Posts Tagged → Pennsylvania
PA House Bill 1576 pulled, for now
Pennsylvania House Bill 1576 would have dramatically changed the way PA regulates and manages endangered, threatened, and rare species of plants and animals. It went overboard in so many ways, too numerous to recount now, and missed an important opportunity to actually bring a needed level of professionalism and accountability to the way the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission interact with and serve citizens.
Legislation setting timetables for the agencies on permits and regulatory actions is a good start. Allowing citizens to recoup legal costs from successful lawsuits against the agencies would be fair, as the agencies occasionally get that bully’s “Go ahead and sue me” attitude, so inappropriate for any government agency.
HB 1576’s proponents bit off more than they could chew, probably a result of making an emotionally charged effort, rather than a carefully calculated and strategic effort at reining in government behavior that is sometimes seen as failing to serve citizens in the ways they deserve. Advocates for the two agencies, myself included, should be asking how HB 1576 came up in the first place – what kind of agency over-reach, or failures to serve – resulted in elected officials from both parties becoming so frustrated that they decided to drop that bomb.
Now, HB 1576 is not on the next list of proposed legislation to get a vote. There is talk in both parties about getting more finely tuned and focused legislation passed, and I certainly support that. Government’s role is not to dominate citizens, but to serve them. Protecting vulnerable plants and animals is a way of serving citizens’ interests, but there is also a way to do that without unnecessarily damaging the people who are supposed to benefit. That includes ensuring that the two agencies have sufficient funding and staff to implement their respective missions.
PGC: Great, Old Agency Unused to Modern Limelight
If there is one take-away from my many years in federal and state government jobs, it is that agency staff cultures change slowly. In Pennsylvania, a great example of this is one of my favorite agencies, the Pennsylvania Game Commission. PGC is an agency that is used to doing things the way it wants, often relying on its impressive history as evidence for its present day independence and independent culture.
PGC is presently in the headlines because of a $200,000 payment to its former executive director, Carl Roe, now very recently departed of the agency.
I thought it was an amicable departure; maybe not. PGC staff say this is a settlement to avoid a possible lawsuit. Critics of the payment include the governor’s office, the PA Comptroller, the PA attorney general, and many elected officials. They say this is a sidestep around the state’s prohibition of severance payments, made between a board of directors and an executive director who were actually very cozy with one another.
This is sad, because PGC is a storied agency, a trend-setter in the area of wildlife management, wildlife science, habitat management, and public land acquisition. Something I like is that PGC has uniformed officers who stand in front of Hunter Trapper Education courses filled with 10-18-year-old kids, and tell them that they have a Second Amendment right to own firearms. Few states in America have such a wonderful role for their uniformed law enforcement officers. We are fortunate to have this agency with this culture, and it is for this reason that I oppose merging PGC with DCNR. Ranger Rick and Smokey Bear are not going to purvey that valuable message.
The flip side of the culture is what is often described as a “bunker mentality” among the agency’s staff, and this payment to Roe probably fits in with that view.
Most agencies are careful to avoid controversy, especially controversy that does not have a strong basis. This payment does not appear to have a strong basis, so it is an unnecessary controversy that is likely to damage the agency’s standing among lawmakers and executives, as well as the general public and hunters who otherwise happily buy hunting licenses to support their favorite agency. It comes at a time when the agency is already under the gun from oversight legislation (HB 1576, which does not address actual problems, but rather imagined problems unrelated to PGC and PA Fish & Boat Commission).
Don’t get me wrong, I like Carl Roe, and PGC has also driven me nuts at times. I clearly recall the day he was brought on to the agency as an intern. Me, then PGC executive director Vern Ross, PGC biologist Gary Alt, Carl Roe, and senior PGC staffer Joe Neville drove together up to Bellefonte to participate in the swearing-in of a new PGC commissioner. Carl struck me as a bright, quantitatively-oriented, inquisitive, experienced manager. Over the years since that day I have had many opportunities to meet with Carl, and he has always impressed me as a stalwart and intelligent promoter of PGC, hunters, trappers, and wildlife conservation. This huge payment lightning rod situation just does not make sense in that context.
