“I feel like a soldier returning from Vietnam. My country doesn’t give a damn about me.” — Frank Folb, Aug. 18, 2010
Frank Folb, who owns Frank & Fran’s tackle shop at Avon, admits his comment about a Washington, D.C., federal judge’s decision was one percent hyperbole and 99 percent frustration.
The judge, Royce Lamberth, dismissed a motion by lawyers representing the Cape Hatteras Preservation Association to block the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s declaration that parts of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore are critical habitat for piping plovers.
The July decision was another body blow to villages on the Outer Banks, the narrow strip of sand that protects one-third of North Carolina’s coast from the Atlantic Ocean.
First came an April 2008 consent decree, forced by a federal judge who said his other option was to close the entire seashore to public access. OBX residents awoke to find National Park Service employees driving stakes and no-trespassing signs into the sand at many formerly open beaches. The action enraged anglers, residents and vacationers who’d walked, driven and fished the Cape Hatteras National Seashore for 60 years.
Well, said the NPS, we should have done something about President Richard Nixon’s directive to set up a permanent beach-access management plan 30 years ago, but we didn’t, and we have operated under an interim plan. Now that the enviros have sued and won, you lost, so game’s over.
In response, Folb and groups such as the Outer Banks Preservation Association and N.C. Beach Buggy Association formed the Cape Hatteras Preservation Alliance to raise money for their own attorneys and even got politicians such as Rep. Walter Jones Jr. to introduce bills in Congress to return the NPS to an interim plan. Nothing has worked.
All this over a bird, the piping plover, that’s not listed as endangered and apparently lives in good numbers from Nova Scotia to North Carolina, at Gulf Coast states and the Great Lakes.
“There were 11 successful nests and 15 fledglings this year because we had good weather,” Folb said. “(Sixteen destroyed nests) also had nothing to do with beach driving.”
More than anything, Folb is angered that a small group of environmentalists is turning the Outer Banks into Cape Cod, where beaches are closed to access when anyone sights a plover. And the will of the people — documents show the federal government created the Cape Hatteras National Seashore as a place for human recreation — plays second fiddle to a bird that appears to prefer beaches other than North Carolina’s.
“I don’t know whether we can get over this latest decision or not,” Folb said. “It’s like another wall’s been built.”
Other experts believe the critical habitat designation actually destroys plover nesting sites because it allows vegetation to cover them.
The choices aren’t good. Either (a) the NPS and judges are inept or (b) enviromentalists’ lawsuit threats using junk science are being used to close beaches.
“I worry about a system that seems so corrupt,” Folb said.
That, too, is hyperbole, he admitted, born out of frustration.
“We’ll just keep plugging,” he said. “There’s nothing else to do.”
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