With HB 514 Legislature Takes Another Step Closer to Nullifying Sportsman Initiative
House Bill 514 strips language from the 1938 Initiative (the Sportsman Initiative that created the IDFG Commission), that stipulates no one party may have more than four of the seven commission seats. If the bill passes, any Governor, R or D, can have total political sway of the entire Commission.
Some context: Frustrated with political interference, sportsmen 80 years ago took on politicians and passed Idaho's first voter initiative with 76% approval. At issue was who should control the destiny of Idaho's wildlife and hunting/fishing traditions, and the people won. The Initiative created an appointed Commission to run the agency. The commission would come from all regions. Commissioners would serve staggered six-year terms limiting any one governor's ability to stack the commission. It also imposed political diversity so the party in power at the moment could not overtly sway decisions with political motives, or the Governor couldn’t install political cronies for every seat.
Over time, Idaho politicians have eroded the Sportsman Initiative and outright circumvented the Commission, slowly undoing the will of voters. The Office of Species Conservation was created to be a direct management arm of the Governor and legislature, encroaching the Commission. Commissioner terms were reduced to four-year terms to allow every governor commission appointments. And year after year, new bills take shots at setting big game seasons, or demanding auction and LAP tags be sold.
We are working in reverse. House Bill 514 proves it. How many more laws will the legislature pass before the Sportsman Initiative is completely nullified? Or the Commission's authority neutered?
We have to look out another 100 years. It might seem fine now to pack the Commission with seven members of your political party, but governors come and go. What if a future Governor doesn’t see things your way? Or doesn’t share your values? This bill creates a lot of risk with no reward. Idaho’s political majority has flipped 15 times. Will our heritage survive another 15 partisan shifts? It won’t if we subject our commission, our investment in wildlife, to the volatile whims of the political class.
That is why the Initiative was passed: to insulate our resource from political motivations. That is why IWF will not support this bill and neither will a great many. See the polling results from IWF’s strategic plan below. The top three issues sportsmen see as the biggest challenges to hunting are: 1) loss of public land, 2) politicization of the IDFG commission, 3) privatization of wildlife through sellable LAP tags, auctions tags, etc.
It just so happens those are the top three things the legislature wants. What could go wrong giving them the reigns of the Commission…