But on second thought, this payment does make sense if the insular agency culture managed to eventually penetrate into Carl’s otherwise solid judgment. That has been a phenomenon witnessed among other new PGC staff; the broad “something-is-in-their-water” observation that people’s personalities changed dramatically once they joined PGC. Other evidence of an insular culture was recently brought to my attention: Four of the agency’s biologists (all of whom have some or all of the deer program’s oversight) have graduate degrees from the same school and they studied at the same post-graduate field station. And no, they ain’t from Penn State, or any Pennsylvania university, for that matter, dammit.
I fear for PGC, because at a time when the agency is already under scrutiny from HB 1576, this new payment debate threatens to add fuel to the flames, and add a straw onto the camel’s back. Part of the culture driving these problems is the same kind of culture that can cause the roof to suddenly come down. Careful there, boys, careful.
*******UPDATE:
So, as has happened before, these essays get read, and I get phone calls and emails. People calling me usually do not want to post on the blog, being afraid of attribution, and frankly, what some other people want to post here is not always worth keeping. So here is the gist of what came over the transom in the past half hour: Things between Carl Roe and the PGC board were not chummy. The payment to him is seen as a real money-saver. I am unsure how an at-will employee like an executive director has any real legal recourse, unless he is fired for his religion or political views, things that are a) hard to prove and b) unlikely. Also, I neglected to mention that Roe had, indeed, given away about $300,000 in agency funds to Hawk Mountain (GREAT PLACE, but not necessarily deserving of big PGC money) and other groups. This unaccountable and unapproved largesse caused real friction between Roe and the board, not to mention the rest of the stakeholders whose donations to and purchases from PGC are expected to be spent in a pecuniary fashion.
Happy Birthday, Pennsylvania!
333 years ago this week, Pennsylvania was born, when King Charles signed the Penn Charter, granting William Penn millions of acres of land in the New World. Ever since then, Pennsylvania has been a leader in religious tolerance, democracy, and citizen liberty. Contrast our liberties with, say, adjoining states New York and New Jersey. ‘Nuff said.
Condolences to the Mowery family, who lost former state senator Hal Mowery this week. Hal was a gentleman, cheerful, intelligent, thoughtful, charismatic, and without question the best looking man to ever serve in the Pennsylvania legislature. He will be sorely missed.
York County senate race is a sad state of affairs
Scott Wagner is an upstart York County businessman who wants to be elected to the PA state senate. He’s not a fan of the Republican establishment, and they’re no fan of him.
What Wagner has done to attract the negative radio ads the PA Republican Senate Election Committee is running against him, is anyone’s guess. His political independence is most likely the great crime.
Voters overwhelmingly embrace independent minded candidates. Free of special interests, or of tepid blah political stances designed to offend no one, candidates like Wagner are a threat to a plain vanilla political orthodoxy that often stands for basic business issues and not a lot else. Candidates like Wagner have the potential to propose and support strong laws that threaten to upset the delicate balance of power the establishment has cultivated with Big Labor, Mainstream Media, etc.
Wagner is a breath of fresh air, necessarily running against his own political party because his party is afraid of him. Very sad state of affairs. And an indication that political parties often have their own interests well beyond those interests of the party members.
Goin’ to the big show
The NRA may not do a great job of thanking, recognizing, or appreciating its members’ grass roots work that shut down the Eastern Outdoors Sports Show and turned it into the Great American Outdoor Show, but the show is on, nonetheless. I’ll be there all week, off and on, and I hope to see you there.
Who is a “sportsman”?
Sportsmen were the nation’s first conservationists, advocating in the 1890s for sustainable harvests of previously unregulated birds, fish and animals like deer and bear. Acting against their own individual self-interests, they banded together to place limits on wildlife and habitat so that future generations would have opportunities to fish, hunt, camp, skinny dip, sight-see, wildlife watch, and help wildlife recover from 300 years of unregulated market hunting and industrial exploitation.
