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Outdoor Trade Shows Move to Colorado

The Outdoor Retailer show is throwing its financial clout behind the cause they appear to both believe in, and rely on

By Rob Breeding

In a show of support for public lands, the Outdoor Retailer trade show announced earlier this month it is moving its pair of annual events to Denver.

Usually, this sort of change is predicated by a need for improved facilities, or better infrastructure such as airports and public transportation. Salt Lake City, which had hosted the shows for more than 20 years, however, has the facilities, including the Salt Palace Convention Center, which was twice expanded to accommodate the trade show.

But Utah also has politicians who are some of the most hostile in the nation to public lands. An effort to undue the Bears Ears National Monument designation by outgoing President Barack Obama was apparently the final straw.

I say final straw because there were many that came before it. In a cautionary tale for Montanans, Utah politicians have repeatedly tried to roll back the state’s stream access law. That battle has raged in Utah courts for years.

And the state’s congressional representatives have been some of the most outspoken in the federal land transfer movement. While this highly unpopular effort continues to lose support — see former Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s about-face on a land transfer bill earlier this year — it remains a significant threat to those of us who hunt, fish or otherwise recreate on public lands.

By the way, I think there’s a fair debate to be had on issues related to public lands management. Sure, the Feds could do a better job, but we ought to remember that management of public lands is an expensive business. Unfortunately, some of the biggest critics of federal land management also advocate cutting the budgets of the agencies responsible for those lands. Transferring lands to states without addressing the budgetary issues is simply a path toward privatization.

The Outdoor Retailer show is throwing its financial clout behind the cause they appear to both believe in, and rely on. We have to take those folks at their word on the “believe in” part, but there’s no questioning the fact that the customers of the outdoor recreation “industry” use public lands, and that use creates demand for outdoor toys. The message Outdoor Retailer sent to Utah was that it was hurting an industry that matters in a state that is one of the greatest public land playgrounds in the nation.

The immediate result for Utah is the loss of the estimated $45 million the winter and summer shows brought to Salt Lake City. An even more important potential result would be if the loss of the show leads to some rethinking by politicians who seem to want to sacrifice themselves on the petard of their own ideology. For some conservatives, land transfers are an obsession they have a hard time abandoning. What they may be forgetting is that hunters, and to a lesser degree anglers, are groups made up largely of conservative voters. And most of those folks just want improved land management, not wholesale transfers.

Chaffetz seemed to get that point when some of those same hunting and angling groups that long supported him made clear their opposition to his transfer legislation.

While Outdoor Retailer has made a point, sadly, the idea the show might relocate to Montana was never more than fantasy. The trade shows require 1 million square feet of meeting space, and there isn’t anything close to that in the Treasure State.

Even the One Big Sky Center, a proposed downtown development in Billings that will include the state’s tallest building at 324 feet, will only add 70,000 square feet of convention space. That might be sufficient the next time the Outdoor Writers Association of America hosts its annual convention in Montana, but it won’t cut it for the Outdoor Retailer trade shows.

Portland, Las Vegas and maybe Los Angeles were the only real competition Denver faced.