Legislature May Create Interim Study on Issue

House Committee Kills Montana Stream Access Bill

By Dan Testa, 4-03-07

After another packed hearing on the issue, the House Fish, Wildlife and Parks Committee Tuesday night voted, 13 to 6, to kill a bill that would have clarified public access to Montana’s streams from county bridges.

Prior to voting on Senate Bill 78, Libby Republican Chas Vincent offered an amendment to change the bill’s language and set up an interim committee to study the issue for two years.

But Billings Democrat Kendall Van Dyk, who supported the bill, quickly moved to table it, saying Vincent’s changes altered the bill’s intent and basically punted the problem downfield for the 2009 legislature to deal with.

“I find it surprising that we would just strip the meat of the bill out rather than have a substantive debate on those merits,” Van Dyk said. “I can smell a delay tactic from across the street.”

Committee Chair Mike Milburn, R-Cascade, answered that the interim committee wasn’t a cop-out, but an attempt to bring landowners to participate in a process from which they have been excluded.

“A lot of times interim studies are delay tactics and I sincerely believe and hope that this is not one of them,” Milburn said.

Sponsored by Sen. Lane Larson, D-Billings, the bill seeks to clarify the legal ways a landowner can attach a fence to a county bridge abutment, such that a recreationist trying to access the river can still easily go over, under, or through it. It passed the Senate 34 to 16.

Previous hearings on the bill have been crowded, emotional affairs with anglers on one side and on the other, landowners and representatives of the Montana Stockgrowers Association and the Farm Bureau Federation saying the bill was a “compromise” that didn’t involve them.

Tuesday’s hearing was no different.

The issue triggers something in Montanans that reaches at firmly-held ideas on the sanctity of private property, the public’s right to access rivers, and the subtle erosion of Western courtesy which seems the result of an influx of out-of-state landowners.

All acknowledged the bill was a state-wide solution aimed at resolving disputes between landowners and anglers on the Ruby River.

“Madison County, that’s where it’s all coming from,” Milburn said after the vote. “Are we going to dictate policy and legislation because of three bridges?”

“This is a Trout Unlimited issue, most landowners don’t have a problem,” Milburn added, saying in most areas of the state total cooperation exists between landowners and recreationists. The Montana chapter of Trout Unlimited helped craft the bill.

Milburn said he will introduce a separate bill to accomplish what the amendments would have done: set up an interim committee to study the issue with input from everyone, including landowners, the Stockgrowers and the Farm Bureau.

Mark Aagenes of Montana Trout Unlimited said he preferred that the bill die than go forward with amendments which would have mangled its intent.

“There’s reasons to vote against a bill and there’s excuses to vote against a bill,” Aagenes said. “All we heard tonight were excuses to vote against stream access at bridges.”

Aagenes said he unsuccessfully tried to contact the Stockgrowers for input crafting the bill.

Van Dyk stood firm on his motion to table the bill, arguing that SB78 was a good compromise between recreationists and landowners in its original form.

“I’m not about to stand around and let a bunch of special interests turn a good access bill into an anti-access bill,” Van Dyk said. “The people back home don’t want this studied, they want action on this.”

Van Dyk considered attempting a “blast” motion to bring the bill to the floor, but that would require 67 votes, a highly unlikely scenario in the Republican-controlled House.

So it appears anyone looking for a decision on the stream access issue will have to look to the Supreme Court for a ruling on the Ruby River case, or wait another two years—whichever comes first. 

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