Nueces County’s boating community urges city officials to reconsider water limits tied to a drought plan, fearing impacts on tourism and local livelihoods.<\/p>\n
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas \u2014 Boat community members gathered for a meeting with city officials to voice concerns over water limits tied to the drought contingency plan.<\/p>\n
In Nueces County, there are about 8,000 registered boats, and nearly 40 fishing tournaments brought in tens of millions of dollars last year. Now, the boating community says it is fighting for reasonable water limits that will not hurt the industry.<\/p>\n
Joey Farrah has been a fishing guide for 30 years and says these limits could not only impact boaters but also the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think if we put restrictions on the use of water for boating and fishing boats and things like that, the tourism would suffer greatly, especially in a crucial time now as our summer months,\u201d Farrah said.<\/p>\n
Farrah said water is important for boat maintenance.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I\u2019ve seen a lot of ups and downs, but water issues have plagued this throughout. And those who don\u2019t use water to take care of their boats and their boating areas have seen their investments go down very quickly,\u201d Farrah said.<\/p>\n
For boaters like Alan Schultz, boats are his livelihood.<\/p>\n
\u201cI generate between $50,000 and $100,000 of revenue a year for my family running guide service, and that\u2019s a crucial part of our family budget. The water is very important, and if we can\u2019t use water, we\u2019re not going to run our boats,\u201d Schultz said.<\/p>\n
Boats must be rinsed off after they are used. Marker 37 owner Brad Kaylor said if this is not done, the consequences can be costly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you do not flush your engine, you will ruin an engine, and engines can be anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000, depending on what kind you run,\u201d Kaylor said.<\/p>\n
Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo said the city is working to rewrite the policy in a way that better supports the boating community.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sounds to me like this industry might need its own classification. So you have residential, you have industry. We\u2019re looking at doing a car wash classification. We might need boat owners or a boat classification,\u201d Guajardo said.<\/p>\n
With possible restrictions on the table, the boating community is asking city officials to reconsider.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t maintain the boat, you\u2019re going to destroy a very valuable piece of equipment. Boaters have to be allowed to wash their boats and flush their engines. It\u2019s imperative,\u201d Kaylor said.<\/p>\n
There will be another boating community meeting later this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nueces County’s boating community urges city officials to reconsider water limits tied to a drought plan, fearing impacts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":["post-283527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}