No Pay, No Say

Creative as they are, all these strategies—even Missouri’s—are band-aids on a ruptured aorta. The Conservation Federation’s Dave Murphy offers this: “In 1937, the first year of the Missouri Department of Conservation, the fish and wildlife budget was 0.8 percent of the state budget. This last year, with all our sales tax revenue, license fees, and federal aid, it was 0.7 percent. So the sales tax has allowed us only to stay about where we were, not get ahead.”

And for all the enlightenment in state wildlife agencies and all the evolution in America’s sporting culture, there is still no shortage of knuckle draggers to preserve good-ol’-boy networks. Nowhere is this more apparent than in otherwise progressive Vermont, where, as in so many states, the Fish and Wildlife Department is nearly busted. Between 1987 and 2008 sales of hunting licenses declined from 111,542 to 80,831, sales of fishing licenses from 161,014 to 122,642. The agency has gone begging to the legislature for extra funds, never with good success, and it has been laying off staff and leaving positions open.

So the department’s former commissioner, Steve Wright (then the National Wildlife Federation’s northeast representative), and Patrick Berry (then communications director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council) helped develop a legislative mandate for a study committee that would explore alternate funding. And they helped put together a support coalition called the Vermont Wildlife Partnership with a strong, diverse membership of 60 groups—from Wright’s and Berry’s outfits to Trout Unlimited to Audubon Vermont to the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs.

In due course the study committee hatched a proposal (Vermont has no ballot initiatives) to redistribute one-eighth-of-one-percent of the existing sales tax to the Fish and Wildlife Department. Of every 48 cents collected, 31 would go to the general fund, 16 to the education fund, and 1 cent to the Fish and Wildlife Department. It wasn’t much, but it would boost the agency’s paltry budget from about $14 million to $20 million.

“Governor Jim Douglas has a mantra of ‘no new taxes,’ ” says Wright. “The word on the street was that just at the end of the 2007 legislative session, his office found out about the study committee and sent over one of its heavies to proclaim that the governor wouldn’t sign the bill unless he could appoint committee members.” Co-chairing the committee was Douglas appointee James Ehlers, who had gained public attention by whipping sportsmen to a froth of paranoia with hook-and-bullet-rag harangues about alleged plots by greenies who, he charges, are “equating the constitutional rights of humans with the supposed rights of bugs.”

Current Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Wayne Laroche—an Ehlers acolyte who once wrote that wilderness sacrifices “tangible values to achieve the ‘spiritual’ values of the so-called environmentalists at the expense of traditional users”—had been propelled to office by the anti-wilderness, pro-clearcutting, pro-mechanized-access-at-any-cost Hunters, Anglers, and Trappers of Vermont (HAT), which Laroche used to serve as a director. HAT perceives alternate funding as a plot to keep its members out of the woods and turn over wildlife management to anti-hunters. Basically, Laroche killed the sales tax proposal when he announced to the press that it was “imprudent.”

“The whole process became a tragicomic opera,” says Wright. “Laroche got up and gave an hour-and-a-half PowerPoint about all the things the department was going to do and how it wouldn’t need any more money. If you had been there, you’d have laughed out loud. Then Ehlers talked about everything the study committee hadn’t done—‘Yes, I co-chaired the group, and our members agreed on an eighth-of-a-percent sales tax, but they didn’t say how the money would be spent. . . .’ ”

The other co-chair of the study committee was Jim Shallow, conservation and policy director for Audubon Vermont. “I don’t have a lot of hope for the near term,” he told me. “The fiscal situation here is really bad. We just had a budget enacted over a gubernatorial veto.”

In most states, an element of the general public complains that it is denied a voice in wildlife decision making. But if it wants a say, it has to pay. Moreover, I have always questioned the fairness of “user-fee” funding in which hunters and anglers are taxed on their equipment when they’re already giving the general public a free ride by providing it with national wildlife refuges purchased and managed with duck-stamp revenue, by providing it with permanently protected state lands and waters with their license revenue, and by protecting it from irruptions of ungulates. Under today’s regulations no species is remotely threatened by hunting or fishing, and a few (that would otherwise overpopulate) are benefited. The general public should pay for protection and restoration of its fish and wildlife, but the people who should pay most are those who hack, gouge, and poison habitat. There ought to be a “resource-extraction tax.”

Prospects for big increases in fish and wildlife revenue are suddenly brighter. On June 26, 2009, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which, in addition to directly benefiting the biota by cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and providing clean energy jobs, would secure major funding for fish and wildlife. Funds would be generated by polluter payments for carbon released into the atmosphere. Between 2012 and 2030 roughly $1.7 billion a year would be available for natural resources damaged by global warming. State wildlife agencies would get about $500 million of this. Then, on November 5, 2009, the Senate version passed the Committee on Environment and Public Works on a vote of 11 to 1, with all seven Republican members boycotting. While the allocation for natural resources was reduced to $1.4 billion, both state and federal funds would be automatically appropriated. In the House bill the federal portion would be a gamble.