Commercial fishermen furious feds rejected DeSantis’ fishery disaster request

LEE COUNTY, Fla. — Hurricane Ian destroyed nearly all of Lee County’s commercial fishing industry, but the feds denied Gov. DeSantis’ fishery disaster request.

Shocked, bewildered, frustrated, and abandoned are all adjectives ABC Action News reporter Michael Paluska heard from commercial fishermen to describe a recent decision by NOAA to deny Gov. Ron DeSantis’ request to declare a federal fisheries disaster.

Are bad policies and poorly written federal statutes to blame? Or does it boil down to politics? That depends on who you ask. But, commercial fishermen across the state are sounding the alarm about the future of the commercial fishing industry and whether seafood that comes fresh from Florida can survive.

“This industry is really on the verge of being gone,” Casey Streeter said.

Streeter’s fish house on Matlacha was destroyed during Hurricane Ian, and his home in St. James City.

MATLACHA, DAYS AFTER THE STORM

Boats in his fleet are damaged, some beyond repair; his ice house is gone, and his market gutted after nine feet of water and three feet of mud flowed in.

In 12 hours, all of his infrastructure to fish was wiped out. To make ends meet, he now fishes for debris in the waterways that Ian left behind.

“We are out on our own, and there is no one coming to help us,” Streeter said. “And with this denial that we just received, you know, I don’t want to call it a death sentence to our progress and move forward, but I mean, it sets us back in a way that’s going to be pretty hard to overcome, for my particular situation, and the other fishermen in the area. Here, we have a complete loss of infrastructure and a complete fishery failure. It’s disheartening. I want to feel that being an American food producer is important to our country, important to our local and state, and federal economies. I know the value that we bring; I know the culture that we carry. So it’s very, very disheartening.”

ABC Action News received a copy of the rejection letter sent to the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; it stated:

“Additional request from other impacted states” is one line in the letter that fishermen are taking issue with. That is because rapid fishery disaster requests for Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Irma were approved. Neither request submitted under former Gov. Rick Scott’s administration required requests from other states to be approved.

Hurricane Ian is the third costliest storm at $ 114 billion. Combined, Irma and Michael were $ 90.7 billion.

A spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries told Paluska they are “conducting a review of the fishery disaster request under Section 312(a) of the MSA and the NOAA Fisheries Disaster Policy. NOAA will continue to work with the State of Florida to obtain the necessary information to assess whether a commercial fishery failure due to a fishery resource disaster has occurred under the MSA,” according to Allison Garrett, Communications Specialist with NOAA Fisheries/U.S. Department of Commerce.

But fishermen, like Streeter, and many more, believe the decision was purely political.

“I think it’s a very partisan environment that we live in. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of deep-seated lines of people’s opinions, but in all reality, we’re American food producers,” Streeter said. “This is a purple issue. This has nothing to do with one side or the other. This is for the American consumer for our country’s well-being financially. You know, it’s for us to be able to go work our waters and contribute to our communities. This has nothing to do with politics. But unfortunately, a lot of these things are pushed through political arenas where people are dug and dug in and don’t really want to help, even if it’s for the greater good of everybody.”

“If this is not a catastrophic event, I don’t know what actually classifies as a catastrophic event,” Eric Schmidt said.  

Schmidt is a charter boat captain and commercial fisherman. With more than 40 years on the water, he told Paluska there is nothing he can do in Southwest Florida except visit his mom. So after losing his home and the ability to fish, he moved to St. Petersburg, where we sat down for a candid conversation about the disaster denial.

“You want my opinion?” Schmidt asked Paluska.

“Yeah,” Paluska responded.

“My opinion is this is strictly political, and it’s strictly political because the Biden administration recognizes Governor DeSantis is a political threat. When he decides to run for president, they want to make him look as bad as possible.”

“For us, common sense is clearly you got a boat sitting on the beach, it can’t fish,” Bob Zales told Paluska. “It’s pretty well certain that that person has lost his income. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Politics shouldn’t play in anything like this. You got people down there hurting people that have been pretty much devastated by the storm that need help.”

Zales represents the Southern Offshore Fishing Association and Commerce Grouper Longline Fleet. Hurricane Michael severely impacted his operation in the Panhandle. He told Paluska even with the rapid response being approved for Michael, he got money in the summer of 2022, three and a half years later. Zales said a majority of fishermen couldn’t wait that long.

“Some of them are going to be gone,” Zales said. “They’re going to find other things to do; they’re going to support their families, they’re going to support yourself, they’re going to do what they can to do to survive. So some of these people leave the business. And that’s the worst thing that can happen is because especially in an area like Fort Myers.”

While help for fisheries can take years, farmers impacted by Hurricane Ian have already received hundreds of millions in relief.

According to a USDA spokesperson:

To date, Florida producers have received over $246 million in Federal crop insurance payments, with $134 million from the hurricane policy starting weeks after the storm, Oct. 19. The crop insurance is similar to homeowners or car insurance and, during catastrophic events, is automatically triggered.

Streeter believes fisheries should be able to operate just like farmers and would like to see changes down the road.

“Unfortunately, at a federal level, there’s been pushes to change how these disaster declarations are executed, but there’s been no traction,” Streeter said.

THE LAST FLEET

On San Carlos Island in Ft. Myers Beach, the last remaining shrimper is miraculously operating, albeit not how they were.

“In 12 hours, my life changed completely. Our life changed completely. We had an operation with more than a million dollars a month coming in; to nothing.”

Grant Erickson owns and operates Erickson and Jensen Seafood with his daughter Anna. For more than 70 years, the family-owned and operated business has pulled delicious pink shrimp out of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the future of the operation is in jeopardy.

“Things are better now. But I mean, I still worry about it, you know, almost nightly, you know, about how we’re going to make all this work. You know, there’s still so much to do, and I don’t know how it’s going to come together. To rebuild these docks is about $3 million. So we’re gathering back from zero; we had five operational boats.”

Out of 11 boats, three were destroyed, and three needed severe repairs, leaving Erickson with only five ships on the water. His crews repaired a small section of docks to offload the day’s catch, but more was needed.

“We’re working with about 200 feet where we had about 1,000 running feet before the storm,” Erickson said.

“NOAA writes in a letter that the requirements were not met. What is your reaction to that?” Paluska asked.

“Well, I don’t know what the requirements are because you know it to declare a disaster. I’m looking at it right now,” Erickson responded.

After the storm, Erickson talked with his daughter to decide if they should stay or go.

“And I said, Anna, ‘What do you want to do? We’ve got a valuable piece of land here, we’ve got boats, we could get whatever we could, we would be fine. We could sell everything, and we would be fine for the rest of our lives,’ She says to me; she says, ‘Dad, I like what I do. I want to continue to do it.’ So here we are. Onward we go.”

“I love my job, and I would never give up on my community,” Anna Erickson said. 

“Can you guys survive without help from the feds or the state?” Paluska asked.

“I don’t know. Honestly, the docks are a real issue. And if we don’t have them, we aren’t going to be functioning. And right now, it’s the biggest thing that we have to work on. We have to have grants. I mean, there’s no way we could afford it.”

“What do you love about this job?” Paluska asked.

“The people,” she said.

“What if you did leave? What if you said, ‘Man, this is too much,’ and left? What hole would this place not existing leave for the community?” Paluska asked.

“You know, this industry created Fort Myers Beach. We were one of the original groups down here,” Anna Erickson said. “So to give up on that would be like giving up on Fort Myers Beach, which is not possible.”