A senator representing five Piedmont counties has introduced an amendment to a House bill that, if it becomes law, will prohibit shrimp trawling in all of North Carolina’s inland waters and within a half-mile of the Atlantic Ocean shoreline. Despite protests from a coastal senator and several commercial fishing representatives, two Senate committees that met Tuesday (June 17) were in favor of amending House Bill 442, which Rep. Frank Iler, R-Brunswick, filed in March “to restore recreational fishing for flounder and red snapper in North Carolina.”
Iler said to both committees Tuesday that there wasn’t much of a recreational flounder season last year. He was referring to the harvest seasons established by the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission, which manages flounder and red snapper fisheries. The commission votes on management plans that determine when those species can be harvested.
As the bill made its way through the House and then to the Senate, its language focused solely on expanding recreational access to southern flounder and red snapper, but that changed Tuesday morning during the Senate’s agriculture, energy, and environment committee meeting. The committee approved the amendment and then referred it to that afternoon’s Senate rules and operations committee, which also voted in favor of the bill.
Sen. David Craven Jr., R-Anson, who also represents Montgomery, Randolph, Richmond, and Union counties, introduced the amendment to put North Carolina “on par” with regulations in force in Virginia and South Carolina. He said that the estimated bycatch, or unwanted species, that comes with shrimp trawling is 4 pounds of bycatch to every pound of shrimp harvested, “which is a lot of other species of fish that’s getting caught in the net, potentially dying,” he said. “This has been an issue for quite some time, and I think it’s time this body addressed it.”
The amendment details the penalties a commercial fishing operation would face if caught “taking or attempting to take shrimp using a trawl net in any coastal fishing waters other than areas of the Atlantic Ocean located more than one-half mile from the shoreline.”
When Committee Chair Sen. Brent Jackson, R-Pender, opened the floor to elected leaders for comment, Sen. Bobby Hanig, R-Currituck, was the first to speak. Hanig asked why not wait for the results from an ongoing lawsuit filed in 2020 by the Coastal Conservation Association North Carolina to ban shrimp trawling and the results of a study commissioned in 2022 on the issue.
“Why the urgency all of a sudden and at the 23rd hour?” Hanig asked. Hanig said he was also concerned with “what data was used to support the amendment to put the hardworking men and women that work in our fishing industry every day out of a job and completely shut down an entire industry? Seventy five percent of the shrimp that are caught in the state of North Carolina are caught where this amendment is affected,” said Hanig.
Craven responded that there was no intent to put anybody out of business. “I believe these fine folks can trawl a half-mile off the coast of North Carolina,” and continue to shrimp. He added that work had been done on a separate matter to ensure there’s “compensation during that time to make sure that we get these folks transitioned.”
During both committee meetings, supporters and opponents of the amendment explained their positions.
Reprinted (in part) from CoastalReview.org.