By the 1920s, a culture of stewardship and natural resource conservation was cemented into the sporting ranks by leaders like Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold. Hunting clubs across rural America incorporated stocking programs, tree planting, and facilitating public land purchases to improve and increase wildlife habitat.
Fast forward to today, where wildlife populations are largely stable, wildlife habitat is not in crisis mode, and hunters and anglers are experiencing the best opportunities to harvest trophy fish and game in many decades. We are living in a golden age of the outdoor lifestyle.
Riding on the successes of past generations, today there are some grumbling guys with guns, crabbing that they don’t have anything to hunt. The real shameful behavior is the recent abandonment by some of these men of the sportsman’s stewardship ethic and the conservation pledge that made the hunting community highly respected among the larger society. A group of disaffected users, takers, and malcontents calling themselves “sportsmen” recently endorsed HB 1576, a proposed Pennsylvania bill which would gut the very state agencies charged with protecting Pennsylvania’s natural resources, and remove from state protection those plants and animals necessary for healthy hunting habitat.
The question on the table is, Are these men sportsmen? Are they sportsmen like Aldo Leopold was a sportsman?
While I wait to hear back from others, my answer is No, these men are not sportsmen. They are simply men with guns, freeloaders, spoiled children living off the hard work of both past and present generations, while complaining it isn’t enough and they want more, now, dammit. Their behavior is short-sighted and embarrassing, nothing like the visionary selfless sacrifice of their forebears. They should be publicly shamed and drummed out of the ranks of sportsmen.
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“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
― Aldo Leopold
You see the darnedest things while hunting
Southeastern Pennsylvania has an overpopluated deer herd of Biblical proportions. Every drive results in shots and deer scrambling across the landscape, making their momentary escape.
On a recent hunt, a midget deer presented itself to every hunter in our group. It was a dwarf deer, without question not a baby or a fawn, apparently fully developed but the size of a fox. I am not making this up or exaggerating.
Although its tail was the regular size for an adult deer, its body was tiny. We nicknamed it the chihuahua deer, and no one shot at it. It was just too cute and freakish. I wanted to adopt it as a pet, which is a big no-no, as wildlife never goes home to become a pet. But it was entertaining to think of it as a pet. I bet it would become mean and spoiled.
Hunters see the darnedest things while afield: Endless trash left by someone too lazy to clean up after themselves; hawks taking snakes and mice; animals fighting; meth labs; you name it, someone you know has seen it.
Today we saw the chihuahua deer, a first-time experience. Maybe it’s a new species. Maybe its extremely diminutive size spawned too much silliness. Maybe hunting is more than killing; sometimes it’s just the experience of witnessing God’s amazing creation.
Bless you, chihuahua deer.
Good luck today, deer hunters
Like many Pennsylvania families today, ours went afield for the morning. My son, having watched an enormous buck run past us in the early morning dark, minutes before shooting light, decided his feet were cold enough and it was time for him to head in.
None in our hunting party got a shot off, yet, but we are gearing up for an afternoon drive, usually productive.
Good luck today, deer hunters! Hunt safely!
Challenging modern sensibilities
Yesterday, the distant father of one of our bear hunters texted his cell phone, urging him to retreat from the cold descending upon central Pennsylvania.
“Too cold! Go home!” read the text, which included several other adjectives supposedly describing hunting conditions.
The dad is not a hunter. He’s a very nice man, a hard worker, a veteran of Vietnam War infantry battles that earned him two Purple Heart medals. He’s no wimp. He is, however, a member of a materially comfortable society that increasingly believes food comes from the market, heat from the switch, and clothes from China.
Luxury is the standard for most Americans. By international standards, our ubiquitous cell phones, big screen televisions, cars, and expensive clothes are unimaginable expenses in days filled with constant quests for food and shelter around the planet.
Hunting for us makes us human, and quintessentially American. Hunting connects us to a human tradition predating anything surrounding Americans today. Cold weather is part and parcel of hunting. It challenges our artificially padded modern sensibilities for a few days, something that everyone needs. Couch potato nation, arise!