Fish and Game Politics

But now that Idaho's sportsmen have lost the director they so badly needed, they've joined with environmentalists in a 22-group coalition and are fighting back. As former US Interior Secretary and former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus aptly puts it, Kempthorne and the legislature "have jabbed an old hibernating bear in the fanny with a stick." The coalition is circulating a petition for a ballot initiative in November that would reduce the number of commissioners from seven to five, strip the Senate of confirmation power and require the governor to appoint members from candidates elected in caucuses around the state.

A good measure of the initiative's worth is the reaction it is eliciting from the governor and Farm Bureau Federation. In March the coalition summarily dismissed a "compromise" offered by Kempthorne in the form of a five-man commission in which sportsmen supplied two members, the Farm Bureau supplied two and the governor appointed the fifth. Andrus accurately defined it as "three to two against wildlife." Showing its first-ever concern for sportsmen, the Farm Bureau refers to the "unholy alliance" between sportsmen and environmentalists and warns that "if true sportsmen go for this ruse, the hunter, fisherman and outfitters will be out of business."

"The current situation is forcing the public to take this kind of action," says Lonn Kuck. He speaks of "this subtle pressure" that made it impossible for him and his fellow professionals to do the work they were hired for. "It was very difficult to make hard decisions," he says. "No one said I couldn't do something, but lots of times my recommendations weren't carried out. If you don't agree with the direction, you're slowly and insidiously ostracized from the decision-making process to where you become ineffective. That happened to me. It reached a point where I didn't even participate in the last round of big-game season-setting."

Maybe the coalition can pull the State of Idaho up by its bootstraps. I doubt that it realizes its own power. "Whenever sportsmen combine with environmentalists, you have 60 to 70 percent of the population, an absolutely irresistible coalition," remarks Chris Potholm, founder of the Potholm Group, a polling and strategic advice company that has engineered 60 environmental referenda victories in 30 states.

I'd hate to think that men like Sando are too good for states like Idaho. Maybe there's a state that deserves Sando now, but he's 60 and tired of directing (or trying to direct) resource agencies. He's flat-out not going to do it anymore.

So what is he going to do? Well, at this writing he's off to a place about as far as you can get from Idaho politicians and Idaho resource extractors—New Zealand. For a full month he's going to fish for non-threatened steelhead.