New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Monday sued the federal Department of Commerce to overturn summer flounder regulations that allow fishermen in other states to catch more and smaller fish than they can here.

The state-by-state quotas, Cuomo said, put Long Island charter boat operators and recreational fishermen at a disadvantage, driving customers to New Jersey-based boats because they can take more fish that are 3 inches smaller.

"Everyone believes in protecting the fisheries but this is random and an arbitrary and hurts New Yorkers and New York's economy," Cuomo said. "We just want fair limits."

Cuomo's suit says the state-by-state management regulations are based on obsolete data from a 1998 survey that a recent high-level technical review has confirmed was never an appropriate basis for setting state-by-state recreational measures.

The suit also argues that the "irrational choice of the state-by-state limits and rejection of coastwide measures that NMFS [the National Marine Fisheries Service] itself argued would be better for managing the fishery does nothing to further ... conservation and recovery of the species."