August 2024 - Director's Corner

By Melissa Mahoney - August 5, 2024

.As we move toward the milestone of our 10-year Anniversary in September, I’m reflecting on the early days of the Trust and how we came to be…

In 2013, the City of Monterey approved its first Fishing Community Sustainability Plan, and one of its key recommendations was to establish a Community Quota Fund (CQF). A CQF is an entity that holds fishing rights in ‘trust’ for the benefit of the community. At that time, I was working for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) of California. My job was to bring together various leaders in Monterey representing the commercial fishing, government, and conservation sectors, and convince them to put their support behind this new initiative. Having been involved in various aspects of the fisheries management landscape, and the formation of the sustainability plan, these folks already knew what needed to be done. It was just a matter of committing. 

Former TNC Director and now Vice President of conservation science at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Margaret Spring, in addition to the Monterey harbor master, Steve Scheiblauer, commercial fisherman and local businessman, David Crabbe, and research professor, Monica Galligan, came together to create the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust and our first strategic plan and draft bylaws. We pooled seed funding from our organizations, which was enough to hire a strategic planner, and eventually an Executive Director, Sherry Flumerfelt. Sherry stayed at the helm for eight years. Spring, Scheiblauer, Crabbe, and Galligan are all still active board members ten years later. Other representatives of the fishing industry and staff from the City of Monterey aided in these early efforts. 

Fortunately, we already had a decent road map forward at this point; the Morro Bay CQF was formed a year prior with a similar mission: to secure groundfish fishing rights for the local fishing community in order to revitalize the west coast trawl fishery, after its collapse in the early 2000’s and the decade long transformation into one of the most well managed fisheries in the US.

In September of 2014, the Articles of Incorporation were filed with the California Secretary of State, and we were official. Shortly after, we executed the first quota share sales agreement and began our journey as a nonprofit corporation to help revitalize and support the region’s commercial fisheries which provide us with healthy local seafood, and are a part of our iconic maritime economy and history.

I’ll share more next month on how the Trust evolved from leasing groundfish quota to the array of community support programs offered, but in the meantime, don’t miss the early bird ticket pricing for our 10th Anniversary Seafood Celebration! We look forward to celebrating milestones achieved over the last decade, as well as looking to the future of Monterey Bay fisheries.