Anglers skunked on the Hill
Memo to lawmakers: It's bad enough to send out the message you loathe drinkers, gays and mooners — but don't anger the anglers.About 250 fishing enthusiasts, birdwatchers, paddlers and other outdoorsy riff-raff, armed with fly rods and nets, portaged a canoe up the steps of the Capitol to show opposition to a bill that would close many state waterways to the public.
Rep. Ben Ferry doesn't like a recent state Supreme Court ruling:
The public [has] the right to float, hunt, fish and participate in all lawful activities that utilize the water.Ferry, a feed-lot operator, and the Farm Bureau are pushing HB187 to drastically limit the rivers open to the public. They argue that private property rights of the land along the streams trumps the public's ownership of the water.
Field and Stream, which has the power to send fishing and paddling tourists to Utah, doesn't like Ferry's idea:
The dirty truth is that many of us who live in states where stream access is restricted (like Colorado) are green with envy over states (like Montana) where things are more open. Oh, the fishing is good if you're on the inside of those fences. Sometimes better. But that costs money.Former Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson, now with the Utah Rivers Council, says Ferry's attempt to deprive the public of access to streams will just cost the state more legal fees: "If this passes it will go right to court again."
And with more and more of us having less and less to spend, with more businesses depending on people to get out and fish, and more people clinging to what is a relatively affordable pastime... well, I think, if anything, we should be taking down more fences, and not building new ones.
The crowd took the precaution of wearing hip waders for nothing—Ferry refused to come out to smooze them.
3 Comments:
A public waterway, or a public roadway, is a public highway.
Just as the landowner has the right to enjoy their property, so has the waterowner the right to enjoy theirs. These coexisting rights are, depending on the particular right, dominant and servient to the other.
With the unanimous ruling of the Conatser Utah Supreme Court, the waterowners' rights to use the water were found to be dominant over the coexisting, yet servient, rights of the landowner as written in paragraph 20 of the ruling:
¶20 “An easement is a privilege which one person has a right to enjoy over the land of another.”22 Therefore, an easement “gives rise to two distinct property interests: a ‘dominant estate,’ that has [the] right to use land of another, and a ‘servient estate,’ that permits the exercise of that
use.”23 Because there are two parties’ interests involved, “[t]he right of the easement owner and the right of the landowner are not absolute, irrelative, and uncontrolled, but are so limited, each by the other, that there may be a due and
reasonable enjoyment of both.”24
The ruling clarified the recreational right to use public waters as long as there is no unnecessary injury to the property rights of the landowner now or in the past and the right of recreational use of public water:
pp 30 "We hold that the scope of the easement provides the public the right to flat, hunt, fish, and participate in all lawful activities that utilize the water. We further hold that the public has the right to touch privately owned beds of state watrs in ways incidental to all recreational rights provided for in the easement, so long as they do so reasonably and cause no unnecessary injury to the landowner."
HB 187 confuses the balance that the unanimous Utah Supreme Court has clarified between private landowner and public waterowner property rights and should be considered in voting to protect the rights of those who have paid for either private or public property.
rstrouts... great post!
But if this bill will only complicate the law, cost tax payers money, and seek to deny rights to a certain group of people, you can almost gaurantee our legislature will pass it.
I will not vote for anyone who wishes to place public resources in private hands. Rivers and Streams are amazing resources and there is no need for a few landowners to horde the majority of these awsome resources.
Its already bad enough that cranky landowners can prohibit you from driveing through publicly built roads to access some cool public land.
As americans we need someplace to breath. OUR rivers and streams are one of those places.
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