NOAA weighs letting one scallop boat carry two permits, with a New Bedford hearing Dec. 14

NEW BEDFORD Federal fishery regulators are weighing whether to let scallop boat owners combine two permits on one vessel, with a hearing in New Bedford on Dec. 14 and written comments due Jan. 4, 2027.

NOAA Fisheries set five public hearings, three in person and two online, in a notice published in the Federal Register on Nov. 3. A boat carrying two stacked permits could fish the allocations of both, which the notice says would reduce the expense of maintaining several vessels that each get only a few days at sea. The notice says it does not commit the secretary of commerce to act. The hearings and written comments are meant to inform the secretary's decision on whether to write the change, called a Secretarial amendment, into the federal scallop plan.

The fishery is concentrated in New Bedford, Mayor Jon Mitchell wrote to NOAA in October 2025, and the city had been the nation's highest-value fishing port for 23 straight years, since 2001, the Port of New Bedford said in its release on his letter. This year a full-time scallop vessel was allocated 36 days of fishing in open areas and no trips into the rotational access areas, the agency's scoping document says. When the current permit system began in 1994, a full-time boat got 204 days.

Why stacking is back

Some in the industry have told the agency that low allocations, paired with rising costs, are not enough to maintain vessels and crews through the year, according to the scoping document. Some crews routinely work on more than one boat in a fishing year, it says, and reports suggest some ports are crowded with vessels tied to the dock for most of the year, causing safety and space problems.

The idea returned through comments NOAA received under Executive Order 14276, issued April 17, 2025, which called for unburdening commercial fishermen "from costly and inefficient regulation." Supporters of stacking cited lower fixed and operating costs for businesses that own more than one permit, structural overcapacity in the fleet and changing fleet conditions, the document says.

The limits NOAA is weighing

The agency listed protections it would study to guard against fleet consolidation, job loss and fishing effort spilling into other fisheries. They are presented for discussion only, the scoping document says, since no action is being taken yet.

Among the approaches it lists are limiting stacking to two permits on one vessel and only within the same permit category, so full-time permits would pair with full-time permits and part-time and occasional permits with their own kind. Stacking would be a one-time, permanent step, with no splitting the permits apart later. NOAA also asks whether a permit from a smaller boat should be barred from moving onto a larger one, so stacking could not be used to get around the fleet's length, tonnage and horsepower limits.

The agency is also weighing whether to allow stacking only between vessels under common ownership or control, to avoid fleet concentration and protect owners who fish their own boats, and whether to keep the cap that bars anyone from owning more than 5% of all limited access permits.

How the fleet got here

The New England Fishery Management Council created the limited access fleet in 1994 through Amendment 4, which limited days at sea, barred combining permits on one vessel and set the 5% ownership cap, according to the scoping document. Allocations fell to 120 days by 1999 from 204 in 1994, and open-area days kept falling after that, while more effort went to access areas, which offset the drop.

The council considered stacking and leasing in Amendment 15 in 2011 and first listed both as its preferred choices, then dropped them after its public hearings, concluding that the measures already in place were enough to address excess capacity, the document says. Most public comment opposed them, citing waterfront job loss, the effect on future fishing for boats that did not stack or lease, effort shifting into other fisheries and further consolidation of the fleet, it says.

NOAA's rule for this year's season, Framework 40, published March 27, raised a full-time boat's open-area days to 36 from 24 under the measures in place before it, but it allotted no access area scallops, down from 24,000 pounds. The rule opened no access areas because the 2025 surveys suggested no areas held scallops dense enough to support rotational fishing at the levels of recent years. It projected about $259 million in scallop revenue for the limited access fleet in fishing year 2026, measured in 2024 dollars, and counted an average of 152 businesses in the fishery from 2020 to 2024. It also set a fallback of 27 days for a full-time vessel in 2027, 75% of this year's 36, in case next year's rules are late.

What New Bedford's mayor told NOAA

In his Oct. 16, 2025, letter to NOAA Fisheries, Mitchell weighed a proposal to let full-time permit holders stack two permits on one vessel, three years after he opposed a plan to allow leasing of permits, the port's release says. "The continued decline in available days-at-sea and closed area trips for limited-access permit holders has forced a broad reckoning in the industry that the traditional assignment of one permit per boat is antiquated," he wrote, adding that scallopers were "remaining in port for nearly eleven months a year on average."

"While it would be premature for me to explicitly endorse the proposal, as the precise language has yet to be settled on, it is clear that the status quo is untenable," the mayor wrote. He asked that the 5% ownership cap stay "sacrosanct," that the council expand the scallop resource open to fishing, in particular by revisiting its decision not to reopen the Northern Edge to scalloping, and that New Bedford be "the focal point" of outreach to small fishing and shoreside businesses. He also suggested barring the stacking of a permit tied to a boat that has sat dormant at a public facility for an unreasonably long time.

How to weigh in

NOAA Fisheries scoping hearings on scallop permit stacking (Federal Register, Nov. 3, 2026)

Date	Time	Where
Tuesday, Nov. 17	About 4 to 6 p.m. (begins 30 minutes after the council's scallop committee meeting ends)	Hilton Garden Inn Boston Logan Airport, 100 Boardman St., Boston
Monday, Nov. 23	11 a.m. to 1 p.m.	Webinar
Thursday, Dec. 3	4 to 6 p.m.	Barnegat Light Volunteer Fire Department, 907 Central Ave., Barnegat Light, N.J.
Monday, Dec. 7	6 to 8 p.m.	Webinar
Monday, Dec. 14	1 to 3 p.m.	UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology East, 836 S. Rodney French Blvd., New Bedford

Written comments go through regulations.gov under docket NOAA-NMFS-2026-3136, or by mail to Emily Keiley, 55 Great Republic Drive, Gloucester, MA 01930, and are due Monday, Jan. 4, 2027. Comments become part of the public record, and anonymous comments are accepted, the notice says. NOAA asks people to register for the meetings they plan to attend, and questions go to nmfs.gar.scallopstacking@noaa.gov.

Among other questions, the agency wants to know whether a stacking program is needed, how it would affect captains, crews and shoreside businesses, and whether the limits it listed would guard against the unintended outcomes the council acknowledged when it weighed Amendment 15.

What happens next

The council's Scallop Committee and advisory panel meet at the same Boston hotel at 9 a.m. Nov. 17 to choose final preferred options for the 2027 season, including days at sea and access area allocations, according to a separate Federal Register notice. After comments close Jan. 4, the secretary decides whether to develop a stacking amendment, and any change would come through a separate rulemaking, NOAA says. The only hearing in New Bedford is the last one, at 1 p.m. Monday, Dec. 14.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.