Can’t this crowd get anything right?

I hate to think it has devolved to this level, but I’m beginning to expect really, really bad news every time something that’s the least bit controversial with regard to wildlife or fisheries in North Carolina appears on the state legislature’s radar.

I have begun to expect the worst any time North Carolina’s politicians stick their noses into anything with hair, feathers or fins. But you know, if you look at the record, it’s pretty easy to understand.

Just a few years ago, I couldn’t wait to get the Democrats out of power in Raleigh. Just give me something, anything that’s different; it can’t be worse.

I stand corrected.

In the space of a couple of short years, we’ve seen this Republican-controlled legislature use a great saltwater gamefish bill as a negotiating tool to knock a Democratic governor down to size, and then discard it altogether. We have seen a group of coastal legislators so intimidate Gov. Pat McCrory and his minions that a directive from the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission to enter into a joint enforcement agreement with the feds that would have provided $600,000 annually to the cash-strapped N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries was put on hold. North Carolina is the only state on the Atlantic seaboard without such an agreement. I guess that means we’re special.

This year, we have witnessed the legislature turn over the management of deer farms in North Carolina to the agriculture folks, even though the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission did a remarkable job keeping chronic wasting disease outside our state boundaries for years. And about the same time that happened, a handful of coastal legislators was intimidating McCrory and Co. again and attempting to intimidate the majority of the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission over proposed changes to more-restrictive regulations on commercial flounder fishing.

After a delay of three months, the Commission was set to vote a week or so ago on those same changes to flounder regulations, based on flounder stocks going down the tubes and the NCDMF providing several scenarios the Commission could use to address the issue. But before that meeting, about the time this issue of the magazine went to the printer, we started hearing rumblings that efforts were being made to derail the Commission again, and some of the rumblings pointed to coastal legislators getting ready to pull off a stunt to delay, postpone or shelve the vote altogether.

I long for the day when the legislature gets something right in terms of fish and game. I’m thinking that maybe the days when the party of Mike Easley and Bev Perdue was in charge weren’t all that bad after all. At least they paid the school teachers.