Big Island businessman and ocean advocate Rick Gaffney would like to see more balance on federal councils that manage off-shore fisheries.

Honolulu marine scientist Tony Ostrowski believes a national policy on aquaculture would do wonders for Hawai'i's fledgling industry.

Buzzy Agard, a longtime O'ahu fisher, says the federal government's fishery decisions should be based on the best science available, something he argues isn't being done now.

Those are among the recommendations advocated by Hawai'i residents as an Obama administration panel prepares to meet tomorrow in Honolulu to gather comments about a national policy to protect the oceans, coasts and Great Lakes.

President Obama has directed an interagency task force to come up with recommendations. Tomorrow, the panel takes public testimony at the Neal Blaisdell Center. It will be the fourth of six regional meetings held nationally to solicit comments.

Any marine policy adopted by Obama would have major implications for the nation's only island state, which depends on its marine environment for food, recreation and to sustain its main industry, tourism.

The task force could get an earful.

Gaffney plans to be there to raise concerns about the federal bureaucracy for managing fisheries in the oceans.

"I think the fishery management system in America is broken," he said. The regional councils that do the managing, Gaffney added, focus too much on commercial fishing interests at the expense of others, such as conservation needs.

Citing one example, he noted the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council played a key role in the collapse of the lobster fishery in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. "They rode that fishery right into the ground, and it still hasn't recovered," said Gaffney, who used to serve on the council.

Gaffney is advocating that the councils have more balanced memberships, with people representing conservation, recreation, subsistence fishing and other inter-ests to provide perspectives beyond commercial ones.

Agard, another former council member, also has concerns about the federal management system. It's based on a take-whatever-you-can approach pushed by commercial harvesters, he said, and science is given mostly lip service.

"You can't just catch, catch, catch and expect (the resource) to last forever," Agard said.

Ostrowski, who is interim president of Oceanic Institute, a research institution affiliated with Hawai'i Pacific University, wants the Obama administration to develop an aquaculture policy that is based on science. There currently is no policy.

In such a void, decisions about aquaculture proposals are driven mainly by fear, triggering attempts to halt the developments, Ostrowski said.

"It's all based on fear," he said.

That is a particular problem for Hawai'i as it tries to develop an aquaculture industry to help satisfy the state's larger-than-normal appetite for seafood with diminishing local resources.

Hawai'i consumes twice the national average of seafood, Ostrowski said, yet it imports more than 80 percent of it.

Along with additional funding, a science-based policy that covers permitting, environmental effects and other such issues would help Hawai'i's young aquaculture industry grow, he said.

Laura H. Thielen, head of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, is scheduled to give testimony to the task force on behalf of the Lingle administration.

Thielen said she will stress two points: that any national policy incorporates an island community's perspective, which is very different from a continental one, and that the federal government's focus on long-term goals not come at the expense of ongoing programs dealing with short-term issues.

With other attempts at setting national policies, the efforts "tend to be dominated by a continental approach," Thielen said.

The Honolulu meeting wasn't initially on the task force's public meeting schedule because staffing and funding limited the number of sessions, a task force spokeswoman said. But at the urging of public and federal agencies here, Honolulu was added to the mix.