Six local commercial and sport fishing groups have put aside their differences to cast their lines together into the wave energy issue, the Fort Bragg City Council heard Monday night.
The timing couldn”t have been better.
Local leaders hope that Pacific Gas & Electric and others who develop wave energy locally will fund such “stakeholder” groups, City Manager Linda Ruffing told the council.
John Innes, head of the North Coast Fishing Association introduced the new group, Fishermen Interested in Safe Hydrokinetics (FISH), explaining that a wide variety of ocean users will expand further.
“I wanted to add the word energy so we could call it FISHE [pronounced fishy], said Innes, to the amusement of a large audience of local fishermen.
“But they weren”t having it.”
“They” now includes representatives of the Salmon Trollers Marketing Association, Recreational Fishing Alliance, North Coast Fishing Association, California Sea Urchin Harvesters Commission, Sonoma County Abalone Network and Fishermen”s Marketing Association.
Innes said groups to be invited to join in the future include processors such as Caito Fisheries and even the Noyo Harbor Commission.
Jim Martin, another organizer of the FISH Committee, Monday morning filed a Motion to Intervene in PG&E”s pending ocean area off Fort Bragg. The motion, like those filed last fall by the city of Fort Bragg and the county of Mendocino, is late.
Ruffing said the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has not refused or granted the late requests.
“Fishermen are a contentious lot,” Martin told the council. “It”s pretty significant for us to get together like this. The fishermen need to get on the same page and act as one in this stakeholder process.”
Dan Platt of the Salmon Trollers Association and owner of Dan”s Diving Service will help determine impacts on commercial fishers and divers. Larry Knowles, owner of Rising Tide Sea Vegetables, also spoke and plans to be part of mapping sensitive areas.
“I have grave concerns the effects could have to the near shore ecosystems, the idea of reducing the swell would have dramatic effects on the nearshore ecosystem,” Knowles said.
“Based on my 15 years of experience with sea algaes, I”m convinced it would wipe out a few species, principally sea palm, because of its need of the full force of ocean swells,” said Knowles.
Talking to Knowles after the meeting, Ian Caliendo of PG&E said he was impressed with the diversity of the new group. He said getting stakeholders to the table would be a key to the study process.
FISH is modeled on Oregon”s FINE (Fishermen Involved in Natural Energy). The Oregon group has played a significant role in the development of wave energy in Oregon, the state that leads the nation in research and creation of a regulatory process.
About 40 people, including commercial fishermen like Frank Bertoni and party boat captains like Tim Gillespie, attended Monday”s hour-long wave energy session at the start of the council meeting.
The county and the city got high praise for their Jan. 19 wave energy forum that featured developers and top federal and state regulators.
The idea for just such a fishing group to be formed, and possibly funded by PG&E, was one of the key recommendations of a group of local leaders who assembled following the wave energy forum.
Ruffing told the council those meetings involved Councilwoman Meg Courtney, Mayor Doug Hammerstrom, Supervisors Kendall Smith and David Colfax. The officials compose ad-hoc committees of city and county bodies.
Also represented on the committee were Congressman Mike Thompson”s office and energy activist George Reinhardt. Two Ukiah officials who have been very involved, Terry Gross of the county counsel”s office and Paul Cayler of the CEO”s office, were on hand Monday night but didn”t speak.
In her report on the forum, Ruffing said that the committee suggested PG&E and other developers establish a developer deposit account with the city. The account could be used by stakeholder groups for study efforts. She said the city could also be the entity that manages local efforts, also providing “nominal staff time” and a place to meet.
While nobody criticized the city, county or even PG&E, there was plenty of criticism of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, called FERC for short, and its process of non-competitively awarding permits that act like mining claims.
“This is a huge preliminary release of permits by FERC,” said Fort Bragg resident Char Flum, who offered a large map of the areas now claimed off the coast.
“The five members of FERC answer to no one, they don”t answer to Congress (or the cabinet). They are appointed by the president of the United States, which is currently George Bush,” said Flum.
Rachel Binah, a long-time activist against offshore oil development, told the council that Barbara Boxer should be invited to participate, as the California senator holds a key committee position on the issue.
Binah said the thing that struck her after the wave energy forum was that the process for public input, and everything else, was still so undefined.
Mayor Hammerstrom agreed and said that was an opportunity for the city to have its own strong hand.
Councilman Dave Turner worried about lack of public oversight of FERC.
“I don”t want input I want control,” Turner said.
“This is a runaway train once we give it over to FERC, hopefully we will have a new administration coming in that will be a little more receptive to local communities,” he said.
Laurel Krause, who lives north of Fort Bragg, questioned why the city would be steering the stakeholder process, when much of the shoreline is outside city limits.
Susan Lightfoot, a community activist for local foods, said she has been going back and forth about the positives and negatives wave energy would bring.
She asked the city attorney to research whether free trade would prevent local control.
“There are international agreements about trade that could lead us into scary space,” said Lightfoot.
Many of the free trade deals of recent years, such as NAFTA and GATT, do prevent local preferences or local people from picking who they do business with.
“We could have a really successful PG&E venture here and then we could have a Japanese or Indonesian corporation, for example, come in that would want to do the same thing,” Lightfoot said.
