Reached last week, Whitefish Republican Sen. Ryan Zinke called Senate Bill 13 – which was proposed and supported by a number of his colleagues – a “terrible bill.” It was a blunt assessment one day before the legislation was scheduled to hit the Senate floor.
Instead, SB 13 was referred back to the Senate Finance and Claims Committee for a revised fiscal note and will now likely die. How it made it out of that same committee in the first place, on an 11-7 vote, is truly perplexing. Perhaps the legislation got lost among the noise surrounding several other more controversial and less relevant pieces of legislation. But the consequences of its implementation could have been dire for the Flathead.
If passed, according to Zinke, many parks would “be shut down, literally shut down.” It could have affected everything from fishing access sites to Wayfarers Park.
The premise of SB 13 seemed innocent enough. It would have made it so that when you register your vehicle you would no longer be required to “opt out” of the $4 annual fee that is used to support state parks. The legislation would change the law to an “opt in” system and the fee would be raised to $25.
What that would mean is no one would pay. Washington state tried a similar system and participation dropped to just 3 percent. That state has since reverted to a system similar to ours.
Those who supported the legislation, which was sponsored by Sen. John Brenden, R-Scobey, argued that people shouldn’t pay a fee they don’t know about. It’s a reasonable argument except that the $4 fee has been in effect since 2004 – implemented under a Republican administration. It is now the main funding source for maintaining parks and has been uncontroversial since then. And 23 percent of people do opt out.
Senate Minority Leader Carol Williams, D-Missoula, said the bill is a “way to get nobody to put money in the account.” For Zinke’s part, he said in an interview “some legislators just don’t like (Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks) because of wolves, some because of buffalo and some because of tracts of lands purchases.”
That’s truly telling coming from a Republican, that some legislators supported defunding state parks to get back at FWP for things that are largely out of the agency’s control. How wolf policy affects whether someone has decent access to the area’s waterways would seem to me unrelated.
To their credit, some Republicans, such as Sen. Jon Sonju of Kalispell, withdrew their support for the legislation after the financial consequences of changing the system became clear. Still, how bills like this are able to consume precious time of a Legislature tasked with balancing a budget and buoying the economy is exasperating. Can you imagine the impact shuttering state parks would have on Montana tourism? Why was this even on the table? Is my response to this legislation too cynical?
I asked Zinke, who is considered a moderate in his caucus, if the state’s media are paying an exorbitant amount of attention to the more outlandish bills that have been proposed this session, bills that have little or nothing to do with jobs or the budget. He said only partially and was candid in his assessment of the Legislature thus far, which is dominated by Republicans.
“Some of the bills are so outrageous that they are worthy of print and worthy of headlines,” Zinke said. “Things like the ‘home guard.’ Things like picking and choosing what federal laws you should support. These are really extreme views that I think are on the realm of entertainment.”
And they are distractions that we can’t afford.