CORTEZ – An historic net camp in Sarasota Bay off the Cortez commercial fishing village could be the next offshore structure scrutinized by the state, some Cortezians fear.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is investigating the legality of a building being constructed in the bay by Cortezian Raymond “Junior” Guthrie, who maintains he is building on the remains of a previous net camp long owned by his family, according to DEP.
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“A title determination indicates the land is sovereign submerged land owned by the state,” DEP spokesperson Shannon Herbon said, adding that this is the first, and so far, the only such case in this part of Florida. After an inspection on May 25, “We issued a compliance assistance offer asking him to come in for a meeting to discuss the structure,” she said.
Guthrie’s structure is just west of a net camp that the Cortez not-for-profit Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage (FISH) rebuilt as an historic artifact. Cortez commercial fishermen long used net camps to mend, clean and store cotton nets; attached net “spreads” were used to hang the nets to dry.
The state should leave both buildings alone, said fourth generation commercial fisherman Capt. Kathe Fannon, who now operates boat tours in the bay.
When the state enacted a constitutional amendment banning gill nets in 1995, effectively putting Cortez fishermen out of business, it also made the net camps of the Cortez founding families obsolete, according to Fannon.
“We had net camps up until the net ban. What else are they going to take away from us?” she said. “I want my Dad’s net camp back. It’s a birthright.”
“I was glad when Junior started building this,” said Karen Bell, of A.P. Bell Fish Co., a mullet toss from Guthrie’s structure. “I would be thrilled if every single family that had one could build them again.”
Bell said she offered to place Guthrie’s structure on her submerged lands lease to satisfy DEP, but thinks Guthrie’s ownership should be grandfathered in under the Butler Act, a 1921 law repealed in 1957 that awarded title of submerged lands to owners of adjacent property who made permanent improvements to the submerged lands during that time period.
Net camps, or their piling and remains, have been off Cortez for decades, she said, as pictured in a 1950s photo in her office that “shows the shoreline dotted with those things,” including the Guthrie family net camp, she said.
Net camps also could be protected within the Florida Working Waterfront program; Cortez is one of 24 Designated Waterfronts Florida Partnership Communities, a program created in 1997 to address “the physical and economic decline of traditional working waterfront areas,” according to a DEP publication. Cultural resource protection is one of the goals of the program, according to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.
Some of the village’s working waterfronts projects include the creation of the FISH Preserve, the FISH Boatworks and the Florida Maritime Museum and the restoration and relocation of the 1910 Pillsbury Boatshop.
The net camp also could be protected by Manatee County’s Cortez Village Historical and Archeological Overlay District. The Cortez Village Community Vision Plan of 2000, included in the district’s design guidelines, supports “maintaining the historic fishing culture of Cortez.”
