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MOORESVILLE A panel developing Lake Norman’s first rules governing boat rental companies will deliver its recommendations to the Lake Norman Marine Commission in April.
“We’re getting right to the very end,” Marine Commissioner John Marino of Catawba County told fellow commissioners at their monthly meeting Monday night.
The five-member marine commission includes residents appointed by the Mecklenburg, Iredell, Catawba and Lincoln county boards of commissioners. The commission formed a panel in March 2012 to study such measures as mandatory safety courses for renters, annual licensing of rental companies and a minimum age for renting a boat.
The panel was created in response to a boating mishap the previous summer in which a Charlotte woman was seriously injured.
In a lawsuit against the boat’s operator and the boat manufacturer, Deondra Scott said she was struck by a propeller after she jumped into the water at an annual gathering known as the Lake Bash, in a cove off Gainswood Drive in Mooresville.
Scott said in the suit that Dennis Franklin Allen, the boat’s operator, had not operated a motorboat before and didn’t know how to handle one in a public area, especially at one of the most crowded events on the lake.
The suit also names David D. Orzolek, who rented the motorboat to Allen, as a defendant.
Allen was charged with negligent operation of a motorboat, endangering life and limb and operation of a motorboat with insufficient life jackets.
