With many Americans working in the public sector, often it cuts too close to the bone to rip “government” as inefficient, wasteful, venal, and, even worse, disastrous. Nonetheless, it’s become easier during recent years, in light of catastrophes ignored or promulgated by our overseers.
Often bureaucracies have good intentions, but managers sometimes are: (a) inattentive, (b) incompetent or (c) lured over to the dark side. Sometimes what happens is inexplicable, like one of those horror movies where a homicidal maniac with an axe waits in the shadows.
“Don’t open that door,” we pleaded to Jamie Lee Curtis, because we knew the boogeyman in a hockey mask had a meat cleaver. But she always opened the door.
Bureaucracies usually are created to do essential services (police, fire protection, zoning, courts, tax offices), but they may morph into giant entities with hundreds of employees that exist to expand their power by making and enforcing ever-expanding rules nobody quite understands, yet we must obey and be swallowed up.
And so we come to spotted seatrout management in North Carolina. The N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries seeks public comments (email to Chip.Collier@ncdenr.gov) by Jan. 18 regarding a “draft supplement” to the Spotted Seatrout Fishery Management Plan.
What’s happening is this: the last stock assessment was in 2008 on an overfished stock, and the agency knows lots more trout were in the fishery the past two years. So the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission changed the plan, going with a 4-fish, 14-inch rule for recreational anglers and 75 specks per day for netters until it got new data from a 2013 stock assessment. But the agency didn’t do the study because of a lack of funds, and now, the Commission must vote on a FMP but doesn’t want it based on outdated 2008 input that created three choices:
• A recreational limit reduction from four to three fish per day starting in February, with a minimum size of 14 inches, plus a recreational closure from Dec. 15-Jan. 31 and a drop of the commercial catch limit from 75 to 25 fish;
• Four specks 14 inches or longer for recs and a 75-fish trip limit for netters with no weekend fishing (2013 rules);
• A 6-fish creel limit for recreational anglers, with only two longer than 24 inches, no limits for netters and weekend closures.
If it chooses the first alternative, the Commission knows fishermen and netters will come after it with pitchforks and burning pine knots, so it wants approval to keep 2013’s rules. Meanwhile, the meetings, expenses and energy inherent in trying to tweak trout regs could be avoided with gamefish status for specks — or red drum or striped bass.
Typically, the DMF/MFC bureaucracy seems content to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Hey, it’s their job, man.
