February 19, 2016 — WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH — Before state officials decide how to better regulate commercial fishing licenses, they’ll have to answer an important question — ‘just who is a commercial fisherman?’
When members of the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission met in Wrightsville Beach this week — their first meeting of 2016 — updating the state’s 17-year-old criteria for commercial fishermen was a hot topic. And it’s one that’s sure to be contentious — when Commissioner Alison Willis proposed a subcommittee to study the issue, she said she was putting her head on the chopping block.
By the time her motion was worded as carefully as possible, it was a paragraph long.
“And here I was thinking that it was the lawyers that got paid by the word,” Phillip Reynolds, the commission’s legal council, joked.
But commissioners agreed they would rather be cautious than concise after a year of meetings marked by emotional exchanges, audience outbursts and even threats. At this week’s three-day meeting, members tackled topics from shellfish management to fishing licenses and tied up loose ends on the southern flounder management plan changes that caused so much controversy in 2015.