Grant will help address structural issues at aging dock as city works through millions in harbor maintenance needs
A local commercial fishing organization has again stepped up and made a significant donation to the Morro Bay Harbor Department and its efforts to catch up on a litany of maintenance needs.
The Morro Bay Community Quota Fund has granted $150,000 to the Harbor Department to assist with needed repairs to the Fishermen’s Wharf, a fish unloading dock located adjacent to Dockside Too south of the North T-pier.
It was the second large donation made by commercial fishers in 2025.
Last September, the Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Organization turned over a $400,000 grant it received from yet a third fishing organization, the Joint Cable-Fisheries Liaison Committee, intended to assist with repairs to the Fishermen’s Wharf facility, which a recent city inspection showed had numerous issues, including missing support piles, an undermined seawall, and a deteriorating support timber.
That revelation was part of a larger effort the city has undertaken to address a backlog of maintenance needs to public facilities throughout the harbor, including repairs to seawalls, rip rap, floating docks, and the North T-pier, among numerous others and totaling tens of millions of dollars.
Morro Bay Life sat down with Quota Fund Executive Director Dwayne Oberhoff and board members Andrea Lueker and Jeremiah O’Brien to talk about the donation and catch up on the Quota Fund.
The Quota Fund was born in 2013 as part of an extensive overhaul of the trawl fishing industry that had come under fire for perceived damage to the seafloor done by dragging big nets across the bottom.
The fishery targets the so-called deep-water simplex, consisting of a number of species that live in the deep ocean along the bottom. Targeted species include Petrale sole, black cod, various rock cod species, and others.
The Federal Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC), which sets federal regulations for the West Coast (but not Alaska) sought to limit the damage done by setting strict catch limits on the trawl industry, which had been the backbone of the local industry, bringing in the most fish and keeping the docks busy.
From that evolved a catch shares program that assigned each fishing boat a certain share of the new limits. Then environmental groups began buying up the permits in an attempt to end trawl fishing, including buying up nearly every permit and fishing boat on the Central Coast — from Port San Luis to Monterey.
But the law requires these permits to be fished and so a quota system was developed and local quota committees were established to ensure that fish caught in local waters are landed at local ports.
The MB Quota Fund was established to manage the allotted quota in Morro Bay and Port San Luis (Avila Beach), explained Oberhoff.
The Quota Fund leases out its share of the overall catch to local fishermen who then go out and catch the fish. And if a fisherman pulls up more of any species he has quota for, he’s got to buy extra quota space or face shutting down for the season, or potentially face stiff fines.
They also have quotas for some fish species, like whiting, that are not fished in local waters, so they are free to lease those fish to fishermen up north, where whiting is fished commercially.
That’s an oversimplified explanation of what is a very complex system that at this time has but one local fisherman working it. But Oberhoff said they hope to soon have a second boat working the local quota. With a shortage of fishermen, the Quota Fund is free to lease out unused quota to fishermen from other ports.
Those lease payments support the Quota Fund, which also has a grant program.
O’Brien said some of the money can be “dedicated to things like science and research.” They can also be used to support critical infrastructure, such as the wharf in Morro Bay.
He said Harbor Director Chris Munson had asked for grant monies during one of their recent board meetings, and the board voted to make the donation.
MBL asked Munson for comment about the donation and the extent of the work that needs to be done on the wharf, but he deferred for now, saying that he was working on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would lay out what the city would use the money for.
Lueker added that repairing vital infrastructure like the fish dock has a direct nexus to commercial fishing. “It’s the only place the quota that we lease can be offloaded,” she said.
O’Brien, who also played a hand in the MBCFO’s $400,000 donation, said the Cable Liaison Committee’s donation would not necessarily go towards fixing the same issues with the wharf. “The connection is commercial fishing,” he explained.
Where’d they get that kind of money to give away? Oberhoff said “it came from leasing the quota since the start [2013].” Also, when the local fund started out, it had to purchase the quota from The Nature Conservancy, which had bought up all the quota here along with almost all the fishing boats. “We were paying them for the first six years,” Oberhoff said. But now that debt has been paid off freeing up more money for the Quota Fund to try and help out the industry overall.
The Quota Fund recently put out a request for grant proposals, with $200,000 available to fund scientific research projects beneficial to commercial fishing, and hoping to be able to fund at least two proposals.
They plan to make the awards in May.
While they’ve funded grants for research in the past this is the first time the Quota Fund has allocated money to repair infrastructure.
O’Brien called it a “one-off” allocation, as they don’t anticipate donating to repair infrastructure becoming a regular thing.
Oberhoff added that they make sure the quota they lease outside this area is at least fished and landed in a California port. “We lease about 7-8 million pounds of fish overall,” he said.
O’Brien said, “That’s what we own, the ‘catch shares’ and we can buy, sell or lease it.”
Oberhoff said they actually sold off some of their quota to pay off The Nature Conservancy. As for the work the city is planning, O’Brien said they only want to make sure it goes to what they agreed it would go to.
The MOU, when it comes out, should lay all that out in contract form.
The Harbor Department had commissioned a study of its revetments and seawalls, called The Brady Report. That study inspected all the city-owned facilities, identified problems and rated the various areas as to the severity of the issues at each one. It was an eye-opening report that estimated the total costs for needed repairs at from $25.5 million to $54.6 million.
