SOUTH ATLANTIC FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE Westin Jekyll Island Jekyll Island, Georgia March 2-3, 2020 SUMMARY MINUTES COUNCIL MEMBERS Jessica McCawley, Chair Mel Bell, Vice-Chair Chris Conklin Chester Brewer Anna Beckwith Dr. Carolyn Belcher Dr. Kyle Christiansen Spud Woodward Tim Griner Dr. Roy Crabtree LCDR Jeremy Montes Steve Poland David Whittaker Art Sapp COUNCIL STAFF John Carmichael Dr. Brian Cheuvront Kim Iverson Myra Brouwer Kelly Klasnick Dr. Chip Collier Cameron Rhodes Christina Wiegand Dr. Mike Errigo John Hadley OBSERVERS/PARTICIPANTS Shep Grimes Dr. Jack McGovern Monica Smit-Brunello Dr. Clay Porch Dr. George Sedberry Duane Smith Pat O’Shaugnessy Erika Burgess Martha Guyas Dr. Wilson Laney Rick DeVictor Other observers and participants attached. Committee of the Whole March 2-3, 2020 Jekyll Island, GA The Committee of the Whole of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council convened at the Westin Jekyll Island, Jekyll Island, Georgia, on Monday, March 2, 2020, and was called to order by Chairman Jessica McCawley. MS. MCCAWLEY: We are going to get going in the Committee of the Whole, and so everybody that is on the council is on the Committee of the Whole, and we’ll be in Committee of the Whole today and probably most of tomorrow. The first order of business is Approval of the Agenda. Are there any changes or modifications to the agenda? Any objection to approval of the agenda? Seeing none, the agenda stands approved. The next order of business is Approval of the June 2019 Committee Minutes. Any modifications or changes to those committee minutes? Any objection to approval of those minutes? Seeing none, the minutes stand approved. Next, we’re going to get into the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and that could last the entire afternoon today, and so we’re going to have multiple presentations, and so, from FWC, I have with me Martha Guyas, and she is the Section Leader over Federal Fisheries, and she also sits on the Gulf Council, and she’s going to give the FWC presentation on the sanctuary, and we’re probably going to end up coming back to this presentation later in this discussion, and then we’ll have an update from the sanctuary, and we have three sanctuary staffers out there. We have Sarah Fangman, the superintendent, and we have Beth Dieveney, also with the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and Ed Lindelof with the Sanctuary Program in D.C. Then Monica is going to give us an overview of the council’s role in this process, and she wrote a document that’s in the briefing book for folks to look at, and then we’ll get back into the discussion, and we’ll probably come back to this FWC presentation, and so we’ll probably end up rehashing some of the things we talked about at the last meeting, and so we talked about, at the last meeting, there’s this protocol for fisheries management, and FWC has met about the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary on three different occasions with our commission. Most recently, we talked to our commission at our February commission meeting a couple of weeks ago, and the presentation that you’re going to see today is very similar to that presentation, and it will go into not all the topics, because there are eighty-something topics in the sanctuary plan, but it will go into some of the main topics that we think you guys would be interested in and how FWC is going to be commenting on those topics, and so we thought that that would be a good place to start to start the council discussion. I’m going to turn it over to Martha to give this presentation, and, if you have any questions, stop us in the middle of the presentation, and we can get the questions answered then, and then, like I said, there is kind of some talking points in here, or points for discussion, that the council might want to have, and so we’ll probably end up coming back to this presentation later in the discussion, and so I’m going to turn it over to Martha. MS. GUYAS: All right. Thanks. Like Jessica said, stop me if you have questions. It gets a little heavy and complex fast, but I’m going to try to keep it high level, as best as I can. Let me just start by explaining where FWC fits into this process, and we’ll talk about the councils too, and, of course, Monica is going to talk about that, but FWC is a co-manager of the sanctuary, and it has authority specifically to implement the fisheries regulations for state waters of the sanctuary. Our 2 Committee of the Whole March 2-3, 2020 Jekyll Island, GA agency has very limited authority to do other regulations, like boating, habitat, and wildlife, and so, between those two things, FWC and the sanctuary can complement each other. The council, obviously, one of the things you’re going to talk about today is providing comments on the sanctuary’s proposal, which they’re calling the restoration blueprint, and my next bullet here is really a question mark, and I think it will hinge on what you guys talk about with Monica later, but how FWC and the councils may want to work together on the fisheries rules for Atlantic federal waters, of course, with the sanctuary, and then I’m going to come back to this bullet about workshops, but, just to give you a little taste of where I think our commission is going to go, we’re going to hold workshops on the fisheries issues for state waters of the sanctuary, likely later this summer, and so, assuming we do that, we would invite the councils to come on and join us, because, in our past experience with the south Florida workshops, it’s been that people don’t necessarily distinguish between state and federal waters. They just know they have an issue, and, if they have an audience at FWC workshops, it might nice to have council representation there, too. Our commission has spent a lot of time on this sanctuary plan, and we’ve had updates at our October meeting, our past December meeting. In January, Jessica and I and a number of our staff were in the Keys and had a number of meetings with stakeholder organizations, to get their thoughts on the plan, to help us understand what their issues are, to inform our comments, and, just last week, or a couple of weeks ago, our commission met again to look at the plan one last time in a little bit more detail, so that they could form comments for our comment letter, which is due in April, and we’re working on that letter now, based on our commission’s meeting, and then, as I mentioned before, we’re going to be holding workshops, and we will be doing some rulemaking for fisheries items in state waters, and I will talk more about that later in this presentation, but this is just big picture what we’ve been up to. Our commission and staff have been looking at the sanctuary’s plan, with a number of guiding principles in mind, and those are up on the slide, and I will just kind of run through these very quickly. The first one is looking at ecosystem-level changes in the Keys, and recognizing and addressing those is a very high priority for the commission, and specifically looking at water quality, water flow, and coral loss. Those are all factors that are influenced by conditions within the sanctuary, and also outside of the sanctuary, and so addressing these issues is a high priority for our commission, and it really should be considered on all the proposals in the sanctuary’s plan. The next one is fisheries management is reserved to FWC in state waters, and FWC has the lone authority to implement fisheries regulations in the sanctuary, and so that’s just kind of coming back to that. Considering closures and access restrictions on a case-by-case basis, and so we’ve tried to give a lot of thought to the various aspects of this plan. There’s a number of area proposals in here, and we’ve tried to evaluate each one on their own merits, and then making sure we have the rationale for whatever is proposed, identifying what’s being addressed, what have we learned in the past, and what can we expect by taking action in the future. Then evaluating all of those relative to how they’re going to impact stakeholders and making sure that we are fair to all stakeholders as we look at this plan. The next couple of slides is just an overview of all the things that I’m going to touch on today. First, I will go over some overarching issues, and I’m going to talk about our ideas on enhancing 3 Committee of the Whole March 2-3, 2020 Jekyll Island, GA coral reef restoration and recovery, some area closures for fisheries management, and then habitat and wildlife conservation proposals in the plan, and then some sanctuary-wide issues. These are big-picture items that FWC will be commenting on in our letter to the sanctuary, and these overarching issues are things that -- They are basically universal, and everybody recognizes that these are big issues, and they have been consistently things we’ve heard of from the public, no matter who we’re talking to, and so the first one that I’ve already talked about a little bit is water quality.