A version of this story first appeared in the Tideland News

Several boating and fishing groups and boat manufacturers are opposed to a bill that would raise the yearly registration fee on all recreational boats in North Carolina in order to pay for dredging inlets along the coast.

Senate Bill 58, introduced by state Sen. Harry Brown, R-Onslow, would eliminate the flat fees of $15 and $40 that recreational boaters in the state now pay for registering a watercraft for a year or three years. Instead, the legislation would establish a fee schedule based on vessel length with the owners of the smallest boats paying $15 year and the largest $150. The fees for new boat titles and transfers would also increase.

The bill requires that half the money each year go to a dedicated fund that would be used to help pay for dredging inlets that have a maximum depth of 14 feet.

Sen. Harry Brown

BoatUS, which has about 16,000 members in North Carolina, agrees that the inlets along the coast have to be maintained, said Nicola Palya Wood, who works in government affairs for the organization.

“But it has to be equitable,” she said. “We have serious concerns with the bill the way it’s written. We represent all boaters in North Carolina and we want to make sure all boaters are fairly treated. The lion’s share of the costs in this bill falls to recreational boaters, but leaves the commercial boater untouched.”

The group on its Web site is urging its N.C. members to contact their legislators to oppose the bill. The site has generated more than 1,200 emails to the N.C. Senate opposing the bill, Wood said.

Bass fishermen don’t seem too pleased, either. The N.C. Bass Federation features the BoatUS alert on its Web site. It has about 400 active members in the state and is an independent affiliate of the Bass Federation, one of the largest fishing groups in the country.

“While we like to see everything done to protect the inlets, there are lots of freshwater boat owners, fishermen and recreational boaters all over the state who would never see the benefit,” Chuck Murray, president of the N.C. group, explained in an email. “We are in no way supporting this bill.”

BoatUS and a group of boat manufacturers, which includes Grady-White Boats and Parker Boats in Carteret County, have been talking to Brown’s office about the bill, Wood said. They hope to talk to Brown directly about their concerns and other options to raise money for dredging.

“Dredging has to be done, and the fees haven’t been increased in many years,” Wood said. “But these increases are substantial and there has to be a more equitable way.”

Brown did not respond to an email or telephone calls seeking comment.

Under his proposal, boats less than 14 feet long would continue to cost $15 for one year. The owner of a 14- to 19-foot boat would pay $25; 20 to 25 feet, $50; 26 to 40 feet, $100; and vessels longer than 40 feet, $150.

Boaters would get no discount, as they do now, for registering their boats for three years.

Half of the boat registration fees and one-third of money for new titles would go into the dredging fund. A minimum of $10 of each new title or transfer would go directly to the dredging fund under the proposal.

The registration and title fees are used by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to pay for a variety of boating-related initiatives, including boater safety and construction and maintenance of public boat ramps and docks.

Senate Bill 58 would create a dedicated funding source to help pay for dredging most inlets along the coast.

Under the bill, a “shallow draft inlet” means “a waterway connection, with a maximum depth of 14 feet, between the Atlantic Ocean and a bay or the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, or a river entrance to the Atlantic through which tidal and other currents flow.”

Inlets along the central and southern coast, such as Bogue, New River and Carolina Beach inlets, have been primarily discussed by state and federal officials when talking about shallow-draft inlets. Oregon, Hatteras and Ocracoke inlets on the Outer Banks have also been described as such by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Oregon Inlet’s authorized depth by the Corps is 14 feet. But there was some concern in Dare County that Oregon Inlet wouldn’t qualify for dredging money, but Brown told the Outer Banks Voice in an email that the inlet would be included.

That could be a problem, noted Rudi Rudolph, Carteret County Shore Protection officer. It costs about $6 million a year to maintain Oregon, he said. That’s about as much as it takes to maintain all the inlets along central and southern inlets combined, he said. So Oregon would be sucking up a vast quantity of money generated by the dedicated fees, Rudolph fears.

But he supports a state bill because it would establish a revenue source to help pay the state’s share of the cost for inlet dredging, but Rudolph added that he’d like to see a few changes to the bill.

“The idea is that there would a dedicated revenue source, which would get us out of the ups-and-downs of depending on the general fund” for state contributions to dredging projects, Rudolph said.

“This would be a very good step,” Rudolph added. “But the bill specifies a 50-50 split (between the local government funding and the dedicated state fund). What we would like to see, if it might be possible, would be a 75-25 state-local split, or maybe 65-35.”

The bill, Rudolph said, is clearly intended to help fund the inlets along the central and southern coast, such as Bogue, New River and Carolina Beach inlets, which traditionally have been dredged by federal vessels.

But it might be good, he said, if some of the new revenue could be made available for dredging waterways – such as Taylor’s Creek in Beaufort – that are not inlets, but are crucial to local economies.

Topsail Beach added its name last week to the number of beach towns that have voiced their support for the bill. Topsail, like other beach communities, has been trying to cope with the loss of federal funding to keep shallow-water inlets open. It paid $225,000 on a dredging project that began last month in New Topsail Inlet. Pender County contributed $75,000 to the project, and Surf City has agreed to provide $37,500. The state is picking up the remaining $225,000.

The bill will next be heard by the Senate Finance Committee.

By Brad Rich and Frank Tursi

First of a two parts

MOREHEAD CITY – Most people in North Carolina have never seen an Atlantic sturgeon. Once common along our coast, the fish became so rare that to preserve the remaining population the state more than 20 years ago made it illegal to possess a sturgeon. Starting Friday, though, the full weight of the U.S. government will get behind the protection of what remains of this ancient fish whose ancestors swam among dinosaurs.

