“Protecting access for hunters and anglers act”

[Ben Lamb]

I'm making a point about how ideologically inconsistent we are in supporting wildlife management structures only when they directly benefit us.

It's an incredibly stupid bill.

This is why I tolerate your love of Sublime.

 

[BenP]

That said, Congress is very into stupid, meaningless stuff right now.

Yeah it would be nice if they would stop everything else until they funded DHS so I can get paid.

 

[R.K.]

It's not even lip service. It is removing science as a primary driver of regulating shot and putting personal favoritism at the head of the line.

When Regan's undersecretary for the Interior banned lead shot, it was through executive fiat, not through the states. Why would we give up that kind of tool for wildlife conservation?

I was making a guess. After reading the text of the bill, I agree that it’s not harmless lip service- it’s an attempt to undermine federal management authority and science. The last line of the summary about “and if the state approves” is basically a temper tantrum about the California lead-free boogeyman.

What is up with Montana legislators hating wildlife and public access unless we raise a small army of opposition?

 

[Treeshark]

What is up with Montana legislators hating wildlife and public access unless we raise a small army of opposition?

Daines somehow managed to convince quite a few people that he is one of the good guys when it comes to conservation/public land preservation. It was a masterful sales job, but if you looked hard enough his true self still poked through all along. (My opinion).

 

[Ben Lamb]

What is up with Montana legislators hating wildlife and public access unless we raise a small army of opposition?

Well, MT did just solidify one of the largest increases in conservation funding through HB 932, which not only increases funding for Habitat MT and WHIP (Wildlife Habitat improvement Program), but also helps fund parks, trails and non-game species, while also supplying the wildlife crossings account (another piece of legislation that passed last session) with some revenue. MT also invested in 7 full time education positions and increased warden positions (hopefully pay raises for all FWP staff soon). So I think overall it's a mixed bag at the legislature. There are strong conservationists in both parties and those voices tend to carry the day by day 90 (sine die - end of session).

But historically, yes. The MT session has been one of the busier in the US. A lot of it is frustration from rural interests who felt like they were being ignored, while some of it was bad ideas being advanced for personal reasons.

Yet more of it is because there's a lot of power in the politics, especially when you see so many show up for rallies. The left views the issue as a way to build power with a constituency that looks sideways at them (gun owners, hunters). The organizations that track farther left than others find fundraising power as well as membership bumps by being seen to fight the good fight - and they use that rhetoric to increase the pressure and pain. I've even had some suggest that Republicans shouldn't run good bills, and that only democrats should do so in order to help those legislative careers. Same stuff happens with those on the right (the Hunter Nation crossbow saga, for example). Sometimes there are strong philosophical disagreements on corner-stone issues like the weed $ and the funds not going to addiction counseling or the general fund, sometimes it's personal like with the attempts to repeal the Breaks Bundled Permits, and a lot of the times it's just because people don't always have good ideas and so they introduce bad bills without understanding the impacts (there were more bills last session that would have eliminated MT's share of PR/DJ funds through loss of control or diversion than other sessions that I can remember - and it was a bi-partisan approach to that issue because people wanted to make wildlife political).

So the TLDR is that politics means that wildlife stuff is going to be sporty in Montana. There are always some real threats, and there are a lot of small threats that are easily dealt with, but membership doesn't respond to quiet kills of bad bills. Since I've been at the legislature, we have gone from over 150 bills to less than 80 and that seems to trend downwards.

If I could wave my magic wand, we'd have stronger interim processes to vet ideas and bill concepts like Wyoming does (recognizing that their legislature tilted too heavy towards the super-far right). That process tends to weed out most of the bad ideas and gets you to vetted, thoughtfully considered bills.