Senate Bill 787. Federal Seizure of ALL water.

Todd Painton

Todd Painton

Member
I just did a quick search for "787" and did not find anything. Sorry if this is a repost but it's very important.

Russ Feingold, Democrat, Wisconsin, has proposed Bill (787) that will make all water federal property and all lands affecting that water subject to federal regulation. That includes the intermittent stream in your back 10, and your duckponds.

Please see http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s787/show

For those of you who hate reading legal docs.. Here is the youtube video that explains it all nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqHaUadsapc&feature=related

Please write your congressman and tell them to say no. Wisconsin hunters, call Russ Feingold!

Clean water is good but lets leave it to our state!! Enough with the federal takeover!!!
 
if its navigable waters, their decision if it is or not, then the US Army corp of engineers will be in control of it anyway, we have a drainage ditch on the club i lbelong to in vermont that is under USACE regs since they determined it is a navigable water, cant float a canoe in it or even wet your hubs driving through it, but we had a build a bridge over it sicne it is navigable waters...

seizure is a bit misplaced, but if we cant get a national CCW bill to pass because it takes over states' rights then this sure does too.

http://www.texas-wildlife.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=204:clean-water-act-muddied-due-to-controversial-bill&catid=6:site-news
 
I don't neccasrily like the wording, but the fact is it would benefit all of us duck hunters across the nation. The intent I believe is to get jurisdiction over isolated wetlands that are not subject to existing federal law and to have control over people/business that negativily impact water with pollutants, filling draining and such. I don't typically like big government stepping in, but becuase this is one area (ducks and duck hunting) that I am passionate about and don't trust the common man, that worded differently I could get behind.
 
The thing is without the protection of a bunch of buracrats most wetlands would be filled or drained to make more land to make a buck farming or for development.
If you like seeing duck filled sky's you have to suck on a big outfit that will keep a place for them to breed, loaf, eat, and get shot. Otherwise its lake houses and more corn\soy\whatever.........
Like the big pork farm bill....... loaded with dough for CRP and other stuff we all will want to hunt. Not very fiscally conservative but a program I sure hope to hunt on with my kids.
 
What I liked was I read today your governor is increasing an Elk permit to 3 times the current cost. Since when did Wisconsin start having an Elk season?...LOL
 
Ed,

You're right Ed, no elk seasons in Wisconsin. Not surprised that Gov. Doyle would raise taxes or fees on anything he could get through the democratic legislature but this isn't one of them. We do have elk in the northern part of the state but no definate plans that I am aware to have a hunt. In fact we lost many of our calves as well as adults to our ever growing wolf population. There were plans to have a wolf hunt until the feds put them back on a protected list.

Your house sell yet?
 
Yes, the intent is to close the "isolated wetlands" loophole in the Clean Water Act and Corps regulatory program.
Calling the bill a "seizure of all waters" by the feds is really taking things out of context and nothing more than a scare tactic.

Like others have noted, if we dont close this loophole, you can start kissing prairie potholes, playa lakes, and a whole range of wetlands that are incredibly important to ducks goodbye. While Mom & Pop farmers care about such things, the big coporate farms of today couldnt give a damn about ducks and wildlife, they want to produce dollars. If that means plowing every acre of wetland on their lands, so be it.


The federal govt already has navigational and freedom of commerce servitude over all navigable waters and has had such since we became a country. Depending on your state, all navigable waters and any waters touching more than one property owners land are considered "waters of the state" and/or "state owned submerged lands" as well. What is considered navigable depends on what court precedents have been set in your state, in some its navigable in fact, in others, if you can float a toothpick on it, its considered navigable. A lot of people out there think they bought waters & waterbottoms what were never sale-able or privately ownable to begin with.
 
Carl explains this well. What happened, in a nutshell; several years back the Federal courts ruled that the Clean Water Act did not apply to isolated wetlands, so these wetlands have become vulnerable to development and the plow for the corn based ethanol debacle, among other things, which has put a big hit on the "No Net Loss" wetlands initiative. There may be some debate over what is the best language to close this loophole in the Clean Water Act should be, but in concept, it is vital that this legislation pass. Once wetlands are lost to development, they are lost forever, and wetlands lost to agriculture are often difficult to restore.

ALL DUCK HUNTERS SHOULD SUPPORT CLOSING THIS LOOPHOLE AND FOLLOW THIS BILL CAREFULLY TO GET THIS DONE!!

Hitch
 
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This forum doesn't have enough bandwidth to describe this whole issue, but Hitch and Carl are correct that this imperative for the future of duck hunting. a good article to read is that by Ted Williams Jr. in the latest issue of Fly Rod and Reel. Though I don't subscribe to most of his views, this one and his description are dead on. I deal with this issue very regularly and am quite familiar with the SWANCC and Rabanos cases and implications. These are the precise reasons that DU, Trout Unlimited and a host of other conservation organizations are FOR the bill. A host of other hunting and some fishing organizations are against the bill but are looking at it from a private party taking position as opposed to a protection position.
 
I agree with Carl but not about the "Mom & Pop Farms" caring about wetlands, in the northeast, granted not a great duck factory, but in the Northeast I can spend days driving you around to Mom & Pop farms showing you they are the fastest fillers of wetlands there are, they tile and bank every wet spot, claiming and perhaps rightly so, that a loss of even 1 acre of tillable land is what might make or break them....it costs them $20 a 100 weight to produce milk they are selling for $14 a 100 right now, they are quick to point that out when asking for federal relief and subsidies while plowing under our wood ducks and tilling into the fields all their garbage, that which they aren't burning out right...no the Mom & Pop farmer is not friend to the hunter, the sooner the government takes over agriculture in this country the better off the hunter will be.

