The Inter-Cooperative Exchange, an Alaskan crab fishing cooperative, has filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to compel the National Marine Fisheries Service to release records related to how a NMFS employee interpreted an arbitration standard used by the NMFS to resolve disputes over the price paid for crab caught by ICE members.
ICE alleges that it is responsible for arbitrating crab prices and has been “harmed by NMFS’s failure to search for, improper withholding of, and improper redaction of the arbitration-related agency records requested by ICE,” according to the lawsuit filed last month.
The initial FOIA request was filed on 18 July, 2017, to which NFMS responded with “146 responsive records, including several emails with redactions allegedly pursuant to certain FOIA exemptions.”
Not satisfied with the response as it did not contain text messages which ICE sought, ICE then filed an appeal in December of that year, to which NMFS has not responded. However, the agency had disclosed text messages in response to another FOIA suit, and according to the ICE lawsuit, it is “common knowledge in the industry that the [Assistant Regional Administrator for the Alaska Region] routinely texts about NMFS and council matters.”
The records that ICE is seeking are related to the “crab price arbitration system component of the BSAI [Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands] Crab Rationalization Program,” which was put into effect in 2005 by the NFMS. It has since been co-managed by the NMFS, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and the State of Alaska.
According to the lawsuit filing, the program “eliminated the competitive crab processing market for 90 percent of deliveries… [and] to mitigate its anticompetitive effects, the program includes a crab price arbitration system that is designed to preserve the historic division of crab fishery revenues between harvesters and processors that was previously determined by market forces.”
In its suit, ICE is requesting not only the text messages pertaining to the program, but also that previously provided emails be resubmitted without redaction.
