North Carolina Fails to Protect Fisheries

Wake County Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins found that North Carolina failed to protect the state’s fisheries for its citizens. Doug Olander

A path forward for North Carolina’s fisheries was again put on hold in September, when the state appealed a judge’s August ruling that North Carolina failed to meet its constitutional obligation to protect the state’s coastal fisheries.

“The Order in Liability Phase affects a substantial right that would be lost, prejudiced, and/or inadequately preserved without an immediate appeal,” the state’s lawyers wrote in a one-paragraph notice.

The Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina (CCA N.C.), which filed the 6-year-old lawsuit along with 86 individual citizen plaintiffs, scored a huge victory for the sate’s fisheries and its anglers with Wake County Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins’ August ruling.

“We are disappointed that the State has chosen to file a meritless, procedurally improper appeal rather than focus its energy on addressing the serious problems identified at trial and moving the State’s fisheries managers toward practical, science-based solutions,” said CCA N.C. Executive Director David Sneed. “This meritless appeal does not change the need to act to restore our coastal fisheries, and North Carolinians have waited long enough for meaningful progress.”

The Judge’s Ruling

North Carolina failed to meet its constitutional obligation to protect the state’s coastal fisheries, according to an August ruling in a 6-year-old lawsuit filed by the Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina (CCA N.C.) and 86 individual citizen plaintiffs.

In a 190-page ruling following a six-week trial, Wake County Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins found that the state breached its legal obligations under public-trust doctrine and the North Carolina constitution to protect the state’s fisheries for its citizens. Now the action moves on to the “remedy phase.”

“With this ruling, we are calling on the general public, our elected officials, our scientific community, and state fisheries managers to join together with us, roll up our sleeves, and commit to doing the hard work necessary to restore our coastal fisheries for the benefit of all citizens and future generations,” said CCA N.C. Executive Director David Sneed.

In the original complaint filed in 2020, CCA N.C. alleged decades of mismanagement, chronic overfishing and resource waste resulted from the state’s allowance of shrimp trawling, unattended gill netting and a lack of commercial reporting.

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In this latest trial, a key to North Carolina’s defense argued that the plaintiffs lacked the data to prove its allegations against the state. 

“The State argues that Plaintiffs have the burden of proof and cannot carry that burden due to the substantial gaps in crucial data,” Collins wrote in his judgement. “That argument is specious at best. It is the State’s duty to manage our public trust fish. The evidence is overwhelming that one of the critical aspects of that duty is to collect adequate data. The data gaps the Court has found in this case are evidence themselves of management failures by the State and not lack of evidence from Plaintiffs.”

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