By SHERRY HALBROOK
Are you a shellfish lover?
If you like scallops, clams and oysters, your enjoyment depends on them being safe and plentiful. That’s where your culinary tastes collide with the state budget.
Long Island and Staten Island produce approximately 160,000 bushels of hard-shell clams each year. And that’s just a part of New York’s shellfish industry. In fact, it’s a $22.8 million catch, a number that’s magnified several times before it gets to your plate.
Unfortunately, the relentless pressure on state government to “do more with less” threatens to sink that harvest before you can get a single bite.
“This is just one of many examples of how state cost cutting may save a few hundred thousand dollars up front, but end up costing the state’s economy millions,” said PEF President Ken Brynien. “What’s worse, this example also could cost people their lives.”
Small unit, big responsibility
It’s up to less than a dozen people including PEF members in the Shellfish Growing Area Classification Unit (SGACU) within the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Division of Fish and Wildlife to survey and monitor 75 separate shellfish growing areas, mostly off Long Island to keep them safe and productive.
Unfortunately, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, understaffing of the DEC unit may force the state to shutdown shellfishing in a million acres of beds along 700 miles of shoreline.
Four of the unit’s 10 positions are vacant. It would cost about $260,000 (including benefits) for the state to fill those vacancies. Current vacancies include the lead biologist.
In an annual report issued November 17, 2008, the FDA stated:
“DEC’s SGACU is now staffed at the lowest level it has been since 1986. These staff reductions have left the unit in a position that will jeopardize (its) capacity to meet the sanitary survey requirements...and adequately protect public health.”
According to the report, “complete and up-to-date surveys are essential to protecting the health of shellfish consumers,” and when survey reports are not done on time the law requires the affected area be closed.
The surveys identify and measure pollution threats to the shellfish beds. The SGACU also monitors the level of marine biotoxins in shellfish.
Eating toxic shellfish can cause a wide variety of dangerous symptoms that can lead to a coma and even death.
Back where they started
This isn’t the first time the FDA has sounded the alarm for understaffing of the SGACU.
A “staffing shortfall in the early 1980s resulted in hundreds of miles of shoreline not being adequately surveyed to locate and evaluate all actual and potential pollution sources that could adversely affect the sanitary condition of the shellfish harvesting areas. Additionally, thousands of acres of productive shellfishing areas were not being sampled at the frequency required...to assure the water quality in those areas was meeting...standards.., thus, placing public health at risk.”
In 1986, the FDA called on the DEC to boost staffing of the SGACU and, in 1987, DEC brought the staffing up to four biologists and four technicians, who were overseen by a senior biologist. But the huge backlog of work still forced the temporary closing of 56,000 acres of shellfish beds off of Long Island.
According to the 2008 FDA report, that area “was eventually reopened in the mid-1990s and the program has remained in compliance until 2007, when..a 12-year survey was overdue....” The DEC completed that survey last year, but “due to the loss of program staff in recent months and years, the SGACU staff is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain sanitary surveys and take on additional programs necessary to protect shellfish consumers.”
Dangers, duties growing
Staffing is now back to the level that caused the FDA to blow the whistle in the ’80s, but now the workload has dramatically increased because a very dangerous biotoxin has entered the NY shellfish beds.
The toxin, which is caused by a naturally occurring plankton, migrated down the coast to Long Island. In 2004, the SGACU established a new monitoring program for it. In 2006 and in 2008, they found lethal levels of the toxin that required temporarily closing large areas of the New York beds.
These are very technical, labor- and time-intensive programs. The surveys require frequent trips offshore to gather samples and data, while monitoring for toxins requires the repeated collection of shellfish meats, and then preserving, transporting and testing them.
The FDA also wants the state to train and equip its SGACU staff to computerize maps of the shellfish beds and pollution sources.
This small but crucial unit was already running on low, when the state imposed a hiring freeze last summer. Now, the agency is pressed to make still deeper cuts.
“This is tragedy waiting to happen,” Brynien said, “and it makes no economic sense. We are highlighting it in our budget talks with state lawmakers.
