Allowing canoes and kayaks only on Georgia rivers and streams deemed navigable would ruin an outdoor recreation industry that brings in billions of dollars, outfitters and paddling enthusiasts told a legislative study committee Friday.

“Tourism is a significant economic driver in Georgia,” Amanda Dyson-Thornton, executive director of the Georgia Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus, told members of the House Study Committee on Navigable Streams and Related Matters during a hearing at the Unicoi State Park & Lodge near Helen. “Public access to Georgia’s rivers and streams is crucial to sustaining Georgia’s outdoor recreation economy.”

The study committee was formed 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 Georgia 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.

After some waterfront property owners complained that a provision in the 2023 bill containing a legal concept known as the “public trust doctrine” could take away their private property rights, the General Assembly revisited the issue this year by passing a second bill removing the public trust doctrine from the law.

The study committee’s task is defining which rivers and streams in Georgia are navigable and, thus, open to fishing and paddling, and which are off limits.

Several North Georgia outfitters who testified Friday said they operate their businesses on streams with far less flow than the 400-cubic-feet-per-second standard the state Department of Natural Resources has suggested to define a stream as navigable.

“A kayak can float in two to three inches of water,” said Andrew Bruce, owner of Toccoa River Outfitters. “If we start restricting what we’ve had before, we’re doing an injustice.”

Both outfitters and riverfront property owners urged the committee to maintain the current status quo rather than impose new restrictions that could put outfitting companies out of business.

“We’re just asking to float through,” said Tim Brenner, owner of Wildwood Outfitters in Cleveland. “We don’t want to trash anyone’s property.”

“Ninety percent of the paddlers we have no issue with,” added Joe Rose, who owns property along the Toccoa River in Fannin County.

But Brad Coppedge, board president of the Soque River Watershed Association, warned that any rush to reclassify non-navigable streams as navigable would damage efforts to protect and restore the Soque, a tributary of the Chattahoochee River.

“If it is reclassified as a navigable waterway … overnight, the Soque becomes the Chattahoochee River running through Helen, Georgia … a recreational playground of tubing, boating, and open fishing, a new deposit area for trash and debris,” Coppedge said.

The resolution that created the study committee set a Dec. 1 deadline to complete its work. 

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