobbied for the factory trawlers and the Oregon delegation for the smaller boats and local processors.

Jim Desler, a spokesman for Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown, said the decision was made at a lower level without political intervention. Scott Smullen, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said his agency rejected the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s recommendation to give more of the whiting catch to small trawlers for on-shore processing because “it would have given an unjustifiably high level” to one part of the industry.

Larry Six, executive director of the council in Portland, said his group was bothered by the last-minute timing of the decision. He also said it “undermines the integrity” of the regional management system set up by the Magnuson Act to govern commercial fishing.

Joe Blum, executive director of the winning American Factory Trawler Assn. in Seattle, had a different view. “To paint this as a big political deal does a disservice to the facts,” he said. “I would say the facts won.” The on-shore factories did not process what they asked for last year, he said.

Bob Womack, president of Arctic Alaska, the Tyson subsidiary, dismissed charges of a political payoff as ludicrous. He noted his firm owns an on-shore processing plant in Newport as well as factory trawlers.

“I wasn’t happy about the damned decision,” he said. Asked then why his company filed comments opposing the proposed rule that favored the on-shore processors, Womack said he did not remember that it had.