Fight to save red drum, spotted seatrout and striped bass important to future of coastal communities.
The way Dean Phillips of Topsail Island sees it, fish availability is the horseshoe nail, the linchpin to the survival of most of North Carolina’s coastal counties, which is to say saltwater fish are crucial to the lives of a majority of coastal residents.
“(In) my county, Pender, it’s just absolutely the thing that ties everything together,” said Phillips, who lives at Topsail Island and works in the family business, Surf City’s Landmark Real Estate.
Phillips, who helped form the Coastal Fisheries Reform Group, wasn’t talking about all fish species, or even one species. In the children’s poem, he meant the “kingdom” – the county per se, the people who live there – as they are affected by the availability of fish, particularly two fish: spotted seatrout and red drum.
“Let’s face it, my county, which is a poor county, without people coming here for vacations, we wouldn’t have the tax base we do,” he said.
And people who visit must have a place to stay.
“Beach rentals pay for a large part of the county’s services,” he said. “Take a kid riding a school bus over in the western part of county. Beach taxes pay for that school bus and the gasoline. It also helps pay for the meals some of the kids get at school, which may be the only meal they get that day.
“Vacation rentals — which are in large part dependent upon having good fishing, because it attracts a lot of people — are why people come to Pender County for vacations.
“Vacation rentals drive the economy in coastal North Carolina.”
Phillips, a 57-year-old former quarterback at Liberty University, works in real estate after having grown up in Greenville. He moved to the Tri-City area of East Tennessee to be near his parents, who migrated there in 1976. After spending most of his summers at Topsail, he made the move to permanent island resident in 2006.
“We spent every summer at Topsail when I was in Greenville and living in Tennessee,” he said.
Today, as he’s heavily involved in the local economy, Phillips said 90 percent of the owners at Topsail rent their beach houses, cottages and condos to vacationers during the summer to cover the cost of upkeep and taxes.
“Just think of the tax revenue generated by property taxes on ocean properties,” he said. “I’d say three-quarters of the property tax in Pender County comes from the beaches.”
Not quite — but close.
Chris Medlin, whose family owns East Coast Sports, a tackle shop, presented a slide show to the county commissioners last year during a public hearing.
“Sixty percent of the tax revenues the county gets comes from east of US 17,” he said. “One of the commissioners stated, incredibly, that ‘It’s only property tax; it’s not tourism.’
“I said if there wasn’t any tourism, there wouldn’t be any property taxes. I can’t believe the guy didn’t get it.”
Phillips said the dynamic is easy to follow, clear as a school of reds in the winter surf.
“When a family owns property at the coast, houses and such, or comes down here to rent property, they usually do one of three things,” he said. “First, before I get into that, the beaches are a place of family reunions. That’s why we’re seeing bigger, huge houses being built. Whole extended families come to the beach and stay together at these places — two, three, four, five families, plus the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters. To me, that’s a wonderful thing.
“They’ve got to drive to get here, buy groceries, etc. So that money is spent all over the state, from where they started to get here — which is salaries and tax money for a lot of counties. Then they get here and buy groceries, clothing, drinks, suntan lotion, umbrellas, kites, sun glasses, and the women might go out to shop; they might go to a restaurant or a movie. They might board the family pet close by. And everyone at those businesses benefits.
“Now to the things they do at the rental properties. One, the women and kids are gonna be on the beach a lot, and the men, too. But then the men might play golf or go fishing. That means buying tackle, ice, lures and getting fishing licenses to fish from a pier, the surf or hiring a guide or charterboat.”
Someone might say, well, not everyone fishes. That’s true, but now the state has a way to track those numbers since the legislature passed a law requiring almost everyone to purchase a saltwater fishing license. About 245,000 state residents have recreational saltwater fishing licenses and 245,000 non-residents buy them — every year. That’s close to a half-million saltwater anglers.
“But there’s a difference in a freshwater and a saltwater license,” Phillips said, explaining that someone who owns a saltwater license is a major contributor to the economy whether they live in Yadkin County or Carteret County.
“If you fish in freshwater, you can do it near your home,” Phillips said. “You might fish a pond, river, stream or lake, and it won’t cost much, if anything.
But, if you have a saltwater license, the coast is the only place you can go. And people who come down here to fish leave a trail of money.”
More than 1 million recreational fishing trips occurred along the North Carolina coast last year, according to statistics from the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries. Many anglers wanted to catch spotted seatrout, NCDMF figures show, the most popular-saltwater target now since flounder stocks have been decimated by years of overharvest.
But because of heavy fishing pressure from commercial and recreational fisherman, and because of cold-stun kills the past two winters, most specks are small, and the recreational limit is down to four per day – while commercial netters can still land 75 per day and are not governed by an annual poundage quota.
“With these fish (specks, red drum, striped bass) such a small part of the overall commercial take each year, why not put them off limits to netting and sale?” Phillips said. “The outcome is so much more beneficial to the entire state and the coastal economy. Nobody’s talking about putting flounder off limits (to nets) or croaker or anything like that, just these three fish.”
Phillips also pointed out an anomaly that many haven’t considered.
“Commercial netters keep talking about how cyclical trout are,” he said. “Okay. We had cold stuns the last two years. This past year, (NCDMF) stopped netting for a while, but if you go to the DMF web site, you’ll see after a cold-stun, the total commercial catch of trout was way down.
“What did these folks do? How many went broke? Or did they survive? The answers are they caught something else or did something else; none went broke, and they survived.
“They can’t have it both ways; either specks are crucial to their survival or they aren’t. And it doesn’t appear they are. Meanwhile, having a robust recreational fishery is crucial to the coastal and state’s economy.”
Phillips also questioned why North Carolina allows commercial fishing to hold sway over the state’s coastal resources when no other southeastern or Gulf Coast state allows such a proliferation of nets, inshore and offshore.
“South Carolina saw the value of what a miniscule part of their economy was the netting of red drum and speckled trout, so they named ’em gamefish,” he said. “Now they have world-class fishing.
“Why has North Carolina been so stubbornly stupid? We’re selling our gold, our two top saltwater fish, for scrap metal. It’s like we’ve walked into a junkyard and plunked down a bag of gold and said, ‘What’s the goin’ rate for scrap metal?’”
Phillips said he agrees with the “buy-out” clause in the saltwater gamefish-status portion of the 2012 legislative saltwater committee study.
“I talked to a lot of fishermen who’d be willing to pay $2 extra, even $10 extra, for a fishing license to go into a fund to pay these guys out of these two fisheries,” he said. “At a $2 increase per license, they’d have $1 million, easy.
“But the commercial guys, this thing about not giving an inch? That’s because of the political cover they’ve had for so long. That’s why they’re like they are today. I want the county commissioners to know commercial fishermen aren’t paying for school buses and feeding poor kids hot meals at schools; it’s the vacation rental business and tax receipts and having fish to catch is what draws people here.
“If it weren’t for the real-estate vacation rentals and the revenue it generates, the coastal communities couldn’t support their current infrastructures. They’d have to fold up their tents.
“I don’t understand, well, I do understand why they’ve been dragging their feet all along and why. But there’s no excuse for it. It’s got to change.”
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