I literally can take you to 100 farms in NY and VT that in my lifetime went from having a nesting pair of ducks or more on them each, to what are now are tile fields, all without hedgerows, without that back corner mudhole, no more stands of cattails in a ditch with a woody and her clan nearby....

Like they did in Vegas it will be Corporate America that gets the farming brought up to speed as a money maker, big corporate farms like to look "green" and getting paid to put land aside for CRP or wetlands or Habitat For Tomorrow is a write off for them, Farmer Fred with his 263 acres of which 100 is tillable, will not and does not hesitate to drain off a wetspot if it means 1/3 of an acre of more corn or soybean for him.
 
I believe we need to be careful about painting all farmers as not caring about wildlife and more concerned about profits. I can name many who do care and farm accordingly. Farmers can be our friends to help protect what we love to do, painting them all as money hungry anti wildlife won't help.

Mark W
 
I'll play the devil's advocate here a bit-

No one seems to be interested in protecting crop land. You can pave over hundreds of acres of crop land to build a highway to bypass ten acres of wet lands (at one end of a 300 acre marsh). This adds millions to the cost of the highway widening project (that's right, they just wanted a few feet along an existing highway), a million a year to drivers on that highway because they each have to drive a mile farther, and because the drivers are on the highway longer there will eventually be human death(s). I know this can happen because it did happen with the highway widening project from Des Moines to Marshalltown.

There are interest groups that protect trees, water, sand dunes and all other "irreplaceable" land except, it seems, farm land. The highway department offered to enlarge the above protected marsh but it was too "unique". Bah! Folks, farm land is what FEEDS us. Farm land is being lost at an alarming rate too.

There is so much bias against drainage that projects that will create more wetlands are opposed because a smaller amount of land is drained in the process. In Florida a land owner built a home for himself and got into trouble because he filled in a wet area. It did not matter that he also created three times as much wetland as he filled in.

My father is a retired civil engineer who worked for the old USDA Soil Conservation Service. He wrote a paper shortly before he retired (over 25 years ago). The paper describes how there is a lot of land in the northern half of Iowa that can be farmed but frequently has standing water on it. This has a gross adverse affect on operations and yield. If it is economical to drain that land, he advocated doing so. (remember he is talking about land that is already farmed here) He says that the studies that decide whether drainage is economical would also identify farmed areas where it is NOT economical to drain. These areas should no longer be farmed but be the sumps for drained areas and thus be larger permanent wetlands. The net would be more wetlands and less farmland but the remaining farm land would be MUCH easier to farm and MUCH more productive.

Because the paper advocated drainage, it did not find much of a receptive audience. Recently he has received requests asking him to come to meetings and write more opinions so maybe there is hope for reasonableness with the wetlands people.

Farm land has value to us all too.


Bob
 
I agree. Many families that still farm their own lands are good stewards, and they could do a lot better job of surviving if the capitol gains tax laws were abolished. More land wourd stay in the hands of the family farmer and less would end up being sold to pay taxes.

Hitch
 
(Ted, moved into a new house and finally got a 3rd garage. Thought I would be jumping right in however the house sat vacant for almost 2 years and there is a ton of stuff I HAVE to get done before winter. My goal is to just get done with the crap before early goose opener. No boat this year.. the thing is.. I am surrounded by crops so I'll be able to walk from my house to the goosefield...That, and all the other stuff I have to do has made not building a boat this summer acceptable. )

I don't know what to think about the bill. I have very little trust in a government that is currently dominated by a party that has traditionally been anti-hunting and anti-gun taking over every last drop of water. Do we really think they have the gun bearing hunters in their best interests? I would venture this is a move that is being done to please the environmentalists who have also been anti-hunting.

Best option is to leave wetland preservation to your state.. which is a person with term-limits and closer connections to their voters. That is conservatism.

Yes, there are people who would like to BAN hunting on all federal properties. Why even give them the chance to prohibit? Leave it local.
 
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is EXACTLY the reason we need a well written, no loopholes FEDERAL LAW, that the States can't manipualte to satisfy local fatcats, developers and profit takers.....those exist at the Federal level as well of course but just ask Hitch about all the little guys in Florida that have been able to get around the "local" restrictions re: "no net loss" as a result of LOCAL influence...

Letting individual States decide whats BEST for their own interests would be just as crazy as letting Florida, as an example, set its own Duck Season open and close.....

No easy solutions for sure...

Steve
 
here ya go bob, http://www.farmland.org/

generally created wetlands do not mimic a natural wetland. I would have to find the info but protecting and restoration far out weigh created wetlands in the value to the environment.

On farmers yes many do value wildlife, but to stay comepetive they "think" they need to plow and farm everything. I have had converstaions with our property neighbor in ND regarding this. He is one of those that value wildlife and wishes he could spend less on seed and diesel and plant less land. He would be willing to cut back buut knows nobody around him would do the same. But he also know if they all did this our prices on the consumer end would rise.
 
but only within the Guidelines established by the Feds.....States can be TOUGHER but not more LIENANT....

Imagine if it was the other way around...we'll use Florida again since they think they are getting the shaft with the January closure......give them the ability to set their season and they'll be shooting till March.....

Same with water.....give the States the right to manage, in totality, their own wetlands and the guy that is "little and insignificant" to the Feds, and therefore doesn't get a permit, becomes improtant enough to the State toadies to get what he wants........Funny thing is I have pictures to prove this taken just this past week in Florida....I'll post them later......its the old "money talks and regulations walk when it shows up" thing......special interests and all that.....

And like I said I know that exists at the Federal level as well....it just takes "more" before you get to pretend that rules don't apply........

Steve
 
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