Got a boat? You may need a license.
US officials, wary of terrorist use of small craft, float the idea of licenses for recreational boaters.
from the August 1, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"We've been doing relatively little, if anything, on the thousands of miles that are the unmonitored and uncontrolled coastal borders," says Henry Willis, a Pittsburgh-based policy researcher for the RAND Corp., a think tank that has studied America's coastal vulnerabilities.
Enter a boater's license. Currently, states regulate small vessels, and only two – Alabama and Connecticut – require licenses for boat operators. Attempts before 9/11 to introduce a license in Utah, which has no coastal waters, failed as legislators moved to protect "the last frontier" from onerous regulation, says Ted Woolley Jr. of the National Boating Safety Advisory Council.
"People don't think about boating the same way they do about driving a car," says Lt. Erica Shipman of the Alabama Marine Police.
The US Coast Guard has been advocating legislation that would give the federal government power to require safety classes and a completion certificate for all boaters, but it's currently stalled in Congress. In speeches, Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen has broached the idea of requiring all states to license boaters.
"We don't want to make the protection against a small vessel ... so onerous and burdensome that we destroy your livelihood or your pleasure in [boating]," DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff told 300 boaters and industry folks at the Small Vessel Security Summit in Virginia in June.
At the same time, pushing through boater identification has become a priority at DHS. In March, the agency implemented new maritime-worker identification rules at 98 percent of US ports, and it is looking at controlling secondary threats from Cape May, N.J., to Catalina Island, Calif.
"It's true that boats are potential instruments for terrorist use, so [boat licenses] are a way for the government to zip up the country as much as they theoretically can," says Dennis Pluchinsky, a retired State Department terrorism expert.
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