TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court Thursday rejected a commercial fisherman’s constitutional challenge to Florida rules about pompano fishing in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in a case that the court described as involving the “entanglement of federal and state jurisdictions in the commercial fishing industry.”
Monroe County commercial fisherman Tim Daniels filed the lawsuit after he was cited by state wildlife officers in 2020 for using gill nets to fish for pompano in a federal area of the gulf known as the Exclusive Economic Zone, according to Thursday’s opinion. State rules barred the use of gill nets, with certain exceptions, for catching pompano.
Daniels contended, in part, that a federal law prevented Florida from regulating pompano fishing in federal waters — an argument about what is known as legal pre-emption. Thursday’s opinion said the federal law allows state regulation of fishing vessels in such areas when there is not a “fishery management plan,” as was the case with pompano in the Exclusive Economic Zone.
But Daniels argued that the law, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, only gave the state authority to regulate fishing vessels, not fishing. The appeals court panel, however, said that “when we read the words ‘fishing vessels’ in their statutory context, it is clear that Congress did not intend (the federal law) to preclude any state regulation that affects the act of fishing.”
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“(States) are authorized to extraterritorially regulate ‘fishing vessels,’ which include vessels engaged in performing activities in assistance of fishing,” said the opinion, written by Judge Gerald Tjoflat and joined by Judges Robin Rosenbaum and Nancy Abudu. “Congress could not intend to preempt all state regulations affecting fishing while allowing state regulations of vessels that are performing activities that assist in fishing, because that assistance itself statutorily constitutes ‘fishing.’ If it did intend such preemption, it would not have defined ‘fishing vessels’ and ‘fishing’ as it did. To conclude otherwise would create a statutory scheme repugnant to itself, which we must avoid.”
The panel, which upheld a district judge’s ruling in favor of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said the agency has declared pompano a restricted species that needs protection. Along with preventing the use of gill nets, other rules include such things as limiting the number of pompano that can be caught and sold each day and placing restrictions on the sizes of fish that can be kept.
President Donald Trump last month issued an executive order to rename the Gulf Mexico as the Gulf of America. But the appeals court said that because laws “pertinent to this appeal explicitly refer to this geographic area as the ‘Gulf of Mexico,’ we continue to use that name.”
