NOAA Fisheries has released Aquaculture Opportunity Area (AOA) public scoping summaries for Southern California and the Gulf of Mexico. The Public Scoping Summaries offer a broad overview of the submissions received during the public scoping periods and provide an overview of the content and themes within those submissions.
The Southeast and West Coast Regional offices each published a Notice of Intent in the Federal Register in 2022 announcing the intent to develop a AOA draft Preliminary Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS). The Notices of Intent initiated a 60-day public scoping process for the PEIS, which took place in the summer 2022. In addition to the opportunity through the Federal Register, NOAA held virtual public scoping meetings to accept verbal comments. All written and verbal comments were recorded for the scoping summaries and taken into consideration.
Public involvement is an important component of developing programmatic environmental impact statements, helping to inform the scope and context of the documents. NOAA considers public comments, along with best available science, in our decision making process.
The Public Scoping Reports for each region can be found at the links below.