Svorinich Reels In Help for Ailing Fish Industry : Commerce: Councilman and Mayor Richard Riordan are selecting a committee to help turn things around in the harbor area.

During a brief tour of Jack Robinson’s fish market in San Pedro this summer, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan was shocked to learn just how badly the fishing industry in the Los Angeles Harbor area had been suffering.

“Did you hear what he said? That they used to have 200 boats go out and now they’re down to 25?” Riordan asked, turning to the group surrounding him, which included newly elected City Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr.

Riordan murmured to Svorinich that they would have to do something; Svorinich mentioned a fishing industry committee.

Within a few weeks, Svorinich and Riordan are expected to finish selecting members of the committee, which will include fishermen, fish brokers, marketeers and people involved in the cannery industry.

“We’re doing this in order to see if indeed this market can be turned around and the fishing industry in San Pedro can be a thriving, lucrative business,” Svorinich said Thursday.

The committee will advise Riordan and Svorinich on marketing strategies and state and federal legislation that needs to be strengthened or softened to help the industry rebound.

Once the site of 25 canneries and a thriving fishing industry, the Los Angeles Harbor is now bereft of much of its fishing splendor. All but one of the canneries is gone and the jobs that disappeared with the other canneries have left the harbor area reeling economically.

Attempting to resuscitate the Los Angeles fishing industry was a campaign promise Svorinich made in his campaign against former harbor-area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores.

But he is also motivated by personal reasons: his great-grandfather, both grandfathers, father and three uncles were commercial fishermen, Svorinich said.

“They had all moved on to the longshore industry by the time I was a young boy, but I still keep a picture of my grandfather’s boat the Long Island hanging on my office wall,” he said.

The name of the boat was a translation of Dugi Otok, or Long Island, in Croatian, his ancestral language.

Tom Creehan, president of the Fisherman’s Cooperative, applauded Svorinich’s plan.

The cooperative, which has been limping economically for the past few years, closed its cannery last year. Nonetheless, Creehan said his members still meet and try to work for fishing interests in the harbor.

“Concretely on a local level they could do what the ports of Seattle and San Francisco do for fishermen, where they’re talking about having a fishery center with a database for information and research for the fishermen,” Creehan said.

More important, the family fisherman will go the way of the family farmer unless the federal government helps with subsidies and tax breaks, as it did for farmers, Creehan said.

“On a national level, a decision has to be made in the Clinton Administration, whether they want family-owned fishing businesses,” he said. “Once they make that decision, either we’ll have them or we won’t.”