A push to reimburse legal expenses incurred by the lobster industry's private-sector advocates, like the Maine Lobstermen's Association and the Maine Lobstering Union, is facing some hurdles. The Department of Marine Resources opposes the legislative proposal, and on Tuesday a majority of members of a key committee voted against it as well.
Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham, a Winter Harbor Republican —and a lobsterman himself — proposed the roughly $900,000 fund. It would help finance the industry's fight against federal rules that aim to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from potentially deadly entanglements in trap-rope and gear.
To fund the initiative, he would sluice some revenues from trap-tags lobstermen buy from the state, and he would raise fees on Class I lobster licenses for single-operator boats.
"This money is set aside for the lobster industry and a commission made up of members of the industry to decide what they need to fight for their industry," Faulkingham told the Joint Committee on Marine Resources.
The Department of Marine Resources, whose budget partly depends on the trap tag funds, opposes the plan. DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher says the agency expects to spend more than $600,000 on outside counsel for its own legal briefs challenging the rules - a cost he says that could rise above $1 million.
Faulkingham and other supporters asserted that the industry universally backed the measure. But the advocacy groups, which are already undertaking their own legal fund-raising efforts, had varying views on the issue. The Maine Lobstering Union, which is a chapter of a national machinists union, strongly supported the measure, but the Maine Lobstermen's Association did not, saying that the trap tag revenues shouldn't be diverted.
And another lobsterman on the committee was opposed.
"I'm a fisherman, and as it's currently written, it is very broad and goes beyond whale rules," said Stonington Rep. Genevieve McDonald. "It's unnecessary. I can just write a check to the MLA legal defense fund as I have been, without processing it through the government."
The committee at first voted eight-to-five against the measure. But Representative Faulkingham then changed his vote, and voted against his own bill, making the final tally 9-4 against it. It's a move that's sometimes used, under parliamentary rules, to allow a vote to be reconsidered.