CORTEZ – Twenty years ago today, commercial fishermen in the Cortez fishing village and all over Florida became outlaws if they used their gill nets to catch mullet, as their families had done for generations.

Florida voters passed the gill net ban amendment to Florida’s Constitution in 1994, and it became effective July 1, 1995, a date which lives in infamy in Cortez.

“Our wounds are deep,” said Mark Taylor, former president of the Organized Fishermen of Florida, who, like many others, had difficulty getting back on his feet economically and emotionally after the net ban. He lost his wholesale seafood trucking business and his parents lost Hawker’s Seafood Market in Bradenton.

“I never believed the public would do that to food producers,” he said.

Recreational fishermen and environmentalists proposed the ban, offering scientific testimony, disputed by commercial fishermen, that mullet were overfished.

But it wasn’t mullet that won the support of Florida’s voters; a widely-publicized photograph of a dolphin in a net appeared with the slogan, “Ban the Nets - Save Our Sealife.''

The photograph “was staged by a Florida Marine Patrol officer who was busted” a decade later, Taylor said, too late for the fishermen, who by that time were trying to make ends meet by bait fishing, stone crabbing, dock building and giving sightseeing tours.

“The whole net ban was passed under the guise of conservation, and the people thought they were doing something good and right,” he said.

But voters did not know the facts, he said, including that proponents “showed fisheries in other places in the world abusing the resource that did not have anything to do with us,” or that Cortez commercial fishermen pioneered habitat restoration in the state by drafting a proposal to use funds from gill net permit fees to pay for two full-time employees at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

To protect the species Cortez has relied on since the 1800s, local commercial fishermen have traditionally undertaken environmental projects, he said, such as planting mangroves, purchasing the 95-acre FISH (Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage) Preserve and hosting cleanups around area shorelines.

“No one was interested in the truth,” Taylor said. “Twenty years later, I don’t know that the public has learned the lessons still.”

Déjà vu

Last week in Sarasota at a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission meeting, Cortez commercial fishermen said it was déjà vu all over again.

This time, mullet are on a list of forage fish, or bait fish, that the FWC manages. The commission voted on a resolution to “confirm the importance of forage fish in Florida and FWC’s commitment to continue monitoring and management of these species.”

On the surface, the language appears non-threatening, according to Mark Coarsey, of the Cortez chapter of Fishing for Freedom, who voiced the concerns of the group about what lies beneath the language.

Forage fish are used as bait to catch recreational fish. Recreational fishermen are once again poised against commercial fishermen in an organized and well-funded (by the Pew Charitable Trusts) campaign to protect mullet and other forage fish, which could lead to limiting commercial mullet fishing, he said.

The FWC has monitored forage fish abundance, size, distribution and varieties for 20 years, using trip ticket data supplied by commercial fishermen and independent trawling and seining surveys, said Luiz Barbieri, program administrator for marine fisheries research at the FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg.

He told the commission last Thursday that after Florida’s net ban took effect in 1995, there was a 60 to 80 percent reduction of forage fish landings that resulted in stable or increasing populations in Florida waters, he said.

No regulations were passed at the meeting and no future regulation of forage fish is planned, FWC spokesman Greg Workman said.

But the Florida Forage Fish Coalition, headed by the International Game Fish Association, has a petition with 245 signatures on its Website, like the petition that circulated to ban gill nets in 1994, Coarsey said. It reads, “Take the pledge, join others who believe that forage fish and their habitats need better protection.”

The Website refers to commercial fishing’s detrimental impact on forage fish populations: Forage fish “school together in large numbers, which make them easy to target and catch. These stressors make forage fish vulnerable to commercial over-exploitation and collapse… In Florida, forage fish constitute 20 percent of all commercial catches. They are important forage for common snook, spotted seatrout, red drum and southern flounder,” popular recreational species.

The forage fish issue is being presented “under the guise of conservation by the same players” as the net ban, Taylor said, adding, “They will come at it from the angle, ‘We need to protect the mullet for bait for the snook and tarpon.’ ”

Like the net ban, “people will support it because of the conservation and protection, as long as it doesn’t affect them.”

All over again

It’s not the first time local fishermen have seen the net ban scenario play out.

A temporary 2009 ban on longline fishing regulations became permanent in 2010 allowing just 62 commercial vessels in the Gulf to hold endorsements, eight of which were issued in Manatee County. Seven of those were obtained by A.P. Bell Fish Co. in Cortez and two fishermen who work with Bell.

One of Coarsey’s concerns is that if the FWC increases mullet regulation, small fishermen will be shut out of the market.

Recreational guides will get the endorsements for baitfish, Taylor predicted.

At the commission meeting, “We agreed with the FWC that we have to regulate baitfish and be good stewards of the resource,” Coarsey said, adding that commercial fishermen realize they must work with FWC to avoid another ban.

For example, “We will be working with them during mullet roe season to avoid waste,” as well as doing beach cleanups, he said, referring to once-a-year mullet roe fishermen taking the high-dollar roe and dumping the mullet carcasses overboard.

“That problem stems from too many licenses,” he said. “Anybody can go get a license for $50 to fish for unrestricted species then they can get a mullet endorsement. That’s why you have mullet on the beach. The state wants to promote jobs, but they promoted it so much they let everyone in here, and they’re all fishing.”

The explosion of recreational fishing in local waters has created unpleasant work for Taylor, who operates Manatee County’s beach rake.

“I’m picking up dead fish along the shoreline constantly,” he said. “They love catching the bonnethead sharks, but I’m picking them up with my rig because they don’t know how to handle them.

“The impact of recreational fishermen continues to increase, but no one seems to be concerned about that fishing pressure,” he said, including hook and line fishermen causing pelican and other seabird deaths, fishing gear left tangled on reefs and in marine mammals.

Never give up

Though some Cortez fishermen still have their gill nets, just in case, efforts to lift the 20-year-old net ban may be played out.

Fishing for Freedom’s Cortez chapter and other chapters around the state contributed thousands of dollars and staged rallies in Tallahassee to support a multi-year court battle to reverse the net ban, only to hit a brick wall at the Florida Supreme Court this year.

The Wakulla Commercial Fishermen’s Association, Panacea bait shop owner Ronald Fred Crum and mullet fishermen Jonas Porter and Keith Ward sued the FWC in 2012, arguing that its rules enforcing the net ban violate the equal protection rights of commercial fishermen, and cause the unwanted bycatch the ban is designed to prevent.

Leon County Circuit Judge Jackie Fulford found in favor of the commercial fishermen and lifted the net ban, ruling it a “legal absurdity” that FWC rules enforcing the ban allow small stretch mesh nets that catch and kill juvenile fish while prohibiting the larger mesh nets that let juvenile fish survive to reproduce.

Her ruling was appealed and stayed by the Florida Attorney General’s office, then reinstated, then appealed and stayed again before being reversed by the First District Court of Appeal, whose ruling the plaintiffs challenged at the Florida Supreme Court.

The high court issued an order in February declining to accept jurisdiction and refusing motions for rehearing.

The fishermen’s lawyer, Ron Mowrey, has “closed his file,” he said.

It’s doubtful that the net ban can be pursued any further, Taylor said.

But Cortez fishermen, known for their tenacity, are committed to not allowing it to happen again on the forage fish issue.

“They (recreational fishermen) want it all,” Taylor said. “It was greed to start with, and it’s still greed. If the public can’t see that, I don’t know what to say.”