House study committee takes up fishing rights

ATLANTA — State agency regulations may be a better way of settling the legally complex issue of public fishing rights in Georgia than new legislation, a former director of the state Environmental Protection Division said Thursday.

“If rulemaking is done well, people have a chance to be heard,” Jud Turner, the only non-legislator appointed to a Georgia House study committee on fishing rights, said during the panel’s first meeting. “It’s a forum with public notice and public comment. … This is what the regulatory process is designed to do.”

House lawmakers formed the study committee this year as the next step in a process aimed at guaranteeing Georgians the right to hunt and fish in the state’s navigable rivers and streams without violating private property rights.

Fishing rights Georgians have enjoyed for generations came into question last year when a property owner on the Yellow Jacket Shoals portion of the Flint River banned fishing there and sued the state to enforce it. When the state Department of Natural Resources entered into a consent decree promising to enforce the ban, Gov. Brian Kemp and lawmakers moved quickly to pass a bill codifying public fishing rights into state law.

Some waterfront property owners complained that a provision in the 2023 legislation containing a legal concept known as the “public trust doctrine” could take away their private property rights, preventing them from kicking trespassers who leave trash and other debris behind off of their land.

As a result, the legislature passed a second bill this year removing the public trust doctrine from the law.

Still unresolved at this point is the sticky question of how to define which rivers and streams in Georgia are navigable and, thus, open to fishing, and which are off limits.

“There’s a lot of passion on both sides of this question,” Rep. Al Williams, D-Midway, said Thursday.

“Any way we look at this, there’s going to be litigation,” added Rep. Stan Gunter, R-Blairsville.

Turner said establishing navigability is a challenging task. While Georgia’s larger rivers — including the Altamaha, the Chattahoochee, and the Savannah — are clearly navigable, other rivers aren’t as simple to classify.

Even some of those larger rivers have upstream stretches that are not navigable, Turner said. He cited as an example the Chattahoochee, which he said is not navigable in the upstream portion that flows through Helen, yet gets heavy use by tubers. Theoretically, a riverfront property owner there could shut down a lucrative recreational industry, he said.

Turner said the state could settle the question by including a map in the rulemaking process specifying which streams and which portions of streams are navigable and which are not. Rulemaking would avoid the need to keep changing the definition of navigability in state law.

“Rulemaking could clarify the definition without changing it,” he said.

The resolution creating the study committee gave it until Dec. 1 to complete its work. But Rep. Lynn Smith, R-Newnan, the panel’s chairman, said it doesn’t necessarily have to make recommendations.

“We don’t have the historic knowledge we need to have as we make our way through complex issues,” Smith said Thursday. “(But) we have the right people on this committee to enter this debate.”