New law will guarantee Georgians’ access to rivers

ATLANTA - Each year, more than 1 million people in Georgia apply for a fishing license – and even for those not casting a line, the Peach State’s riverways offer recreation and relaxation.

As summer approaches and river activities reach their peak, a new law will give Georgians more access to the state’s navigable waterways.

The 11th-hour Senate Bill 115, which originally had nothing to do with rivers, ed the most recent session in the final minutes. It was brought about when a south Georgia company, Four Chimneys, sued to gain the right to restrict boating and fishing in a section of the Flint River that abutted its private property. The company won the lawsuit.

It got the attention – and the worry – of conservation groups, including the state’s largest member-ed organization the Georgia Wildlife Federation.

“In essence, they claimed, and they’ve got legal standing to say that they owned the river bottom out to the center of the stream,” said Mike Worley, president, and CEO of the GWF. “And we disagreed with that. We didn’t think that the angler, who had paid for the boat ramps that those fishermen are using, the fish that they’re fishing for – they belong to all of us, they don’t belong to any property owner.”

In the final days of the 2023 legislative session, Worley and lawmakers worked out a way to get language into an unrelated bill stating that all of Georgia’s navigable riverways were to remain public.

It got onto the floor and ed.

On a larger scale, Worley points to the Public Trust Doctrine – a legal principle that requires states to uphold preservation of public lands for the benefit of residents, specifically land along the coast.

“You can really make a strong argument that we really didn’t change the law; we just restated what had been the practice all along,” he said. “All of us, whether you fish or hunt or not, all of us own these resources.”

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