Reston, VA – June 3, 2024 – The United States has built a world-renowned fishery management system on regional, science-based oversight and stakeholder collaboration.  The success of this system is beyond dispute. 

Rep. Mary Peltola’s “Bottom Trawl Clarity Act” flies in the face of decades of scientific understanding and actual outcomes in hundreds of federally managed fisheries. Subjectively walling off areas and imposing static area closures based on ideological hostility to certain harvesting methods is the wrong approach.  It will limit the nation’s flexibility to manage fisheries based on the best available science and, in the process, will threaten a significant number of jobs in seafood harvesting and processing, many of them in remote Alaska communities. 

Congress should not take up this flawed legislation.  

Lisa Wallenda Picard 
President & CEO