^^^This. A beneficiary inures nothing from the trust on account of any preferred standing. Every beneficiary is treated equally for purposes of trust benefit. The latin phrase is Cestui Que Trust, meaning equal in benefit.
The Trustees can/should enter into transactions to improve the trust assets. Those transactions can be with beneficiaries of the trust, but are not a function of that person's standing as a beneficiary. Whatever value comes from those deals is due to the value each party brings to the transaction.
Most land is held in a corporation or an LLC. Those entities are not public trust beneficiaries. Many want to conflate being a landowner or an owner of an entity that holds land, as being a beneficiary. Thus is not the case.
If the land owner is a resident, he is a beneficiary of the public trust. The land ownership(and whether it’s owned by an individual or a corporation) is not what makes him a beneficiary. His residency does(if he is a NM resident). That’s not to say that his landownership grants him unequal representation under the public trust doctrine, but he is not excluded from representation. The same goes for resident outfitters, and non-hunting residents(which you yourself pointed out on a podcast).
Resident hunters wanting to acquire tags through the draw are not the only beneficiaries of the public trust. I’m not certain legally, but I would suspect that funding NMGF via NR license sales would count as benefiting the beneficiaries even if it isn’t the benefit they seek, and that comes back to the beneficiaries needing to hold the trustees to account on HOW they want the trust to be managed, not whether it is a violation of the public’s trust.
Aside from the legal issues(which are important, but which I’m not qualified to dove very deep into and have probably already been wrong on) there are some very practical issues. What are NM residents trying to accomplish? If they want more tags in the draw, eliminating E-PLUS isn’t going to do that. No one is going to be forcing land owners to allow public access, and taking away their elk tags is very unlikely to result in more tags for the public. Is the issue “if I can’t hunt elk on your land then you can’t either!”? If so, this is a very unproductive path to be going down. There are some very compelling legal arguments for doing away with the landowner authorizations, but I’m not convinced that hunting groups should be pointing them out until someone can show me how eliminating E-PLUS is going to be something better than NM residents cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
Hunting groups in NM have gone down very unproductive paths before. In the late 80’s or early 90’s they decided to cap non-resident hunting. Sounds like a good idea. The result wasn’t so great though. The outfitter supported lobbyists managed to get the outfitter cap to include more tags than outfitters had even been able to sell, while cutting the non-outfitted NR substantially below the number of NR tags that had been bought, but the total of 16% (10% OT and 6% NR) added only a few percent of the total tags to the resident pool compared to what they had been drawing. The result? Resident odds barely changed. non-outfitted NR odds were cut substantially. Odds in the outfitter pool were almost 100% and outfitters got more business than they’d ever had because NRs that didn’t really want an outfitter were incentivized to go into the outfitter pool for the near 100% draw odds. Who won? The outfitters! The movement was largely pushed by the NM BHA, but the outfitters took over control of the outcome and NM residents got almost nothing. More recently, NM BHA decided to take up the R/OT/NR distribution as their cause. They need a cause so they can look like they’re doing something. What was the problem? NM was rounding tags up instead of down whenever the distribution to a pool resulted in a fraction of a tag that was .5 or greater even if the result was that they issued
1 tag more than
published in the book. The result? NM residents were getting the 84% of the
published tags, but that
1 extra tag per hunt on about 1/4 of hunts resulted in NM residents getting closer to 83% of
actual tags. The solution? Change the rounding rules. The results?
NM residents got the exact same number of tags as the year before! But NR’s and OT’s lost
1 tag on a number of hunt codes, even resulting in many hunt codes becoming unavailable in the NR pool. I did the math the year they did it, and I don’t remember, but I believe that NMGF lost around $250k in non-resident tag sales(through both the OT and NR pools) yet NM residents didn’t get even one additional tag in the total of the draw. Some of those hunts went from 11 people in the field to 10. Others went from 111 to 110. Not one NM resident gained anything of value from that change, but now they get over 84% of the actual tags, so I guess some them might have a warm fuzzy feeling. Thanks NM BHA. Now here we are with with the possibility of change, and NM residents need to make sure that this time, the changes are positive and meaningful, and most of what I’m hearing from NM residents sounds like “I don’t like what he’s doing so I’m not going to allow it, even if I don’t get anything from it!” or it sounds like someone who thinks that eliminating tags in the E-Plus system is going to put them all in the public draw, and I just don’t see strong evidence for that.
E-PLUS should have some changes. Someone who lives there and deals with it will have more and better suggestions that myself, but a few changes seem quite obvious to me. 1) No more ranch only tags(not the right word but easier to type), or at least a substantial reduction in tags if you want them to be ranch only. Along these lines, if you want a landowner tag, you allow public hunting on your private land by anyone with an elk tag, or better yet, anyone with any tag. At the very least, there could be a requirement for any landowner receiving a LO tag to allow others access to public land which his land blocks. This would be particularly useful as a lot of the ranch only tags are issued to large ranches with lots of elk on them during the season, and I’ve even heard some outfitters explain that they sell hunts to public land tag holders by allowing access to public land through private land that they hold ranch only tags for and have access agreements they’ve made with landowners. Leaving E-PLUS intact, but making this change would offer the public substantially more land than they can currently hunt. 2) Disallow anyone who enters the public draw the ability to validate a LO authorization. The authorization must be validated with NMGF in order to receive the actual tag, and NMGF knows if they participated in the draw or not. This change would reduce public draw applicants substantially. No it wouldn’t reduce it as dramatically in the resident pool as in the NR and OT, but it would reduce it some. Currently LO’s who receive LO authorizations can participate in the draw, and if they draw, they can then choose to sell the authorization. By denying them that ability, draw participation, even in the resident pool, will be reduced. Super easy change. Doesn’t take any money from a landowner’s or hunter’s pocket. Only the outfitters will cry about that because they current use their client’s money to gamble for tags in the draw even after they’ve sold the client an LO authorization. 3) If you put a small percentage of the LO authorizations into the public draw E-PLUS should gain more public support, as there would be direct benefit to the public when a ranch participates in E-PLUS. If used in conjunction with suggestion 1 and the public tags were contingent on private participation, then LO’s would suddenly be seen as benefiting the public. If a ranch currently gets 10 ranch only tags, but to continue participating in E-PLUS they would have to open their ranch to the public and receive only 9 tags, and one extra tag was added to the draw, then the public could more easily see the benefit of LO’s getting tags. If the LO doesn’t participate, then the public doesn’t have access to that land, the public land that it locks up, or the elk tag that it contributed to the draw(after all, you can’t hunt there anymore, and we can’t be hunting extra elk on public when the elk that tag correlated to will not be getting hunted). 4) Add another fee to validating a LO authorization for a non-resident. Currently a non-resident has to pay NMGF the non-resident license fee when they validate it, thus funding NMGF at roughly 10X the level that a resident would. You could add another fee, and allocate all of the additional funding to some specific purpose such as habitat improvement or public access. In this way NM residents could see additional benefit compared to what they currently do. I’m sure there are much more technical changes to E-PLUS than I would be aware of. The point is that E-PLUS currently has more awareness than it has in a very long time, and there is a chance to make positive changes, but most of what I’ve been hearing seems unlikely to result in big positive changes.
