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Inside the Moon
Sharkathon Winners A5
Old Town Fest A2
Issue 651
Fishing A15
The
Island Moon The voice of The Island since 1996
October 6, 2016
Live Music A18
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Around The Island
By Dale Rankin editor@islandmoon.com
It’s been a big week for shark fisherpersons, motorcycle riders, and wade fisherpersons who have been working the channels and flats. The passes are full of fish and so are the people trying to catch them. The crowd at the awards ceremony for Sharkathon Sunday may have been the biggest crowd ever assembled there. The parking lot was full to SPID of trucks sporting kayaks and shark rigs. According to some of the fisherpersons this did not go unnoticed by sneak thieves to who took the opportunity to make off with Yeti coolers and expensive rods and reels. This is deplorable and we Islanders apologize for having that happen. The people who come down for Sharkathon, a catch and release tournament, are always respectful of the flora and fauna on our island and they don’t deserve that. All we can say is we would hate to be the person caught stealing from shark fishermen - that could get dangerous. Hopefully next year we can get police or constables to patrol the parking lot and head off trouble.
First place Sharkathon winner in the kids division, Guillermo Guillen III, measures a whopper of a Kingfish.
ISLAND PROJECTS
Cone of Uncertainty As we sit here today we Hurricane Mathew is dropping a foot of rain on Haiti but the Cone of Uncertainty has it raking the East Coast from Florida north with nary a raindrop for the Wild Horse Desert. Strange name that, the Cone of Uncertainty. It seems an industry which spends as much time and treasure on predicting the path of hurricanes could come up with something a little more well, certain, than the Cone of Uncertainty. Ah well, they are government jobs.
See the Sea Foam
Three separate floating masses of matter made their way around the canal on the east side of Cane Harbor last week. The Texas General Land Office took a look and determined it was sea foam. It looked thick enough to walk across but no one but the dog tried.
Requiem for a Plan
Lake Padre Four Years After Funding Billish Park Work Continues Improvement Plan on Life Support
By Dale Rankin In 2012 voters approved $500,000 in bonds to improve Billish Park on The Island. Now, four years later, according to information presented to the Island Strategic Action Committee Tuesday, $140,000 of that has been spent on planning and design and the lowest bids on the project, which has been bid twice, came in at $735,000 which is at least $135,000 more than is available. Meanwhile the ten acre park at the corner of Gypsy and Fortuna bay is still largely the sticker patch it has always been; bereft of people and their pets. Island dogs learn at an early age that walking through the park is a losing proposition. According to officials from the city and POA Tuesday discussions between the two aimed at bringing the project to fruition are stalled, possibly for good, over the difference in $125,000 that POA officials say the city promised but city officials say they currently don’t have, and ongoing maintenance costs. After the 2012 vote the POA Board of Directors voted to dedicate an additional $200,000 of members’ money to the project and a public hearing was held in which city planners told the crowd that the cost of the irrigation system for the park would eat up $300,000 of
In order to simplify the construction process, the city was required to seek competitive bids, the execution of the plan was turned over to the POA more than two years ago. By the time the bids came back the cost of the project had escalated beyond the approximately $550,000 still available for the project and in their August meeting the POA board President told the POA attorney that the organization wanted $525,000 from the city for the project in
Billish Park cont. on A4
People Without Health Insurance
The website WalletHub this week released the figures on the number of people in Corpus Christi without medical insurance. They compared 548 U.S. cities. The number of American without health insurance is at an all-time low at 8.6%. These numbers show where Corpus Christi ranks with 1 being the least amount of uninsured citizens, and 274 being the average.
the $700,000 then available for the project. Eventually, a design was settled on which included sodded playing fields, a pond to hold naturally occurring ground water suitable for irrigation (at a cost much less than $300,000), enough topsoil to allow the newly planted grass to crowd out the stickers, and berms along the southeastern corner to prevent the migration of off-site stickers once the current sticker crop was eradicated. Eventually the city agreed to supply free city water for irrigation. But as the plan was being finalized the original designer passed away, after being paid about $80,000 for the first set of plans, and when the second set of plans was complete, according to information presented Tuesday, the total cost of design was at $140,000.
Corpus Christi by the Numbers
Uninsured Rates in Corpus Christi (1=Lowest; 274=Avg.) 483rd – Overall Uninsured Rate (16.49%)
Crews have now installed more than 2000 feet of new bulkheads around Lake Padre. The work is part of the development around the lake in anticipation of the building of the proposed Park Road 22/SPID Water Exchange Bridge which would connect Lake Padre to the existing Island canal system. City staffers told the Island Strategic Action Committee Tuesday they expect the final plans and funding for the bridge to be in place by the end of the year with construction to follow
428th – Change in Uninsured Rate Between 2015 & 2010 (-4.18%) 468th – Children’s Uninsured Rate (7.63%) 486th – Adults’ Uninsured Rate (19.44%) 486th – Whites’ Uninsured Rate (11.66%) 319th – Blacks’ Uninsured Rate (17.94%) 221st – Hispanics’ Uninsured Rate (18.73%) 477th –Lower-Income Households’ Uninsured Rate (21.91%) 413th–Higher-Income Households’ Uninsured Rate (6.58%)
A little Island history
What Happened to Texas’ Commercial Fishing Industry?
Moon online As we are now only sixteen years into the new century the Moon IT Department has joined the century just passed and the latest edition of the Island Moon is now available each Friday on our website islandmoon.com. You can also access it through our Facebook page at theislandmoonnewspaper. Like the printed version they are all free. Remember everybody, the good die young and we’re still here – so we got that going for us. In the meantime say hello if you see us Around The Island.
got rowdy every now and then. Their children were a part of the trade, Writer’s note: This is the emotional bailing out water from the boats tale of Texas’ commercial fishermen. after a storm, cleaning the nets and A hard-pressed group fighting for gathering shrimp for bait. survival. We understand there are two sides to this story and this is one Then came change of them. There are sure to be many In 1979 came word that there was who disagree with them but their going to be a change in Texas fishing voice is one who has not been heard. regulation that was going to affect So we listened. commercial fishing. These families A lifestyle that has been passed were being blamed for a supposed on for generations is soon to be no depletion of redfish under the guise more. There were 400-500 families of conservation. But according to engaged in this trade all along 500 the fishermen conservation was miles of the Texas coastline. They only a ruse, the action was actually were good families who contributed put forward not by conservationists to their local schools, went to church but sport fishermen who, according and served their country. They held to then 25 year old commercial social events at the Fish houses and fishermen spokesman Ernie Buttler, By Mary Craft
“wanted their Gulf waters playground to themselves”. Buttler’s premise has been bolstered over time since there are thousands of sport fishermen fishing the bay, rows of fish cabins (some of the sizable ones can hardly be called cabins), a helicopter pad and runway strips on the once pristine bay.
A Houston based sportfishing group, provided lobby funds to convince the politicians to make red drum a game fish. This would give them exclusive access to this species thereby denying it to commercial fishermen and consumers.
Things got political Dallas
Senator
“Ike”
Harris
sponsored the Texas House bill 1000 which was presented in 1981 to convince the legislature to designate red drum and spotted seatrout as game fish and prohibit their sale for two years. After two years it would be determined if the period should be extended. At that time, any changes in fishing regulations had to be passed by the House and Senate. In 1982 the Wildlife Conservation Act gave Texas Park & Wildlife (whose members, by the way, are not elected) authority to manage fish regulations. The sport fishing group had the money to influence the politicians
History continued on A4