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I was very involved in the process when I lived in Santa Barbara. I went to every meeting and public hearing from Sacramento to San Diego and the stakeholder meetings in SB and wrote up full reports of each meeting to post online.
Overall a very frustrating and pointless process. In the end whatever they want to do is what gets done. Public input had virtually zero impact. Every public hearing was overwhelmingly anti-reserve (besides one where a UCSB professor gave students extra credit to attend and lobby for reserves... pretty funny when I asked how many in the audience had ever visited the areas in question...) but none of that was reflected in any type of action regarding maps or reserves in general. On the day of the final vote 3 of the 5 original committee were "coincidentally" absent and replaced by pro-reserve fill ins. Of course the proposal passed. All said and done an enormous waste of time just to put on a show for the sake of legal process.
The only time we got anything close to being accomplished was through personal meetings with committee members and DFG reps at a sit down meeting. We had very little impact on size and locations of reserves, that was all pretty much hammered out by the stakeholders themselves.
The only thing we did get accomplished was the types of reserves. There are varying levels of reserves that they set up: no take, rec. only, shore based only, etc. We were able to define some reserves as shore based angling only, especially if we used the angle of low income families depending on the bounty of the sea, etc. I really believe we need to look out for our own best interest first and foremost and if anyone else's agenda lines up with ours on any certain situation then so be it. But locking into the motor boat agenda or commercial agenda or whatever could come back to bite us. None of the fishing org's really have enough power to combat the enviro org's anyway, so as far as jumping onboard for the clout factor, forget about it. Not to say it's not worth joining org's like UASC but don't count on your dues out-spending NRDC.
We tried the united front angle with both rec and commercial, then eventually commercial kind of started looking out for themselves so it was all rec. anglers but for our interest we were really most aligned with freedivers by the end. My opinion is that we need to decide right now who we're aligning ourselves with and stick to it. I highly suggest advocating as specialized a need as possible so that we're not stuck trying to minimize the amount of reserves and can rather focus on allowing kayaks at la jolla for example. If we can hammer a few small points home repeatedly it has a much better chance of getting through than being anti-reserve in general.
Another thing we need to do is get some good people on that stakeholder board and setup meetings with them as well as any DFG officials and politicians that have any say in the matter. If we can work with somebody that has any amount of pull it will be much more effective than whining at public hearing meetings every month.
OEX will be happy to facilitate any meetings or offer any services we can. Paul, please continue to keep the boards posted on the process. I'll jump back in and see if we can get anything done this time.
-Brian
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