<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Don et al.,<div><br></div><div>Here is a very rough draft of the letter we discussed this morning:</div><div><br></div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">Dear Senator or Representative of Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts or Maine:</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">As you know, Institution X in your state, together with W, X, Y and Z, has successfully competed to become a member of a new NOAA cooperative institute, a Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region (CINAR). CINAR brings together an immense array of talent in areas of science needed to assist NOAA in its mandate to manage fisheries under the pressures of human use and climate change. It targets a region of the East Coast whose marine populations are connected by southward-flowing coastal currents and promises solutions to thorny fisheries management problems through explicit spatial planning and understanding of climate change in the coastal ocean. This spatial planning becomes all the more important as additional uses of the ocean are anticipated, i.e., to generate energy from offshore wind.</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">CINAR joins the Northern Gulf of Mexico Cooperative Institute as NOAA’s second regional institute in a trend of consolidation from many individual-institution cooperative institutes to a few regional cooperative institutes. It is the logical path to ecosystem-based management of marine communities and is fully compatible with the parallel move to regional ocean observing networks <<a href="http://www.usnfra.org/">http://www.usnfra.org/</a>>, e.g., the evolution from GoMOOS to NERACOOS and MACOORA to cover the CINAR region.</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">What undercuts this otherwise good news, however, is the lack of funds in the NOAA budget to allocate to our new cooperative institute. We encourage you to support increases in appropriations, well justified by both oceans commissions, to the lines that support cooperative institutes at NOAA, allowing us to help them in their urgent goals of better managing fisheries resources and the coastal oceans.</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; "><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true"> <div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div>Pete Jumars <<a href="http://www.umaine.edu/marine/people/sites/pjumars/">http://www.umaine.edu/marine/people/sites/pjumars/</a>></div><div><b>For administrative purposes:</b></div><div>Director, School of Marine Sciences</div><div>360 Aubert Hall, University of Maine, </div><div>Orono, ME 04469-5706</div><div>Voice: (207) 581-4381; Fax: (207) 581-4388</div><div><b>For research purposes:</b></div><div>Professor of Marine Sciences,</div><div>Darling Marine Center </div><div>University of Maine</div><div>193 Clark's Cove Road</div><div>Walpole, ME 04573-3307</div><div>Voice: (207) 563-3146 x.242; Fax: (207) 563-3119</div><div><b>Fastest communication:</b></div><div>e-Mail: <a href="mailto:jumars@maine.edu">jumars@maine.edu</a></div>Cell: (207) 592-0717</div></div></div></div></span></div> </div><br></div></body></html>