The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

We just had our first snow of the season and it did not take very long to start wishing we had missed the snow for the entire winter. The cold temperatures expected later in the week would have gone a long way to creating safe ice for all of those ice anglers waiting on the shore. With 8 inches of snow on what little ice was there will now delay the formation of safe ice as the snow will act like insulation to slow the ice-making process.

Until we get some better hard water conditions the angling and spearing will just have to wait. So, what do you do in the interim? I am heading to Bloomington for the 2024 Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Round Table. This is normally an annual gathering of about 300 citizens and a whole host of higher-level department staff to talk/listen to what has been happening over the past year and what is in store for the coming one.

I have attended the last 10 years or so and found some of them to be interesting and others less so. One year started out with a big opening speaker talking about a lot of racial issues. I was participating to get to the core of the most pressing natural resource issues. That year most of the most pressing issues were not discussed.

It does give me an opportunity to visit with upper-level department personnel and my experiences there have been very good. I ask tough questions on the department’s position on this or that and then get to hear from the decision makers the how, what and why of the department’s direction on certain issues.

There is no greater supporter of the department than me. I know scores of employees of all levels that work for this giant state agency and of those, I find them almost to a T to be dedicated and caring of their job responsibilities. This does not in any way deter me from asking tough questions and expecting solid and frank responses to those questions.

There is never an uneventful year in resource management. Whether it is the logging of public Wildlife Management Areas that resulted in the suspension of millions of dollars in federal dispersions to the state when the rationale for this logging was in question. Many thought it was to prop up the timber industry instead of improving wildlife habitat on these public lands. I would really like to hear what started this brew-ha and what was done to fix it. I don’t know if this is on the round table agenda or not.

Wolves and the newly updated wolf plan in Minnesota are of great interest to me. How many wolves in Minnesota is enough? What measures will be used to keep population levels at a point to balance the desires of deer hunters and livestock producers who have to deal with this issue on a daily basis?

Invasive carp are at the doorsteps of Minnesota and what is being done to ensure they don’t get a foothold here is also on my high-interest list. We have been talking and researching this issue for more than 10 years and I have not seen any concrete measures underway.  Will this get some prominent time during this round table? When I sat on the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council from 2009-2014 we sent millions of dollars the department’s way. I would love a bullet-point presentation on what happened to those dollars and what measures have been executed.

We have had a number of trout streams killed off by pollution runoff in the past few years. I would love to hear what penalties were instituted to those responsible for these all-too-frequent episodes. Managing the state’s natural resources is a critical element of the department’s job but protecting them is equally important. Are they doing a good enough job in this area?

One of the programs managed by the department is the walk-in access program. This is private land opened to public hunting where the landowner gets a small fee per acre to allow access. The program was zeroed out in the last budget cycle, but I was assured the funds would be found and allocated to keep it running. Have these funds been found and allocated or are we still waiting?

My list goes on and on and I look forward to hearing what is happening to these and many other important natural resource issues. By the end of business on January 19th, I will have a much better idea of where they sit. I encourage you to ask questions of those in charge. Be polite and respectful in your asks but be vigilant and don’t give up until you get an answer. The annual get-together called the DNR Round Table has the ability to inform the constituency. Transparency goes a long way to partnership building. Together we can accomplish almost anything and divided we will just have more of the same. I am confident that we can improve the process, and this starts with a robust Round Table and engaged folks doing their part to help solve our most pressing natural resource challenges.

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If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.