They say fishers are a tenacious group.
Mark Coarsey, president of the Manatee County Fishing for Freedom group, said the news came Feb. 16 that the Florida Supreme Court would not review a case he hoped would overturn the 1995 ban on gill net fishing.
“It doesn’t look good for the fishing boys,” Coarsey said.
The appeal to the high court came after a July 2014 decision at the 1st District Court of Appeals in the Wakulla Commercial Fishermen’s Association Inc. v. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The decision affirmed the FWC’s authority to enforce the 1994 Florida constitutional amendment banning fishing in state waters with gill nets.
The Wakulla Commercial Fishermen’s Association, organizers of the parent Fishing for Freedom group, successfully argued the case in October 2013 in a Leon County Circuit Court.
Leon County Circuit Judge Jackie Fulford issued an opinion allowing Florida fishers to use gill nets with wider mesh sizes. Within days, the FWC filed a stop order and an appeal in the 1st DCA.
The constitutional amendment restricts overall net sizes and mesh sizes of nets, almost exclusively affecting the mullet fishing industry. Fishers have contested the rule, bringing it in and out of courts, for 20 years.
The FWC contends the rule is intended to preserve fish populations by preventing over-fishing, and mullet fishers contend that the rules do not achieve those intentions.
Fishers argue limiting the mesh size of the net means it is more difficult for fishers to net legal-sized fish and juvenile fish are caught instead, producing a bycatch that the net-ban was intended to eliminate.
Ripple effect
Four of the five fish houses in Cortez Village went out of business following the ban on gill nets enacted in 1995, said Cortez resident Linda Molto.
The small community settled in the 1880s and built on the commercial fishing industry has struggled to bounce back, and challenge the rule.
Over the years since the ban was approved by a statewide vote, Molto became an advocate for preserving the community including, with the aid of other residents, getting Cortez on the National Park Service’s Historic Registry map in March 1995.
“We had a lot of things happening at the time, the net ban for one. All these young kids from fishing families watched their fathers not have jobs any more as they knew it, and they were kids that were going to follow in their fathers’ footsteps,” she said.
Two years later, in 1997, the Legislature created the Waterfronts Florida Partnership Program “to address the physical and economic decline of traditional working waterfront areas,” according to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.
Cortez was designated under the Waterfronts Florida Program in 1999 as the last remaining commercially active fishing village on Florida’s Suncoast.
The program recognized Cortez faced “a number of pressures as a result of increasing regulation of the commercial fishing industry, encroaching residential development, and incompatible redevelopment interests by outside investors.”
“The developers were just waiting to come in and develop Cortez. After the net ban, we became a target for the developers when the fishers lost their jobs,” Molto said.
The efforts have helped Cortez — a commercial fishing village dependent on mullet fishing since its establishment in the late 1800s — maintain its maritime culture.
This is a tragedy. An entire community lost an industry because the voters of Florida did not understand the issues. Now, the Supreme Court upholds a decision that only hurts innocent people. I remember that election and the voters who supported the net ban-they had no idea what it meant.