THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 13, 1995 TAG: 9501130687
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY BETTY MITCHELL GRAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RALEIGH LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
The state legislature entered a tug-of-war Thursday with state fisheries regulators over one of North Carolina's oldest fishing industries.
The action prompted concerns that the legislators may have set a damaging precedent, and put the regulators in an impossible position.
The Joint Legislative Commission on Seafood and Aquaculture voted unanimously to ask Robert Jamieson, interim director of the division of the Marine Fisheries Commission, to suspend a new rule that closes the herring season on April 15.
The legislative commission also will ask the Marine Fisheries Commission to review its decision to ban herring fishing.
Albemarle fishermen said they were pleased with the decision, but critics said it could set a troubling precedent.
``We now have embarked on a road where every rule that is controversial ends up here,'' said Rep. David Redwine, D-Brunswick, co-chairman of the legislative commission. ``I want us to understand what we are doing.''
Robert V. Lucas, the Alabama lawyer who heads the Marine Fisheries Commission, questioned whether he and Jamieson have the authority to carry out the legislators' requests.
``Legally I don't think the director has the authority to suspend the rule except in the case of variable conditions, and these conditons can't be political,'' Lucas said.
``There's a real danger here,'' Lucas said. ``Next time the side that loses an issue would see their next remedy as being Seafood and Aquaculture.''
The commission voted 9-7 last month to prohibit fishing for herring and shad statewide from April 15 through Jan. 1, to reduce the herring catch by about 70 percent.
Some Albemarle-area fishermen said the ban would kill the state's oldest fishing industry.
They argued that the commission vote came despite evidence that fishermen plying coastal waters with pound nets were not among the chief causes of the decline in the herring population, and they should not be punished. But state fisheries biologists said that regardless of what caused the drop, when fishing is stopped, fish stocks generally recover.
In the last five years, the American shad catch has plummeted by about 50 percent, and during the last decade, the river herring catch has dropped about 92 percent.
During that time, the river herring was the target of foreign fishing fleets operating in the Atlantic Ocean. Efforts to move foreign fleets offshore helped the herring population but the fishery has never rebounded to historic levels, possibly because of water pollution and algae blooms on the Chowan River, plus dam construction and loss of habitat elsewhere.
River herring, also known as alewife, have been a significant part of the commercial fishing industry in northeastern North Carolina since the Colonial era, with landings peaking in the state in 1887 at 23.7 million pounds, according to the Division of Marine Fisheries. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
HERRING CATCHES
Here's a look at the catch, in pounds, of the fish over the last 10
years:
Year Pounds
1984 6,516,000
1985 1,548,000
1986 6,814,000
1987 3,195,000
1988 4,191,000
1989 1,491,000
1990 1,158,000
1991 1,575,000
1992 1,723,000
1993 916,000
by CNB