cheapdate
Eight Pointer
This past week, CCA NC and the other 89 citizen plaintiffs presented powerful testimony from a number of key witnesses:
- Cameron Boltes, a leader in the recreational fishing industry and former Marine Fisheries Commission member, testified about his experience with the Commission and its repeated failures in protecting our coastal fisheries resources from overexploitation. He also described the declines in critical estuarine fish species from when he first started fishing our coastal waters in the 1990s, and how, if current management practices continue, our coastal fisheries resources won’t be available for future generations. He also provided firsthand accounts of resource depletion from gillnet usage and shrimp trawling in the Pamlico Sound.
- Colonel Carter Witten, who retired several weeks ago as the highest commanding officer of the North Carolina Marine Patrol, was called to testify about the significant enforcement challenges in our coastal waters that he personally observed over the course of 25 years. Called to testify as an adverse witness, Colonel Witten gave exceptionally candid, revealing testimony that with more than 2.5 million areas of water to patrol and no more than 29 Marine Patrol officers on duty at any given time, Marine Patrol simply “doesn’t have the officers and resources it needs” to “make sure our fishing laws aren’t being violated,” and that “something has got to change.”
- Rick Sasser, a lifelong recreational fisherman and a longtime critical observer of the State’s coastal fisheries management, testified about how North Carolina’s gray trout abundance decades ago drew him to his passion for fishing, and how the species’ crash led him to become an activist for more effective resource management. He shared his analysis of the State’s twice-yearly trawl studies in estuarine waters showing that juvenile gray trout are most abundant in the deeper waters of the Pamlico Sound where the State has allowed destructive shrimp trawling—all despite the State’s awareness that this area is a critical habitat for juvenile gray trout and other important finfish species.
- Dr. Louis Daniel, a lifelong fisherman and North Carolina native who served as North Carolina’s Fisheries Director from 2007 to 2016, testified candidly and comprehensively about decades of failed fisheries management in North Carolina under the Fisheries Reform Act. Dr. Daniel took ownership of his role as Fisheries Director in allowing fisheries to decline, testifying that the State’s tolerance of extensive estuarine gillnet usage and estuarine shrimp trawls has set North Carolina apart from all other states, and that bycatch from those gears is a primary reason that most of our fisheries have collapsed. Based on his extensive experience, Dr. Daniel described a broken management system, where the Fisheries Management Plan (FMP) process is protracted and cumbersome, where direct political interference by legislators and administrative superiors forced him to make resource-averse management decisions, where the Marine Fisheries Commission typically sides with the commercial fishing industry, and where the current Division of Marine Fisheries ignores precautionary management in favor of maximal resource exploitation. Dr. Daniel testified that as a result of all of this, after 28 years of management under the Fisheries Reform Act, the State has virtually no management successes and cannot claim to have rebuilt a single stock managed under a state FMP to long-term viability, the statutory standard for coastal fisheries management.
up there stinks and no one ever admits they clogged the toilet!!!
