(Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political colummnist.)
[N]o surprise that Gov. Phil Scott wrote he was “very apprehensive about the federal government acquiring additional land for the Silvio O. Conte Wildlife Refuge” in the Northeast Kingdom.
Nor that his administration immediately made clear that this apprehension, expressed in a letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, should not be interpreted as opposition to expanding the Conte.
The governor, said Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore, “is in no way opposed to conservation,” nor “fundamentally opposed” to adding territory to the refuge.
The number of politicians who will accept being described as “opposed to conservation,” can be counted on the fingers of no hands. So broad is the support for conservation, that while no one has taken a poll on this specific issue, it’s reasonable to conclude that most Vermonters think a bigger Conte refuge would be a good idea.
But for at least two reasons, his qualms make sense. The Conte’s long-range expansion plan envisions adding 50,000 Vermont acres to the refuge. Though just a tad more than 1 percent of the state’s land mass, that’s not an inconsequential chunk of terrain, and any governor would be justified in asking the feds just what they intend to do with it.
Except he doesn’t have to ask. All he would have to do is read (or get someone on his staff to read) the Conte’s Final Comprehensive Conservation Plan. It details – alas, in mind-bogglingly bureaucratic prose – the Fish & Wildlife Service’s plans for the refuge.
Just reading the plan, though, would not send a signal – as the letter did – to leaders of the state’s forest products industry, an important sector of Vermont’s economy, not to mention part of Phil Scott’s political base.
All elected officials need now and then to reassure their political base. In light of what is going on elsewhere, it should be noted that Scott performs this task with more subtlety and grace than some other elected officials.
But his economic analysis is open to question. As sectors of the economy go, the production of pulp and sawlogs is declining while forest tourism and recreation expand. So maybe more protected forest land would enrich the state, if not the timber industry.
In a 2013 report on “The Economic Importance of Vermont’s Forest-Based Economy,” the North East State Foresters Association acknowledged that “the economic output and number of jobs in the forest products sector have been reduced since it reached its peaks in the 1990s and early 2000s.” Now half the jobs and more than half the dollars earned in forestry come from forest recreation. Both trends are likely to continue, so in the future the economic value of hiking trails and wildlife viewing platforms could be greater than the value of timber.
None of this proves that expanding the Conte Refuge would be an economic boon. Walter Kuentzel, the director of the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Program at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, warns against applying the “recreation-and-tourism-is-growing generalization” too casually. “Where there is growth,” he said (via email) “there is usually a relatively obvious local reason for it.”
Certainly the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Conte refuge does not seem to have transformed the economy of the Essex County towns in which its 26,600 acres lie, or of Island Pond, its gateway hamlet.
But maybe this is because the locals haven’t done the best job of tooting their own horn. Or they have chosen not to toot their own horn to some potential patrons.
The Conte sits in one of the best bird-watching locales in the whole country. But businesses and organizations in the area have not energetically marketed themselves to bird-watchers, though there are millions of them, and they are affluent.
Why not?
Well, some Northeast Kingdomites have long speculated that Island Ponders wouldn’t feel comfortable (or perhaps just think they wouldn’t) among bird-watchers. It’s tribal. The town fathers aggressively court snowmobilers — more their kind of folks.
Joel Cope, the long-serving town administrator of Brighton (the town in which Island Pond is located) acknowledged that local leaders “have missed the boat” when it comes to promoting the area to bird-watchers and other outdoor recreationists.
“But there’s a new boat,” he said, referring to the Conte’s new plan.
That’s the one that proposes buying more land for the Conte. It also proposes allowing the use of bicycles on the gravel roads (there are more than 40 miles of them) in the Nulhegan area of the refuge, and for that reason, Cope said, the Brighton Selectboard endorsed the plan for the refuge.
“Bicycles are big now,” Cope said. “They’re a huge potential resource for us.”
And along with other outdoor recreations, for the rest of the state. Among those who seems to know this is Phil Scott, who earlier this year created the Vermont Outdoor Recreation Economic Collaborative, composed, says its website, of “Vermont businesses and nonprofits including outdoor manufacturers, retailers, brand representatives, trail and user groups and conservation organizations,” all trying to promote Vermont’s outdoor recreation and tourism economy.
Besides, there’s little inherent conflict between forest recreation and forest production. There is “very substantial” logging in the Conte refuge, said Steve Agius, the manager of the refuge’s Nulhegan Basin Division.
So what explains the opposition from the loggers?
A simple question with a complex answer. Agius acknowledged that the refuge does impose some extra regulation on timber harvest. Those rules could lower the board-foot-per-acre output, not welcome to people who earn their keep selling board feet.
But the economic impact isn’t big enough to explain the intensity of some of the opposition to expanding the Conte. The fuller explanation requires going back almost 20 years, to the transaction that helped create the Refuge – the 1998 sale of almost 300,000 acres of Vermont, New Hampshire and New York by the Champion International Co. to the Virginia-based Conservation Fund, which then redistributed it to various public and private entities.
It was one of the biggest land-preservation deals in the history of the country, and it had broad popular support. But some hated it. This, too, was tribal. Self-styled advocates of local “tradition” hated it just because of who engineered it – environmentalists, the federal government, then-Gov. Howard Dean, big-city financiers. For some, this distaste has not faded.
So the governor of Vermont feels he has to write a letter addressed to the secretary of the Interior but also aimed at Vermont loggers and foresters, letting them know he appreciates them.
Not, mind you, that he’s against expanding the Conte refuge.
