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Recreation

Law of the Landowner?

In Northwest Montana, large private landowners with open access policies have turned out to support legislation that would give game wardens broader authority to enforce rules on chunks of private land open to the public for hunting, fishing and recreation

By Tristan Scott
A closed gate with a sign noting restrictions on Flathead Ridge Ranch land off of Red Gate Road on June 7, 2021. Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon

At the end of a daylong hunting trip in the Flathead Valley last November, it occurred to Jim Vashro that he’d crisscrossed tracts of land owned by three separate private entities with open access policies — the timber companies Green Diamond Resources and Southern Pine Plantations, and the owners of Flathead Ridge Ranch, a 125,000-acre spread of former corporate timberland west of Kalispell.

Earlier in the season, he’d hunted land between Whitefish and Columbia Falls owned by a fourth private interest, F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Company, which for more than a century has kept its land open to the public as a neighborly accommodation.

“I just thought to myself, ‘We are so lucky to have this access,’” Vashro, a former fisheries manager with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP), said. “Even if just one of these landowners pulled out, it would really hinder our ability to move around. And I thought, ‘we’d better not do anything to jeopardize this, because I’d hate to see it all go away.’”

Landowners say they’d hate to see it all go away, too. But amid intensifying recreational pressure on public and private parcels, and with it an uptick in bad behavior, they’re seeking better ways to educate the public about land-use etiquette, and additional tools to enforce the conditions of their access agreements, such as prohibiting motorized use on closed roads, littering, target shooting, and vandalism.

“Rules without enforcement are just simply suggestions,” FWP Director Christy Clark told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 27, when she testified in support of Senate Bill 83, a measure FWP requested this session to extend its enforcement authority to include private lands with public access agreements.

Introduced by Sen. Denley Loge, R-St. Regis, the bill has garnered wide support  from landowners, sportsmen and conservation groups, who say it will help rebuild trust, as well as from FWP, whose wardens have no enforcement authority on private land with open access agreements outside of hunting season.

On Thursday, the Senate in a 47-2 vote approved SB 83 on third reading, referring it to the House Fish, Wildlife and Parks Committee for further consideration.

“I’m glad it’s getting some support,” said Vashro, who now leads Flathead Wildlife Inc., which promotes hunting and fishing opportunities, wildlife stewardship and other conservation initiatives in northwest Montana. Although Vashro has pushed for even broader measures to provide more enforcement authority on private land, he said SB 83 “is a great start.”

“I was surprised after all my years in the agency that FWP had very little enforcement authority outside of hunting seasons,” Vashro said. “In meetings with some of these landowners, they’re describing having real problems with illegal ATV use, littering, unwanted target shooting, use of fires. And a lot of people don’t realize that all this access could disappear.”

In northwest Montana, private landowners have enrolled 650,000 acres in FWP’s Block Management program — a cooperative agreement that helps private landowners manage hunting activities on their property — including Avista Utilities, Flathead Ridge Ranch, Green Diamond Resource Company, MKH Montana, Southern Pines Plantation of Montana, Stimson Lumber Company, and Stoltze Land and Lumber.

And although landowners say 90% of the people using their property to hunt, fish and hike do so in a respectful manner that adheres to the conditions of the access agreements, a small segment of scofflaws has prompted landowners to ask for help, particularly as the enforcement onus increasingly falls on the landowners themselves.

Cameron Wohlschlegel, the land and resource manager for Stoltze, said the family-owned company has enrolled more than 10,000 acres of its land in Block Management, while it leaves open an additional 30,000 acres to public access through a long-established company policy. And while most of the problems Stoltze encounters can be resolved through education and outreach, the Flathead Valley’s rapid growth in recent years has given rise to a host of unwanted behaviors.

“Our lands have been open for over 100 years via neighborly accommodation to the public. If you have legal access, you can utilize our property for recreation based on our open lands policy, which is the governing document that authorizes use of our land for the public,” he said. “But in the summer months when we are not in Block Management, so basically anytime out of hunting or trapping season, we don’t have any enforcement capabilities through FWP on our lands. So there’s no real way to go after violators of our open lands policy, whether that’s vandalizing our land, building illegal trails, ripping down gates, cutting down trees, dumping garbage, boats, vehicles. You name it, it’s happened, especially since the pandemic when we got flooded with so many more people, and a lot more folks who came here lacking some of the land ethics that the locals have historically demonstrated. There’s just been more of a disregard for our rules in the past five years. It’s a privilege to access our property, not a right, but when we’re out there and we encounter folks not recreating responsibly on our property, and we don’t have any backup, our options are limited.”

