HELENA - Former state Sen. Ed Smith of Dagmar charged Monday that charges tacked onto state hunting license fees to improve upland bird programs and habitat are being misspent and can't be fully accounted for by the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
Smith, a Republican legislator for 20 years, the GOP nominee for governor in 1972 and later a state transportation commissioner for eight years, raised the allegations at a meeting of the Legislature's Environmental Quality Council. The council intends to discuss the charges later.
Don Childress, the department's wildlife administrator, took issue with the allegations, including Smith's contention that $3 million could not be accounted for. Childress said the pheasant enhancement program - created in 1987 in a bill that was sponsored by Smith - isn't effective and said the department can get better results ultimately by paying for habitat and range improvements instead of by buying and releasing birds.
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Still, Childress said after the meeting the department is open to suggestions on how to improve the program.
Legislators seemed divided on the allegations.
"To me, this raises more questions than answers," said Sen. Ken Mesaros. R-Cascade, after hearing presentations from Smith and the department. "I think the whole matter needs serious review."
But Sen. Barry "Spook" Stang, D-St. Regis, said, "It doesn't do any good to put birds out if the habitat isn't there." Stang said that if the money in fact has been misappropriated, the issue belongs before the Legislative Audit Committee, not the Environmental Quality Council.
Smith said the department isn't spending enough of the $700,000 raised annually on the program on buying and releasing birds; instead, he charged, too much of the money is going to range and habitat improvements. The major appropriation bill during the 1999 Legislature limited the pheasant enhancement program spending to $30,000 a year.
Smith provided the council with photographs he had taken showing how some of this money was being spent on corral gates, fencing and water pipelines at ranches financed by the program, not on birds.
"I don't think the funding for the program was intended to build the image (of the department)," Smith said.
The program is funded by a $2 fee added to bird-hunting license fees for Montana hunters and a $23 fee tacked on to fees paid by out-of-state hunters.
Smith also contended that by his figures, $3.1 million of the $8.5 million raised by the program since 1987 cannot be accounted for.
Childress, meanwhile, said that Smith's law, which covered pheasant enhancements, was amended in 1989 to include habitat and range-management enhancement. Since then, he said, a major focus of the program has been on habitat and range improvements, with some associated with the department's block management program, which makes areas of land available for hunters.
He told reporters later that it was more effective to work on habitat in hopes of improving native species than releasing pheasants raised by someone else under the program. The program is now intended to enhance other upland birds such as grouse, he said.
Childress said the department's records don't indicate that $3 million is missing, noting that $1.2 million of that $3 million has been appropriated.
He conceded that the department could do a better job of monitoring the contracts, as a legislative audit suggested.
