Thumbnail photo courtesy of the Crescent City Harbor District
Randy Smith says he understands why Pacific Seafood shuttered its facilities in Crescent City and Eureka.
The same regulations the Clackamas, Ore.-based processor gave as its reasoning for abandoning Humboldt and Del Norte counties have also forced Smith and other local fishermen to land their catch elsewhere.
Smith, owner of the Mistasea and member of the Crescent City Commercial Fisherman’s Marketing Association, the California Dungeness Task Force and, up until last year, the Newport, Oregon Board of Shrimp Producers, said he bought a house in Oregon about two years ago because “I’m up there more.” The harbors in California are a place to park a boat and do some repairs, he said, but there’s no infrastructure anymore.
“You can’t blame Pacific Seafood for doing what they did,” said Smith, whose father was one of the first fishermen to work with the company when its CEO opened the Eureka processing facility about 39 years ago. “You don’t know how many pots you’ll get to fish with and you don’t know when you’re going to get to fish…. The state won’t work with you and Fish and Game won’t work with you.”
Smith spoke with Redwood Voice Community News about two days after the Crescent City Harbor District Board of Commissioners voted to send a letter to State Sen. Mike McGuire, seeking his help to revitalize Northern California’s commercial fishing industry. On Friday, Smith said there should be some kind of tax break for seafood producers or ways to make the cost of electricity and water more feasible for them so they will return to California.
Smith noted that Pacific Seafood had recently purchased Trident Seafood’s processing facilities in Kodiak, Alaska, so he doubts they’ll return to California.
“You have to find somebody else,” he said. “Ocean Gold or one of these other big companies that are willing to take the gamble that they can make it down here.”
On Tuesday, Harbor Commissioner Rick Shepherd, who penned the district’s letter to McGuire with help from Harbormaster Mike Rademaker, said five processing facilities had operated out of Crescent City at one time. Today there are zero, he said.
“… and there’s millions of pounds [of seafood] going into Oregon ports that are caught in California,” said Shepherd, who is a long-time commercial fisherman himself and an active participant in the Crescent City Commercial Fisherman’s Marketing Association. “I don’t think they’re aware of that, and so these are the kinds of things that we are going to bring to light [for] the people that need to know about them.”
The Harbor District will also send copies of its letter to state and federal fisheries management agencies as well as U.S. senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Congressman Jared Huffman. Harbor commissioners also agreed to send a copy of its letter to Del Norte County’s newly-elected assemblyman, Chris Rogers.
The Del Norte County Board of Supervisors and the Crescent City Council were also CC’d.
The Harbor District’s plea for McGuire’s help to revitalize the commercial fishing industry came about three months after Pacific Seafood shuttered its ice plant and about two months after it closed its processing facility in Eureka.
Commissioners also discussed the letter about a week before Crescent City’s commercial Dungeness crab season is set to start. Fishermen can pull their pots at about midnight Wednesday.
According to Shepherd’s letter, roughly 50 percent of California’s Dungeness crab and “significant volumes of shrimp, fish and prawns” has historically come through the Crescent City Harbor. Ice is critical for keeping crab dormant for the live seafood market and for preventing other seafood from spoiling. Pacific Seafood closing the ice plant in October “hit the largest Dungeness crab fishing fleet in California hard,” Shepherd wrote.
Smith, whose family bought its first shrimp boat in 1979, pursues Oregon bay shrimp, also known as pink shrimp. There are seven shrimp beds in California with the most productive lying near St. George Reef Lighthouse, he said.
“The biggest landing port in California was Crescent City, nobody [else] was even close,” Smith said. “We had 315 shrimp boats and now we have 36 permits, and probably a third of those are from out of state, if not more.”
Last year, 69 million pounds of shrimp was brought into ports in Oregon and Washington, Smith said. He estimates that 24 percent of that 69 million pounds was caught in a shrimp bed near St. George Reef Lighthouse — in California.
Though he understands why seafood processors are electing not to do business in California, Smith said it’s frustrating because he and other local shrimp trawlers worked for nearly a decade and paid $160,000 for the studies to obtain Marine Stewardship Council certification for pink shrimp in California.
The Marine Stewardship Council assesses a fishery’s stock health, environmental impacts and management. A fishery that obtains MSC certification is considered sustainable, Smith said, and, therefore, more attractive to consumers.
But it took more than nine years for the California pink shrimp fishery to obtain MSC certification. According to Smith, that’s how long it took the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to develop a fisheries management plan for the species.
“In that nine-and-a-half years, we lost all of our processors,” he said, adding that the California fishery was having to compete with MSC certified fisheries in Oregon and Washington. “I can’t remember how many years ago, like six years ago, that half of the Crescent City fleet was moved to Brookings and the other half was allowed to stay here and fish and the next year they were moved north. [The Crescent City shrimp fishery] just slowly got phased out because it wasn’t worth as much.”
In its letter to McGuire, the Harbor Board points to “stringent state regulations, rising operational costs and high utility rates” as being the reason Pacific Seafood focused its operations on Washington and Oregon primarily. As a result, “not a single pound of roughly 40 million pounds of shrimp caught in California waters between Crescent City and Eureka” is landed locally, the letter states.
However, Board President Gerhard Weber asked for clarifications as to what the burdensome regulations were.
“I wonder, if we list some of those regulations that have proven hurtful to us, would it be helpful for a politician who is not necessarily astute in [those] fishing regulations?” He asked. “We can send this letter as is, but there should be a follow up phone call to all of those people that can actually do something about it to provide them with details — we want your help in those issues.”
Commissioner Annie Nehmer, one of three newcomers to the Harbor District Board who is a commercial fisherman herself, said she appreciated Weber’s desire for specifics.
“Having to deal with those regulations, I really didn’t think of it, the onslaught that puts us out of business year after year,” she said, asking to set a deadline to follow up on the letter in about three weeks from last Tuesday.
Kevin Hendrick, chair of the Democratic Central Committee, also urged commissioners to be specific in their letter. He noted that McGuire is president of the California State Senate and that Congressman Huffman is on the Congressional Natural Resources Committee. At the federal level, Hendricks reminded commissioners, bills are introduced in Congress.
“Nobody likes to just hear complaints because they don’t solve problems,” Hendrick said. “You’re the smart people that can come up with solutions when you follow up with him — we need a bill that does this or we need a regulation that adjusts this — our elected officials can help us with doing that.”
Smith was skeptical that the Harbor District’s letter would make a difference. He said he and other fishermen had asked for a letter or to go to Fish and Game meetings when they were pursuing MSC certification for the shrimp fishery and it didn’t happen.
“Now at the 12th hour, or whatever you want to call it, they woke up and are trying to do something,” he said. “Why didn’t they do it when we were trying to work the fishery — to keep it? We could see it was getting pushed out of California.”
