Hundreds of supporters of North Carolina’s shrimp industry, many from coastal counties, descended on the state legislature to protest a proposed ban on shrimp trawling in the state’s inland waters.
Many filled the atrium of the building, wearing shirts that clearly stated their position: No trawl ban. Trucks with signs reading the same circled the block, horns blaring for hours.
They want the state House to kill a Senate-passed bill that critics say would destroy the shrimping industry in the state and have significant detrimental impacts on other commercial fishing. The bill easily passed the Senate quickly last week after limited debate in committees and despite fierce opposition from some coastal senators.
“Watching how crooked the process seems, it’s really hard to have any faith,” said Daniel Brinn, a water and flood control coordinator for Hyde County. “But fishermen, they live on faith. You never see what you catch until it comes in the boat. We just have to have faith and keep pushing forward.”
House Bill 442, as passed by the House in early May, would have reestablished a recreational fishing season for flounder and red snapper of no less than six weeks. In 2024, North Carolina closed the recreational flounder harvest due to overfishing in 2023.
The Senate added the trawling ban in inland waters and up to a half-mile off the coast to that bill — without notifying the House sponsors, they said. The Senate also passed a bailout bill for impacted shrimpers, which would pay impacted commercial fishermen for the next three years. Again, the chamber gutted legislation that was originally House Bill 441.
“We put thousands of hard-working North Carolinians out of work if we allow this to happen, this to continue on,” said Rep. Ed Goodwin at a press conference Tuesday. “We’re talking about generations of shrimpers, generations of fishermen.”
The proposed ban led to death threats against lawmakers. A Brunswick County man has been charged with threatening to kill a state senator. The crowd Tuesday was non-violent, but state representatives didn’t hide their anger.
“This [bill] is going to die a quick, painful death or we’re going to die trying,” Rep. Keith Kidwell, R-Beaufort.
Kidwell added: “If we do it on shrimping, what do we do it to next? We’re going to shut down the dry cleaners? We’re going to shut down the gas stations? Are we going to shut down the people who go to work every day making an honest living because some branch of the government finally decides in some slimy backroom deal that they don’t want to do this anymore. Well, by God, down east we didn’t ask them what they want to do.”
Flanked by those against the ban and other lawmakers, several representatives argued against the science and the process used by those in favor of the ban. Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, argued that the ban is not an environmental policy.
“This is an allocation issue,” said Harrison, who has extensive experience with coastal resources issues having served on various boards and commissions. “And, in fact, if we were focused on the environment and its impacts on the sustainability of fish, we’d be talking about water quality, we’d be talking about coastal development, we’d be talking about protecting our wetlands, restoring our buffers, instead of going in the opposite direction. And the big elephant in the room, the climate crisis, because it is raising the temperatures of the estuaries and the ocean, creating ocean acidification and that is actually what’s affecting the access to the fish the most.”
Supporters of the ban have argued that the policy is necessary to help other fish species thrive in the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine System, and thus promote recreational fishing in the area. Senate backers, including Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, said it was time to end the long-running dispute over the issue and pointed to the fact that North Carolina is alone among states in allowing inland trawling.
Berger said when he first ran for Senate in 2001, he was asked “what are we going to do about the depletion of the fishing stocks because of some of the net uses?”
“And I know that there have been some improvements since then, but it still has been an issue,” he said last week. “I’m glad that we went ahead and took care of that. I am hopeful that the House will follow suit and we’ll be able to get to a point where the fishing stocks in North Carolina’s inland waters are where they should be based on, really, the quality of the waters.”
Recreational fishermen and commercial fishermen have been at odds for years over these types of issues. Proponents of the ban argue that trawling harms the waters and other species in it.
“It’s time to end large-scale inshore bottom shrimp trawling and the ecological destruction it creates,” said Seth Vernon, a recreational fishing guide from Bath, in a statement released by the North Carolina Wildlife Federation. “These waters belong to every citizen of North Carolina, not just those who profit from its value. The resource must be first. It’s time to speak for the resource.”
Vernon continued: “The problem with inshore bottom trawling is the destruction it leaves behind. The practice does in fact catch shrimp and everything else in its wake from juvenile fish, turtles, crabs and more all while destroying the bottom habitat and creating miles of silt plumes.”
Critics say that is a misreading of the facts. They point to progress made on reducing bycatch and the fact that more than half of the water is already off limits to trawling.
They argue that the Senate’s swift action is to get ahead of the forthcoming results from the “Study of the Coastal and Marine Fisheries of the State,“ which state lawmakers commissioned in the 2021-22 state budget. The results are due soon. There is also an ongoing lawsuit filed in 2020 by the Coastal Conservation Association and other groups against North Carolina for its “abject failure” in managing coastal fisheries resources. Critics of the trawling ban want to see the results of both the study and the lawsuit before the state takes further action.
“They know what’s in that study and they know the condition of our fisheries, and they know the false narrative they’ve been pushing for decades,” said Sen. Bobby Hanig, R-Currituck, and the leading opponent to the trawling ban. Protestors gave Hanig an ovation Tuesday morning.
For shrimpers and other fishermen that made the trip to Raleigh on Tuesday, their top concern is the economic impact on their communities. Brinn, who has a side job working on commercial fishing boats, said the ban would make Hyde County the poorest county in the state.
“That’s a huge part of our economy,” he said. “There’s nobody in the county that it doesn’t touch.”
