Jeremy Vesbach
Gov.-elect Susana Martinez earned the support of many New Mexico voters by promising to clean up state government. One subset of the electorate is particularly eager to see change: the 200,000-plus sportsmen of New Mexico.
Many people don’t know this, but sportsmen pick up the entire tab for wildlife management in New Mexico through the licenses we buy and the excise tax we pay on sporting goods. One would think the State Game Commission, which oversees where and how to spend the $36 million yearly budget of the Department of Game and Fish, would have New Mexico resident sportsmen’s best interests at heart.
Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
For years, New Mexico governors have used appointments to the seven-member Game Commission to reward friends and big donors. The result of this pay-to-play relationship is that the Game Commission has been stocked with well-connected donors out of touch with the everyday blue-jean sportsmen they are supposed to represent.
It’s hard to say how far back pay-to-play Game Commission appointments go because campaign contribution records are sketchy before about 1998. But Gary Johnson did it, and although Gov. Bill Richardson said he would eliminate special interests on the commission when he took office in 2003, he, too, has stocked the board with donors. In all, he has received at least $150,000 in direct contributions from his Game Commission appointees over the last eight years.
No surprise there. But in looking closer, New Mexico Wildlife Federation has found a disturbing relationship between big-dollar donors and those chosen to chair the Game Commission – and hence be most directly involved in day-to-day operations of the Department of Game and Fish.
Of Richardson’s 15 commission appointees since 2003, five contributed nothing. Five others gave a combined total of less than $5,000.
The remaining five gave nearly $150,000. Together they have held the chairmanship for seven of the last eight years.
Many don’t feel that the commission listens to us
So who cares?
The 225,000 sportsmen of New Mexico, for starters. We pay the bills, yet many hunters and anglers don’t feel the commission listens to us.
Most recently, for example, more than 6,000 resident hunters signed petitions and letters asking the commission to do something – anything – to increase their odds of drawing an antelope hunting license. The odds now are about 5 percent, or one license every 20 years.
But the commission has clung steadfast to the current management scheme, which results in more than half of antelope licenses going to wealthier non-residents who pay the department more for a license.
Likewise, in the past few years the commission has also shifted a higher percentage of elk licenses toward nonresidents through a similar program.
In a state with our economic troubles and where many families rely on hunting to put inexpensive meat on the table, one would think the Game Commission would bend over backward to make it easier for residents to draw a hunting license. Sadly, that’s not been the case.
Many Game Commission members have stood up for the everyday sportsmen of New Mexico. But too often they have been brow-beaten and bullied into voting the way the chairman wants, or risk being fired by the governor. That’s happened more than once in the last eight years.
The Department of Game and Fish leadership is complicit in all this. The director is technically the secretary of the Game Commission, and as such should help keep the commission in line. Unfortunately, the behind-the-scenes hiring method for the past several directors has also ensured their allegiance to the well-connected insiders and special interests instead of to the public they serve.
The director and top department staff should be willing to stand up for the public when, for instance, the commission wants to adopt rules with little or no public input from sportsmen. Or when then-Commission Leo Sims steered the transplant of 61 bighorn sheep next to his family ranch, while serving on the commission.
The department leadership should have the best interest of sportsmen at heart. But when they ignore 6,000 hunters’ pleas for improving their odds of drawing an antelope license, it makes the sportsman wonder whose side Game and Fish is on.
Time to get the politics out of wildlife management
Some 70 years ago, New Mexico sportsmen called for the creation of a game commission in order to insulate the wardens and biologists from political interference. Sadly, politics has worked back into the State Game Commission in a big way.
But Gov.-elect Martinez could change that. She would establish a legacy among the sportsmen of New Mexico with just two simple things:
- Make sure the five regional public seats on the Game Commission are filled by true sportsman representatives instead of political donors or individuals with monetary interest in Game Commission decisions (two seats are already reserved for special interests in the agriculture industry and environmental interests).
- Eliminate the insider hiring game by asking the Game Commission, which is by law charged with hiring the director of Game and Fish, to conduct an open hiring process for the next game department director, making the finalists public.
Read the full blueprint for restoring trust special report here.
In 1914, the New Mexico Wildlife Federation was formed around the rallying cry to “Get the politics out of the Game and Fish Department.” For a time the Game Commission and department leadership led the way in clean transparent government. It’s time, once again, to get the politics out of wildlife management.
Jeremy Vesbach is director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and an avid sportsman with a degree in conservation biology. The New Mexico Wildlife Federation is a statewide organization of conservation-minded hunters and anglers that was founded in 1914.