North Carolina will appeal Wake Superior Court ruling on protecting fisheries

By Outer Banks Voice on September 18, 2026

Update: On Wednesday, Sept. 16, the office of North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson filed a notice of appeal concerning the Aug. 17 Wake County Wake County Superior Court ruling that North Carolina had failed to protect fish populations.

In response to the state’s decision to appeal that ruling, the Coastal Conservations Association, which was a plaintiff in the litigation, released a statement from its Executive Director David Sneed.

It reads in part that, “We are disappointed that the State has chosen to file a meritless, procedurally improper appeal rather than focus its energy on addressing the serious problems identified at trial and moving the State’s fisheries managers toward practical, science-based solutions. This meritless appeal does not change the need to act to restore our coastal fisheries, and North Carolinians have waited long enough for meaningful progress.”

*****

‘We have a big fight on our hands’

Coastal Fisheries Coalition seeks to overturn court decision on fisheries

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice  

At the Sept. 16 meeting of the NC Coastal Counties Fisheries Coalition in Morehead City, members expressed outrage and concern over the recent Wake County Superior Court ruling that the NC Marine Fisheries (NCMF) failed to protect fish populations following a lawsuit brought by the NC Coastal Conservation Association (CCA).

The Coalition, formed in 2025 after an effort in the state legislature to ban shrimp trawling, includes 19 counties with the goal of protecting the state’s commercial fishing industry. Their opposition to the Aug. 17 ruling was largely focused on fears that it will harm that industry by mandating new protections for fish populations.

In that decision, Superior Court Judge G. Bryan Collins concluded “that the State has failed to meet its ‘obligation to manage and protect fisheries for the benefit of the general public’ as required under the public-trust doctrine, failed to ‘keep fisheries safe from injury, harm, or destruction for all time’ and failed to ‘protect the harvestable fish population ‘for the benefit of all its citizenry.’”

The CCA is an advocacy group for recreational fishing. Although a remedy has not yet been announced by the court, the findings of fact focused almost entirely on errors in how the state regulated commercial fishing.

At the Coalition meeting, Chairman Bob Woodard quickly focused on a response to the ruling.

“The main issue we have is this lawsuit, and I would certainly like to go around the table and get the thoughts from our coalition members, and perhaps how we can weigh in on this,” he said.

Ultimately, members of the Coalition approved a motion from Hyde County Manager Kris Noble “to appeal this particular ruling in a joint resolution.” It included a “request [that] the ruling to be appealed in the appellate courts of the state of North Carolina, and we continue to urge the governor and the DOJ to pursue all available legal remedies through the state’s appellate courts until this ruling is reviewed by North Carolina Supreme Court.”

The resolution added that the “member counties request that all appropriate measures are taken to preserve Eastern North Carolina’s fishing industry.”

Before the resolution passed unanimously, Coalition members voiced anger and fear about how the court’s pending remedies for the violations it cited in its ruling could impact much more than commercial fishing.

“I think they’re going…to make all the sounds in North Carolina become a secondary nursery,” said Dare County Commissioner Steve House. Secondary nurseries are protected areas that allow young fish to grow before moving to open waters as adults.

House said this level of protection would affect “anything you do in the sound, like run ferries, dredging, the commercial industry, or bringing supply ships in…It’s not just fisheries.”

District 2 State Senator Norm Sanderson told the members that “one of your biggest allies should be the Commissioner of Agriculture, because there’s a lot of things in agriculture that people are going to go after if this ruling is settled.”

Chowan County Commissioner Bob Kirby pointed to the economic impact on commercial fishing in North Carolina.

“We’re talking over a quarter of a billion dollars in economic impact, 5,500 plus individuals who are directly and indirectly affected by this,” he said. “Those numbers don’t lie, and those numbers are significant. I think that as we try to push this thing forward through an appeal, we’ve got to put that front and center because…these are real numbers.”

Pasquotank County Commissioner Lloyd Griffin noted that “the lawsuit didn’t really cover the need of the hundreds of thousands of people that work in the industry, whether it’s the guy that picks the crabs, shucks the oysters, grows the spats.”

He also referenced Carteret County, where “maybe 15 percent of the people depend on some form of seafood production,” and also cited Wanchese as an example.

The litigants have 45 days from the date of the ruling to make recommendations for the remedy, but the feeling within the Coalition is there is a strong case for an appeal.

Jess Hawkins, former Chief of Management for NCMF and a consultant to the Coalition, said that “based on what I’ve read of the case and what I’ve read of the ruling by the judge, it merits appeal.”

Noble, however, reminded the attendees that “We have to be realistic that the net that is being cast as we strategically plan how to work against that. We have a big fight on our hands.”