Interview: Russell Cady, October 29, 2022

Hello, my name is Russell Cady. I've been a commercial fisherman all my life. I'm 63 years old. Anyway, there's a lot of younger people here in the audience. And I'm gonna give them a little history lesson. The first Parks and Wildlife workshop meeting I went to was in 1978. We were fighting for our livelihood back then, just as we are now. Parks and Wildlife said that the numbers on the trout and the red fish were down, and they were going to take them away from the commercial fishermen. For a little while until the numbers got up. And they were gonna give them back to us. Well, they lied. That was 45 years ago. They took it away. We've never gotten it back. Through the years we've been fighting for our livelihood, and it's all been political. Parks and Wildlife started regulating the bay systems.

Many years ago, the bays used to thrive. We had many oysters, many shrimp, and many crabs. The sport fishing industry was booming. They caught bigger and better fish. Ever since Texas Parks and Wildlife started regulating this industry, it went downhill, and it's still going downhill. We're losing our arteries at a rapid rate. There used to be over 7000 oyster boats, and we always get the blame for everything. On the Texas coast, 7000. Now there's like 300, something like that, oyster boats. We're still getting the blame for it.

The reefs are disappearing in closed waters, where no one ever works. We're so overpopulated with fish and so mismanaged that the bay is getting annihilated. Anyway, right now, Parks and Wildlife wants to close airs Bay, Carlos Bay, and Mesquite Bay. The commercial fishermen have talked about it. If they do get it closed, we want it closed for everyone. Not just the commercial oysterman, we want it closed for everyone. There's been many bay closures. Bays turned into sanctuary bays, and all that up and down the coast, just to annihilate the commercial fishermen. We've been discriminated against many times. They don't have any data to back all of this up. They have regulatory power, they get ready to close something, they just close it.

Anyway, I've been to a lot of meetings. Another meeting I went to, in the early 80s, Texas Parks and Wildlife came up with a buyback program. And they said okay, commercial fishermen, this is what we're going to do. We're going to put a $3 charge on every sport license in the state of Texas to develop revenue to buy the commercial fishermen out. And I stood up in the first meeting and I said look people, if they do not, if they're not forced to use this money to buy the commercial fishermen out, it will go into the general fund, and they'll just siphon it off. Well guess what? Millions of dollars of revenue are brought in every year from that $3 and have been for over 40 years. And it's all been siphoned off into the general fund. That's not right. If they want us out of the bay, they want to take our livelihood. We have to be compensated for it. Thank you.