KAILUA-KONA — The Legislature passed a bill this session intended to administer a slow death to aquarium fishing over the coming years. It appears now the legislation will instead meet its own demise, as Gov. David Ige included it last week in a list of measures he intends to veto.
KAILUA-KONA — The Legislature passed a bill this session intended to administer a slow death to aquarium fishing over the coming years. It appears now the legislation will instead meet its own demise, as Gov. David Ige included it last week in a list of measures he intends to veto.
Senate Bill 1240 would have halted the issuance of new aquarium fishing permits indefinitely and limited permit transfers, allowing the passage of time to phase out the practice.
Animal rights activists, environmentalists and the ocean tourism industry offered testimony in support of the bill and hailed its passage last month.
“Clearly we’re disappointed in the governor’s announcement and we’re hoping he’ll reconsider,” said Keith Dane, a Hawaii policy adviser with the Humane Society of the United States, which conducted a recent survey indicating 90 percent of state residents supported the bill while 83 percent were in favor of banning aquarium fishing outright.
Dane added that’s a surprisingly sizable portion of the electorate for the governor to disregard and it’s worth asking if he’s doing his constituency a disservice with his decision to veto a measure the public indicates it wants.
“When elected officials have that information available to them and choose to ignore it, that question becomes a relevant one,” Dane said.
Ige justified his position in a brief outline that accompanied the intent-to-veto list, saying the relevant science doesn’t support an underlying notion of the bill that aquarium fishing is taking place at an unsustainable rate.
Sam Johnson, a PADI instructor at Kona Honu Divers, said he found Ige’s decision “dismaying,” adding it doesn’t take a deep knowledge of scientific studies to interpret the evidence he witnesses with his own eyes on a regular basis.
“You don’t need to see research if you go out there and dive,” said Johnson.
He explained he’s less concerned about the popular aquarium species like yellow tang and more worried about the rarer affected species such as snowflake eels and dragon morays, which are rarely viewed now on the reef.
“It’s really sad the governor would veto the bill because (reef health) is such a large part of our industry here, bringing in divers,” Johnson said. “And not even just divers, but snorkelers as well.”
The Humane Society is lobbying for a meeting with Ige this week in a last-ditch effort to change his mind.
But Division of Aquatic Resources Administrator Dr. Bruce Anderson said both he and the available science support Ige’s decision.
Anderson said over a period of 17 years and roughly 7,000 surveys, research not only indicates that aquarium fishing is sustainable but that numbers of sought after species like the yellow tang are on the rise. Most aquarium fishing in the state is done off the coast of West Hawaii.
He attributed the trend to management and regulations placed on the West Hawaii fishery, which were the result of legislation introduced in the late 1990s by then-Kohala representative David Tarnas.
That effort created a series of marine protected areas on roughly 35 percent of the reefs that allowed for fish to flourish away from the threat of overfishing. Anderson said the results could be replicated off the shores of Oahu, where most of the remainder of aquarium fishing is practiced.
“Proponents suggesting there haven’t been studies done on this issue, I think those statements show a lack of understanding or an unwillingness to accept what has been done,” Anderson said. “There are lots of things we can do that are much more effective if we’re concerned about the health of our reefs.”
Kohala state Rep. Cindy Evans said several factors play a role in deteriorating reef health, such as cesspools. Other types of pollution and overfishing of food fish also contribute to the problem.
Anderson said only about 200 aquarium fishing permits were valid last year and that roughly half of them were actively utilized. The resulting impact didn’t justify the millions of dollars the Department of Land and Natural Resources would have needed to spend to meet the requirements of SB 1240.
That doesn’t mean Anderson doesn’t see room for managerial improvements when it comes to regulating aquarium fishing, however.
He said he has discussed with the governor a limited-entry program for the industry moving forward, which might cap the number of permits issued annually or even the number that could be active at any one time.
Anderson would also support higher permit prices to weed out casual collectors and conditions like requiring facilities to adequately hold the fish to cut down on the number of permit holders.
Mandatory reporting requirements and more stringent limits on the species and numbers of those species collected are also avenues Anderson hopes to explore.
“If we establish that type of program, we could have some immediate impacts from that,” he explained. “This bill simply establishes status quo, and the industry would die slowly over time. I think it’s really a bad approach to making improvements to the program, which I think are needed more quickly than this bill would allow.”