A 190-page order finds that not one of North Carolina’s 13 state-managed coastal stocks exhibits long-term viability, southern flounder and estuarine striped bass among them, and sends the case to a remedy phase with a joint report due in 45 days.
A Wake County Superior Court judge has ruled that the State of North Carolina violated its constitutional obligations to protect the state’s coastal fisheries, finding for the Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina and 86 individual plaintiffs after a six-week trial that ran January 20 through February 25. Judge Bryan Collins signed the 190-page liability-phase order on August 17, and it became public the next day. The suit, filed in 2020, argued the state breached the public-trust doctrine and two provisions of the North Carolina Constitution, including the right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife that voters added by amendment in 2018.
The central finding rests on testimony from Dr. Louis Daniel, who directed the state Division of Marine Fisheries from 2007 to 2016. Applying DMF’s own 2017 viability criteria to the agency’s most recent data, Daniel concluded that not one of the 13 stocks managed under a state fishery management plan exhibits long-term viability, and the state did not attempt to rebut that conclusion. By Daniel’s analysis, seven of the 13 have collapsed or are collapsing: southern flounder, estuarine striped bass, river herring, blue crab, bay scallop, hard clam, and eastern oyster.
The order opens its species findings with southern flounder, which it describes as the estuarine stock with the most storied reputation among the state’s anglers. Commercial landings have fallen 91.9 percent from their mid-1990s peak, and of the 1,474 flounder DMF aged in 2022, 99 percent were age 2 or younger. Estuarine striped bass has been under a total harvest moratorium since January 2024, and the order notes that the Central/Southern Management Area stock, which includes the Tar-Pamlico, Cape Fear, and the Neuse River fishery MidCurrent profiled in 2018, was never assessed as viable in any year on record. Spotted seatrout, which witness Joe Albea, producer of 24 seasons of PBS’s Carolina Outdoor Journal, called the “only act in town” for recreational anglers, is experiencing overfishing per the 2022 stock assessment.
Red drum is the exception. Among the stocks a UNC Collaboratory report assessed with quantitative data, red drum is the only one neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, and the order notes it is also the only stock managed under strict harvest controls: a slot limit to protect older fish, a one-fish recreational bag, and an annual commercial cap with a seven-fish trip limit.
The state argued at trial that the plaintiffs could not carry their burden of proof because of gaps in the data. Collins rejected that argument in a passage of the order quoted by Carolina Journal, calling it “specious at best” and writing that “the data gaps the Court has found in this case are evidence themselves of management failures by the State and not lack of evidence from Plaintiffs.” Previously, in 2021, the state filed a motion to dismiss the plaintiff’s claims while requesting immunity from the court for lawsuits of this kind.
Among the fact witnesses whose testimony the order recounts were two full-time recreational fishing guides, Richard Andrews and Capt. Seth Vernon. Vernon, a Wilmington-area guide, talked Carolina redfishing with MidCurrent in 2011.
CCA NC Executive Director David Sneed called the ruling “an opportunity” and urged the public, elected officials, scientists, and fisheries managers to commit to restoring the stocks. A spokesperson for the North Carolina Attorney General’s office, which represented the state at trial, told The News & Observer the office is reviewing the decision. The order imposes no remedies on its own. Collins gave both sides 45 days to prepare a joint report addressing further proceedings in the remedy phase.
