THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 14, 1995 TAG: 9504140430
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY BETTY MITCHELL GRAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Less than 24 hours after it was introduced on the floor of the state House of Representatives, a bill to ban most types of commercial fishing nets in the state's sounds and rivers was quashed by a House committee Thursday.
The move came after a day of apparently intense arm-twisting by some Republican members of the state's coastal delegation who encouraged party mates serving on a House rules committee to kill the measure.
The quick vote, which effectively ends debate on the bill this year, was a surprise to the coastal fishing community and to the bill's sponsor, Rep. W.O. ``Billy'' Richardson, a Cumberland County Democrat, who was away from the legislature when the committee acted.
With only a few minutes' notice to the bill's co-sponsors, the Rules, Calendar and Operations of the House Committee voted without dissent to give the bill, introduced Wednesday along with over 150 other measures, an unfavorable report.
``I feel that we have enough laws on the books now and this bill was unnecessary,'' said Rep. Arlene C. Pulley, a Wake County Republican, from her home Thursday night. ``We were going to punish a lot of small fishermen.''
Pulley, the mother of a Division of Marine Fisheries biologist in the agency's regional office in Washington, made the motion to give the bill an unfavorable report.
Last Thursday in Raleigh, Richardson unveiled the bill, which called for a statewide voter referendum on the use of most types of nets in the state's rivers and sounds. The announcement came at a raucous press conference that featured heckles from several in a crowd of more than 60 commercial fishermen.
Immediately after Richardson's press conference, commercial fishermen, local officials and legislators mobilized in meetings all along the coast.
Jerry Schill, director of the North Carolina Fisheries Association, a commercial fishing trade group, said the bill was ``a wake-up call'' for the state's commercial fishermen.
``I think it's gotten the industry galvanized,'' he said from association headquarters in New Bern. ``We've got to take this energy and focus it in a positive direction.''
The vote by the legislative panel came even as a committee of commercial and sports fishermen, scientists and fisheries managers was meeting in Morehead City to decide whether they should enter the political arena and vote to oppose the measure.
Robert V. Lucas, a Selma, N.C., lawyer who chairs the state Marine Fisheries Commission, said, ``I'm pleased in the sense that the moratorium can focus in its debate on the resource and not on this bill.''
But Richen Brame, director of the state chapter of the Atlantic Coast Conservation, a sports fishing group, said he was disappointed that the bill did not receive serious debate by the General Assembly and that legislators did not give Richardson a chance to discuss it.
``The main thing is they don't want to know what the other two-thirds of the state thinks about it,'' he said. ``To not even let the sponsors know that it was going to be debated. . . . It's Machiavellian.'' by CNB