Once prized for its roe to make caviar, the Atlantic sturgeon will officially go on the federal Endangered Species List that day, not only in North Carolina, but also in the Delaware and Hudson rivers, the Chesapeake Bay and the rest of the South Atlantic Ocean. The decision comes after three years of study and a petition from an environmental group urging that it be declared endangered.

The listing carries with it severe penalties for trafficking or for intentionally killing or maiming a sturgeon, or in the language of the Endangered Species Act, “taking.” Lesser offenses carry lesser fines. The law also requires that the federal government devise a plan to protect the fish’s habitat in order to bring its population back to an acceptable level. That will come later and could include restrictions on such things as commercial fishing gear and how and when inlets are dredged.

Depending on where you stand, the listing is good news for an old fish in trouble or an economic burden that will cost the states too much to comply with, place restrictions on an already beleaguered commercial fishing industry and make it harder to dredge inlets and pump sand on beaches for fear of unintentionally sucking up a sturgeon.

North Carolina officials took the latter stand. Like officials in other affected states, they opposed the listing. Officials at the state Division of Marine Fisheries – the administrative agency of the rule-making Marine Fisheries Commission – aren’t too worried about fishermen being fined for intentionally taking sturgeon, since the fish has been off limits since 1991. They’re much more concerned about those secondary effects, particularly the changes that might be required for fishing gear that could unintentionally snag a sturgeon as “bycatch.”

“We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, and we won’t know for some time,” said Jacob Doyd, a protected species biologist at the fisheries division’s main office in Morehead City. “We don’t know what they (the feds) are going to put in place to protect the habitat of the fish.

“The fishery has been closed for more than two decades here, and we agree with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission that the species is not in decline,” he said. “Our surveys have not showed a decline.”

The commission is made up of 15 states along the East Coast that attempts to coordinate the management and conservation of fish that share the states’ waters. North Carolina is a member of the commission.

Rather than listing the fish as endangered, the division would have preferred continuing the effort to get more and better information about the sturgeon by using more observers on fishing vessels in waters that the sturgeon is likely to be found.

Tim Gestwicki

Count Tim Gestwicki, though, with those who think that federal protection of the fish is long overdue. He’s the executive director of the N.C. Wildlife Federation, which wrote a letter in December to the National Marine Fisheries Service in support of the listing. The service is one of two federal agencies that administer the Endangered Species Act. Gestwicki noted in the letter that the sturgeon population in North Carolina is at a historic low, and the 20-year-old state ban has done nothing to appreciably improve it.

“We believe the time has come to list the Atlantic sturgeon as an endangered species and to invoke the most stringent protective measures possible to save this species from extinction,” he wrote. “Closure of traditional fishing activities has done nothing to stimulate recovery of the fishery. The extra level of protection of the Endangered Species Act may relieve mortality from other sources and help the Atlantic sturgeon survive.”

Be Wary of Sturgeon

Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus) were so abundant along the East Coast in the mid-1800s that boaters along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania were warned about them. A fish that could reach 15 feet in length and weigh up to 800 pounds would do severe damage to wooden boats if the unwary pilot happened to come upon one accidentally. Back then, these giants, which spend most of their lives in saltwater, ranged all along the Atlantic Seaboard, from Labrador down to Florida, undertaking extensive migrations of up to 900 miles.

Each winter and spring, they moved up rivers to spawn. There, the females dropped their adhesive eggs that attached to rocks, gravel or woody debris and hatched within a week. Those spawning runs could extend far upstream. Sturgeon bones have been found in the 800-year-old trash pits of Native Americans living along the Yadkin River in North Carolina, 300 miles from the ocean.

It is an ancient fish, experts believe, a survivor of the Ice Age and beyond. They are considered to be the most primitive of bony fish, with origins dating back 120 million years.

Atlantic sturgeon on a Maryland dock in 1901.

But they almost didn’t make through the 20th century. Prized for their fleshy white meat and abundance of roe, the sturgeon supported a thriving fishery. One researcher likened the harvest of sturgeon at the turn of the century to clear-cutting a forest. In the late 1800s, four to five railroad cars a day brought sturgeon caviar into New York City. In less than a decade, the fishery collapsed at a place called Caviar Point, N.J. Other places soon followed.

The Industrial Revolution added to the damage by destroying the sturgeon’s spawning habitat on many rivers or by blocking its spawning runs with dams.

Numbers improved a little after the federal Clean Water Act of 1973. Sturgeon can live for 50 years or more, but they are late bloomers when it comes to reproduction, which makes population recovery slow. And there are still problems on many rivers, where poorly oxygenated water and siltation because of dredging, agricultural runoff and other factors have impeded the survival of eggs.  What’s more, the shrinking of freshwater habitat is causing problems for juveniles, which spend up to six years in their natal rivers and are intolerant of saltwater. Rising sea levels because of climate change may also have increased rivers’ salinity.

Jack Spruill of Hamstead grew up on Albemarle Sound, where the Atlantic and the related shortnose sturgeon have lived thousands of years and were part of the commercial fishing heritage of his family.

“Sadly, perhaps partly due to no restrictions on their catches, there was a collapse of the populations of both sturgeon species in North Carolina in the late 1940s or early 1950s,” he recently told the Marine Fisheries Commission in support of the Atlantic sturgeon’s listing. The shortnose sturgeon is already listed as endangered.

The story is the same around the world for the various species of sturgeon. The Washington-based Consortium for Ocean Leadership reported in 2010 that 85 percent of sturgeon populations worldwide were at risk of becoming extinct.

In some U.S. states, Atlantic sturgeon populations have plummeted to 99 percent of their historic levels. The National Marine Fisheries Service said in its ESA listing proposal that the populations in the Carolinas are probably at less than 3 percent of those levels.

“None of the populations are large or stable enough … to provide any level of certainty for continued existence,” the proposal concluded.

Wednesday: Consternation and joy