Virginia Talks: Your voice, your opinion, loud and clear.

Va. to Buy Back 359 Crab Licenses for $6.7M

The Virginia Marine Resources Commission will buy back 359 commercial crab licenses as part of an effort to take more than 75,000 crab pots out of the water in an effort to rebuild the species.

It’s an 18 percent reduction in the number of pots permitted for use in Virginia waters, a news release from the Marine Resources Commission said. The licenses will be retired permanently.

Last year, the U.S. Commerce Department proclaimed the Chesapeake Bay’s renowned crab fishery a national disaster, the first such declaration in Virginia history.

Declining stocks of blue crabs, especially females, over the past 15 years motivated the governors of Virginia and Maryland to press for deep catch restrictions last year in hope of sparking a comeback.

Surveys indicate the crackdown worked, with adult populations nearly doubling between 2008 and 2009.

Using $6.7 million in federal money, the state began a license buyback program, letting crabbers submit non-negotiable bids to sell their licenses back to the state. The crabbers submitted the lowest offer they would accept for the purchase of their license.

Bids varied from $500 to $634,000. Accepted bids ranged from $500 to $175,000. Purchase priority was given for the licenses used most often and the number of pots permitted for each license, in order to reduce the fishing effort in the most cost-efficient manner, the news release said.

A total of 664 bids were received by the Nov. 1 deadline, the news release said. Of those, 359 licenses were accepted for buyback. There will still be 1,649 licenses in circulation.

Those 359 licenses came from 59 full-time commercial crabbers, 131 part-time crabbers and 169 crabbers who had not used their licenses since 2004 and were put on a waiting list until the crab population rebounds and stabilizes at high levels for three consecutive years.

In total, the buybacks will remove 75,441 licensed crab pots from the water. There were 423,000 crab pots licensed in Virginia.