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DNR revising crab license buy-backs
Friday, Aug. 21, 2009
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The Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced this week that it is revising the Commercial Limited Crab Catcher License buy-back program. The agency began the voluntary buy-back program in July in an effort to reduce the amount of latent effort in Maryland's commercial blue crab fishery.
The large amount of potential crabbing effort in the Maryland fishery poses a long-term biological and economic threat to the crab population, as an unknown number of inactive licenses may re-enter the fishery in any year.
The department sent all 3,676 latent and active LCC license holders a letter in July offering to permanently buy back licenses through a process called a reverse auction. The goal of the buy-back program is to buy and permanently retire 2,000 LCC licenses. The deadline to participate in the initial offer was July 31.
A total of 494 LCC-holders submitted bids to the department by the deadline.
All initial bids will be formally declined. Instead, the DNR will immediately offer a fixed price of $2,260 to all LCC holders who may wish to sell their license.
"By establishing a fixed sales price for an LCC license we can now eliminate uncertainty for the license holder," said DNR Secretary John Griffin. "In addition, we plan to extend this offer to LCC license holders until the funding for this project is exhausted. We feel that this course of action will ultimately get us closer to achieving our goal."
Letters will again be sent to all license holders explaining the program and the fixed price. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, through Federal Blue Crab Disaster Funds, is providing funding for the LCC buy-back program.
