Orange Beach, Ala. – (OBA) – Citing crowded boat launches as just one of many reasons, the Orange Beach City Council voted in a moratorium on any new business licenses for marine-based operations including boat and jet ski rentals, parasailing, dolphin cruises or fishing charters.

“We had a lot of conversations about the Boggy Point and Cotton Bayou boat accesses being used as businesses and that has occurred since the commissioner of DCR allowed the duck boats years ago to run from there and it kind of opened the floodgates,” Councilman Jeff Boyd said. “We did limit that a couple of years ago, but we had an extreme amount of people coming to us almost daily to run out of those.”

Marine businesses were picking up customers at Boggy Point and Cotton Bayou launches, and they were taking up valuable parking space from boat trailers. Boyd said even the backwaters are home to several businesses operating from homes. Many new ones are running without a business license pop regularly, he said.

“If you take your boat and go down any canal – Martinique, Cotton Bayou – any canal anywhere, you’re going to see people that are pushing the limits by operating from residential communities,” Boyd said.

Anybody doing business now can renew their licenses when they come due again, but anyone applying with a new business will have to wait until city officials study the situation and how to better control what’s happening in the waters of Orange Beach.

“This is a moratorium the council is putting together to discuss how we best move forward,” Boyd said. “I’m not saying this is going to happen fully forward, but this is a starting point. This came out of as well the charter fishing association where they asked for this because of charter fishing and how much pressure they are getting from every direction in charter fishing. There’s going to be a lot of discussion on how we move forward with this. This is temporary, take a deep breath and let’s pause for a second and see where we go from here.”

Mayor Tony Kennon said another aspect the moratorium needs to address is the effect the burgeoning marine business is having on the environment.

“The pressure on our natural resources is beyond sustainability in my humble opinion and there’s only so many numbers it can sustain,” Kennon said. “Whether it be the grass bottoms being run over, chewed up, 3,000 boats on holiday weekends, the spillage. You can only do so much. Hopefully, our goal is: We’re going to find some way to moderate and protect our natural resources as they are our lifeblood. Without them none of us would want to live here, none of us could make a living.”

Another long-term goal, Boyd said, is to take care of the operators who have followed the rules for many years.

“The goal of this is not to punish who’s in business and who are doing it properly at all,” Boyd said. “This is actually to protect the entity that has done it properly, protect the marinas that have invested something in it. That is definitely a situation we need to take in hand.”

The moratorium went into effect with a June 20 council vote and will last through the end of the year.