Rep. Tom Walters (R-Casper) is worried the Wyoming Legislature could create new inequities with a proposed overhaul of the program that compensates landowners for grass eaten by elk or deer.
Under changes being considered via House Bill 60 – Excess wildlife population damage amendments, landowners who “potentially want to have lots of elk on their property” could do so “and get paid for it” by the state, Walters told representatives Friday on the House floor.
“Then they can outfit and bring in one or two clients, and get paid even more money to use all the state’s wildlife for their profit,” he said.
A Walters amendment sought an exchange. Any landowners who wanted to get paid for their lost grass would have to allow for “unrestricted hunting on their property.”
Rep. Art Washut (R-Casper) liked the idea: “This is a mechanism by which we allow Wyoming sportsmen who aren’t going to be able to pay big outfitters’ fees to get access to all this land an opportunity to fill the freezer,” he said, “and at the same time diminish the number of these cow elk out there that are causing so much damage.”
But several influential members of the Legislature’s 62-member House weren’t so fond of adding the contingency to HB 60. Speaker of the House, Albert Sommers (R-Pinedale) — who’s a rancher and large landowner — was against the amendment. Reps. Bill Allemand (R-Midwest) and John Winter (R-Thermopolis), who often vote with a sizable bloc — the Wyoming Freedom Caucus — also opposed Walter’s amendment.
It failed, 26-30.
Four days later while HB 60 was being read before the entire House for the second time, Reps. Trey Sherwood (R-Laramie), Cyrus Western (R-Big Horn) and Walters made a run at a potentially more palatable amendment: Landowners who siphon away Wyoming Game and Fish Department funds for grass lost to elk would have to enroll in the state agency’s Access YES program, where the terms of access can be negotiated.
House Majority Floor Leader, and a Freedom Caucus member, Chip Neiman (R-Hulett) didn’t like it. It too failed.
The majority of the 11 amendments proposed to the controversial legislation were either withdrawn or voted down. Several revisions, however, made it through the legislative process, significantly altering a bill that’s raised the ire of hunting and conservation groups and state wildlife managers worried about unintended effects, like exacerbating elk overpopulation problems by incentivizing landowners to keep money-making herds on their property.
Concern about the difficulty of running cattle amid those same overpopulated herds — which are especially prevalent in central and eastern Wyoming — is what whipped the bill up last summer, where it emerged from the Joint Agriculture, State and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee.
Rep. Ember Oakley (R-Riverton) brought one of the more notable amendments to make it through the House, a change to the compensation rate, dropping it from 150% of market value down to 100%.
Then on HB 60’s third and final reading in the House on Tuesday, Sommers and Rep. Barry Crago (R-Buffalo ) — who helped formulate the legislation in the interim — backed an amendment that made several significant changes. Grass lost on state land grazing allotments would no longer be eligible for compensation, and the revision added that eligible landowners must permit “reasonable” hunting opportunities on their property.
“That gives the department that handles our wildlife some discretion,” Crago said Tuesday.
The Freedom Caucus bloc was on board, the amendment passed easily, and the bill itself passed the House, 43-18.
Opposition to the legislation, especially from the hunting community, remains.
On Wednesday morning, HB 60 was received for introduction in the Wyoming Senate and it’ll likely head to the Senate Agriculture Committee next. Casper resident Adam Morris didn’t delay in sending members of that committee an email.
“The question is, what motivates landowners, state, or private land lessees to reduce over-objective wildlife herds?” Morris wrote to lawmakers Wednesday morning. “The proposed amendments do absolutely nothing to encourage these groups to reduce the herds.”
Staff at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership also emailed its Wyoming members, asking them to urge their senators to quash HB 60.
“While TRCP supports wildlife damage compensation, this bill disincentivizes the partnerships we need to effectively address elk overpopulation in Wyoming while costing [Game and Fish] and Wyoming sportspeople millions of dollars,” wrote Alex Aguirre, the group’s Wyoming partnerships coordinator.
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