“Fanaticism and ignorance are ever busy and need feeding.” — Spencer Tracy as lawyer Henry Drummond in “Inherit the Wind”
On April 5, when legislators submitted a last-second rewrite of the announced goals of the state legislature’s Committee on Marine Resources, they not only gutted co-chair Rep. Darrell McCormick’s intention to change the direction of the state’s saltwater management, but a side result would alter the autonomy of a state agency — and saltwater resources still will suffer.
Besides suggesting “more study” before merging the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, the committee recommended a Joint Legislative Committee review future decisions by the two commissions.
This concept ensures insertion of overt political power into fish-and-game and saltwater agencies — as if they aren’t already battered by covert power plays. In effect, the committee would put the state’s fish and game at the mercy of monied interests that can and do sway legislators.
If those resources are under the thumb of the legislature and monied interests, North Carolina essentially will turn into South Carolina — where legislators must approve every regulation change, especially those proposed by the state’s biologists.
“This would set us back to 1947,” said Dick Hamilton, director of the N.C. Camouflage Coalition and a former director and 37-year employee of the Commission.
The Commission was formed in 1947. It’s been funded primarily by sportsmen, with some public funds sent over from 16 Jones Street during the budget/appropriations process. But no one has suggested open quid pro quos between the General Assembly and commission be written into law — until now.
The Saltwater Committee injected the N.C. Department of Agriculture into the mix, proposing to add the secretary of Agriculture (Republican Steve Troxler of Guilford County) onto a three-person group along with Gordon Myers (the commission’s director) and Dr. Louis Daniel III (the marine fisheries chief).
“Troxler will be sympathetic to commercial fishing,” Hamilton said, “because commercial fishing interests see it as a product. There was no other reason for him to be involved. And to have 16 ‘super politicians’ controlling fish and wildlife and saltwater resources was not how it was set up long ago.”
Even if Myers doesn’t agree to a detail or two of a merger plan, now he can be outvoted.
“And bear hunting, fox hunting, bowhunting, mountain-trout fishing, coastal saltwater fishing, now (they’ll) have to go to the (committee),” Hamilton said. “It’s all a bad idea.”
We couldn’t agree more. Unless sportsmen rise up and contact their legislators, a good intention — and a state agency created to have no political strings attached — will have been perverted by a few rich coastal fish-house owners and the legislature.
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