DATE: Tuesday, September 30, 1997           TAG: 9709300236

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   34 lines

SUIT CHALLENGING QUOTAS OF FLOUNDER GOES TO COURT

Summer flounder quotas could severely harm North Carolina's economy and threaten the livelihood of commercial fishermen, a state official said Monday.

Testifying in a lawsuit filed against U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley, Mike Street, chief of analysis and planning for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, said quotas would cause the state to lose $14 million.

The North Carolina Fisheries Association complained that the quotas set by the National Marine Fisheries Service - part of the Commerce Department - are ``arbitrary and capricious.''

The lawsuit seeks to set aside the 1997 summer quotas for North Carolina and other East Coast states and asks the court to order the secretary not to alter annual quotas after the first of each year to reflect overages from the previous year.

The trial was held in a packed courtroom of about 200 people, many of them fishermen who oppose flounder quotas. Some wore T-shirts that said, ``Save the Commercial Fisherman.''

Jerry Schill, president of NC Fisheries, an organization of watermen and seafood dealers, said the quotas have caused a decrease in funding received by the association.

The association collects about half its of income from dues and other half comes from a 0.5 percent voluntary assessment on a fisherman's catch.

In the first three months of this year, Schill said his organization collected $23,626 from the assessment. In the first three months of 1995, the association collected $32,929.

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