Interesting insights into the governmental, industrial and citizen needs of state wildlife management
Down East > Blogs > Maine Nature > George’s Outdoor News, Tuesday, Dec. 22nd 2009
Merging Would Hurt Maine’s Natural Resource Agencies
By George Smith (© Down East 2009)
…All of the state’s natural resource agencies play critical roles in Maine’s natural resource economy.
…These agencies serve large and distinct constituencies, offer a broad range of services and functions that will only be diminished in a single large department, and would not be strengthened by consolidation.
In “Incentives and Conservation” edited by Daniel K. Benjamin, in a chapter titled “Bureaucratic Organization and Wildlife Management” Dominic Parker looked at a lot of the research on natural resource agency mergers and reached some important conclusions. Parker is a research associate at Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman.
…Only nineteen states had freestanding wildlife agencies in 2000 compared to forty-four in 1934. …
Parker’s concludes:
“The integration of a wildlife agency within a larger agency appears to have decreased wildlife agency revenue. Although such integration has increased the emphasis the agency places on nongame management, overall agency spending on nongame has not generally increased.”
Parker also concluded that
“wildlife agencies that are not designed to produce well-defined products for well-defined constituencies have had trouble generating revenue.”
One consequence of these mergers is that constituencies like sportsmen or commercial fishermen have been reluctant to continue funding their agencies after the agencies are swallowed up by larger departments, and no one else has stepped forward to pick up the slack.
Parker also reported that “a large natural resource agency seems to promote the interdisciplinary cooperation needed for holistic management, but comes at the expense of specialized management that constituencies value.”
In other words there is little to gain and a lot to lose if IF&W is merged into a super agency, especially for sportsmen.
