To achieve a balanced future in its management of wildlife and companion recreation activities, Colorado must return to its past.
More precisely, it must remove the legislation of wildlife affairs from the aegis of the generally hostile Agriculture, National Resources and Energy committees in the General Assembly.
Until the early 1970s, wildlife-related laws were introduced through a separate Game, Fish and Parks Committee, an arrangement that gave balance to the process and gave the important social and economic sector its proper standing.
Chafing over conflicts with game managers and wildlife, agricultural interests seized an opportunity provided by a stacked legislature. That committee was dissolved and its duties folded into the mega-unit whose casual name, the Ag Committee, tells all one needs to know about where the power lies.
As related in a companion story, wildlife and the agencies that manage it suffer as third-class citizens constantly flogged by hostile legislators who flock to the Ag Committee just to get their licks in.
Through all this, one wishes no ill toward farmers and ranchers, who should be free to plan and prosper through management of their own affairs and with their own committee — just not at the expense of wildlife.
If our state needs a model, it need look no farther than Wyoming, where a longstanding Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee goes happily about tweaking the laws that relate specifically to these activities. If proposed laws swerve off track, the full body of the legislature can make the correction.
Thing is, we now have a rare opportunity to change things.
In Gov. Bill Ritter, wildlife interests have an avowed advocate who campaigned as friend of sportsmen. If Ritter does nothing else during his term, he can reward their support by striving for this legislative reform.
In such an effort he would have a formidable alliance in a legislature controlled by fellow Democrats who in the main have few ties to the antagonistic elements who would oppose the change.
Further, most of the state’s overall legislative clout now rests in urban areas whose representatives should be more beholden to sportsmen than to ranchers.
The time to act is now. This chance might not come again soon.
