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What I think would help is to make it mandatory to show your sales slip from the year before in order to get a license again the next year. I bet a big percent of the licenses in MA go to people who just pay the fee so they can skirt the bag limits. They take all the fish a com license allows but sell zero. This is just paying a fee to get around the bag limit laws. People do it for taug and fluke as well as stripers. It should be a regulation something like if you had a license last year , you cannot get a renewal ubnless you can prove you sold more than x amount of fish the year before.
There are two issues here. One , they get to skirt the bag limits for a price. Two , the fish they take are not counted in the quota because nobody knows they are taking them.
I think fixing that problem and forcing bicatch to be sold and counted would really go a long way to reducing the take pumping health into the fishery.
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