Lands and Resource Manager Paul McKenzie moves a gate during a tour of F. H. Stoltze land in Haskill Basin in September 2014. Beacon file photo

That’s the spirit of Senate Bill 83, which FWP leadership supports in part because the agency has seen a decline in landowners enrolling in the agency’s block management or public access land agreements, and they’re trying to rebuild trust between private landowners, like ranchers and timber companies, and the recreating public.

The state Legislature established the program in 1985 and significantly expanded it a decade later. At peak participation, in 2002, 1,150 landowners provided hunters access to more than 8.8 million acres. Today, about 1,200 landowners have enrolled 7.1 million acres in the Block Management program.

“The Block Management program has lost about a million acres over the last decade or so, and while there’s a variety of reasons for that, the inflexibility of enforcement has been cited by some landowners,” Ben Lamb, policy director of the Montana Conservation Society, told Senate Judiciary Committee members earlier this week.“This is a good bill that will allow landowners to enforce their own rules at a much higher level so they feel they are in charge of the access being offered to the public.”

Loge, the bill’s sponsor, said he’s spoken to landowners who are reluctant to call the sheriff’s office on violators whose misdeeds don’t rise to the level of a criminal offense. Instead, they’d like to be able to call on a game warden to issue a warning or written violation.

“We do have landowners who are tired of those rules being broken. They can’t be everywhere and they need a little bit of help,” Loge said Jan. 27, when he introduced his bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If we can’t get boots on the ground we are going to close up that access. That’s one thing we are proud of in Montana is having access to private and public land and we don’t want to jeopardize that.”

Ron Howell, FWP’s chief of law enforcement, said the initiative would give landowners and other land users broader latitude to enforce rules that vary from one Block Management unit to another. In the case of multi-thousand-acre conservation easements or ranches with open access agreements, Howell said landowners have little recourse outside of hunting season to report violations, and must call the local sheriff’s office instead of dealing directly with FWP.

“This would just be another tool in the toolbox to allow us to enforce the rules written by the landowner. Could be a verbal warning. Or a written warning.”

An aerial view of the Thompson Chain of Lakes and its surrounding forestland, including parcels owned by Green Diamond Resource Company, which would be within the footprint of the Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Easement. Photo courtesy of Chris Boyer of Kestrel Aerial

If enacted, the law would extend to all private landowners enrolled in Block Management in the state. But most of the bill’s proponents hail from northwest Montana, where a succession of land sales five years ago, when the Washington-based timber giant Weyerhaeuser Co. sold all 630,000 acres of its remaining Montana timberland to Georgia-based Southern Pine Plantations, a private investment company, dramatically reconfigured the land-ownership matrix in the region. Although Weyerhaeuser had continually enrolled its timberland in FWP’s Block Management program, as had Plum Creek before it, Southern Pine Plantations, doing business in the region as SPP Montana, raised eyebrows when it offloaded nearly a half-million acres in the first part of 2021, selling 291,000 acres to Green Diamond Resource Company, another timber group, while flipping dozens of smaller parcels to private development interests.

Land-access advocates say the region is fortunate that most of the property remains open, but landowners say the future of the agreement hinges on a cooperative trust with the public.

“We own 300,000 acres of working forestland in Lincoln, Sanders and Flathead counties. Nearly all of those acres are open to the public because we’ve enrolled them in the Block Management program,” said Jason Callahan, Green Diamond’s policy and communications manager, who this week testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of the Seattle-based company.“This [bill] would strengthen our relationship with FWP by ensuring that resource protections on our land are being enforced and upheld. We believe it improves the recreation experience for those who enjoy our lands, and probably most importantly it ensures our long-term participation and enrollment in the Block Management program, providing public recreation access on some of the largest blocks of private working forestland in the state.”

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