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The provision that attracts the most opposition may be the one that allows for flexibility in determining the stock rebuilding timelines for various species of fish. As it is written now, the Magnuson-Stevens Act sets a strict, and many say arbitrary, 10-year timeline for rebuilding every species of fish in the fisheries, including the Northeast, where an excess of 19 stocks are regulated by quotas and "catch share" allocations. The problem, say some scientists, is that the science underpinning the quotas is faulty, leading to excessively conservative allocations as a precaution against error. Those precautions in turn have been forcing most Northeast groundfish boats off the water. This has led to the call for more cooperative research with fishermen and non-governmental scientists, to do better surveys so that overcaution doesn't forfeit millions of pounds of fish every year. Dr. Brian Rothschild, professor emeritus of marine biology at UMass Dartmouth's School for Marine Science and Technology, told The Standard-Times that "we should do better science and implement what makes scientific sense rather than do things politically." The conflict occurs because the environmental non-profit organizations view any relaxation of rebuilding timelines as politically inspired. James Odlin of Maine, a fisherman, boat owner and regular at New England Fisheries Management Council meetings, wrote in rebuttal to Seafood News about the existing Magnuson-Stevens Act regulations, "The rigid arbitrary rebuilding timelines and unrealistic rebuilding targets that almost no one thinks are realistically achievable, do not reflect the current ecological conditions, along with very thin survey data that some would argue is not statistically valid, constitute a recipe for failure." To which Matthew Mullin, Northeast regional director of the U.S. Oceans Program of the Environmental Defense Fund replied, “There is really no need to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Act. The law has virtually eliminated overfishing and is working relatively well overall. Weakening rebuilding standards, as the existing reauthorization bill does, threatens to further deplete New England’s fisheries.”