That's after an earlier version of the bill — which government authorities said would have stultified any future efforts to control overfishing around the main Hawaiian Islands — caused an uproar among local environmentalists.

Earlier this week, about 50 witnesses on both sides of the issue filled a committee room for a public hearing. Members of the Senate Water, Land, Agriculture and Hawaiian Affairs Committee had also received a pile of written testimony about four inches high in advance of the meeting.

"This bill is a horror. It's an attempt to wrest control from the professionals in resource management and to give control of our marine resources completely over to those who want to make a profit," Tina Owens, of the Big Island group, Lost Fish Coalition, said at Monday's hearing.

But a number of fishermen voiced frustration at the current process and said the legislation is needed because their concerns over fishing restrictions are given short shrift by rule makers.

Some are too quick to disparage hardworking fishermen, said Carl Jellings of Nanakuli, who has been fishing for 42 years.

"How come the farmer can farm and everybody says, 'farmer is great,' but the fisherman can go there ... and he's doing something wrong?" he asked committee members, his voice rising into its upper registers as he spoke.

"These guys can make any kind of laws they want without the littlest, tiniest data" to support their conclusions, he said.

Committee chairman Russell Kokubun, D-2nd (Hilo, Puna, Ka'u), said he planned to amend the bill to remove some of what are considered by many to be the most onerous issues.

Decision-making on the amended measure will be held Wednesday afternoon.

Under the bill as now written, no fishing rule implemented after Jan. 1 can prohibit or limit fishing without being part of a previously established community-based program and being reviewed by traditional Hawaiian and local fishermen.

Officials must also consider stock assessments and extraction rates, look into other methods such as seasonal closures, and weigh the impact of other potential threats to fish stocks such as pollution.

The measure would also set up 13-member task force of fishermen, divers, ocean experts and environmentalist group representatives to review the current state administrative rules.

The original bill could not have rolled back the state's 2005 ban on fishing in state waters off the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which became a national monument last year. But it could have affected this month's new regulations for lay gill nets and a ban on the use of the nets in state waters off parts of O'ahu and all of Maui that took nearly a decade — including a task force and multiple public meetings — to put in place.

Peter Young, chairman of the department, told lawmakers in his tersely worded testimony that the bill would usurp the public rule-making process and require data that does not exist.

And while the measure calls for science-based management, it sets up an advisory task force "largely devoid of scientists" and instead draws much of its membership from groups with fishing interests, he said.

Kokubun said his changes to the bill would include expanding current community-based fisheries management efforts and revising the makeup of an advisory council and the date that would have affected the gill net rules.

"We need to seek a solution to this. This is such a contentious issue. So, I'm going to give it a shot to put something together that may be more acceptable," he said.

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