STATE CAPITAL - While MRR bills introduced in 2008 are limited entirely to repealing gas-tax diversions to motorized recreation, MRR's original legialton included user-funded implementation of standards for protecting our state from the unwanted effects of these machines. One bill implements the recommendations of the Office of the Legislative Auditor's Program Evaluation Report: State Funded Trails for Motorizec Recreation. A second bill prioritizes user-funds to implement MRR's Five Standards for Protecting Minnesota from the Unwanted Effects of Motorized Recreation. Both bills will be introduced in the coming days.
2008 MRR Legislation Summary - Printable
MRR Legislation Repeals Gas-tax Diversions to Motorized Recreation. User-funded Implementation of Recommendations - Legislative Auditor's Report, State Funded Trails for Motorized Recreation
MRR Legislation Repeals Gas-tax Diversionsto Motorized Recreation. User-funded Implementation of MRR's Five Standards for Protecting Minnesota from the Unwanted Effects of Motorized Recreation
Constitutional and Academic Origin of MRR’s 2008 Legislation
After twelve years of study and citizen action to resolve motorized recreation problems MRR finds that gas-tax funding of snowmobiles, ATVs, dirt-bike motorcycles, four-wheel drive trucks and motorboats iis fueling the irresponsible promotion of these machines and their many unwated effects. The Minnesota Constitution clearly dedicates 100% of the state's gas-tax to roads. Central to MRR's 2008 legislation is repeal of gas-tax funding of motorized recreation.
MRR’s 2008 legislative and long-term strategic goals also revolve around user-funded implementation of MRR’s Five Standards for Protecting Minnesota from the Unwanted Effects of Motorized Recreation. These standards were first recommended in MRR’s 1999 evidentiary, landmark report Off-Highway Vehicles in Minnesota which generated heretofore absent public discussion and debate about the place of these machines on Minnesota’s landscape. MRR’s 1999 report recommendations were corroborated and amplified in the 2003 Office of the Legislative Auditor’s Program Evaluation Report: State Funded Trails for Motorized Recreation MRR’s Five Standards are the result of over eleven years of grassroots study and collaboration with the scientific community, University of Minnesota and multiple local and state agencies and MRR’s academic, evidentiary approach to problem-solving and policy development.
Expression of MRR Principle for Middle Ground: MRR’s Five Standards are an expression of a founding and guiding MRR principle – that there is a place for everything when everything is in its place. Thus, regarding our 2008 campaign message, these standards communicate a yes, with... attitude toward public funding of motorized recreation. It is our belief that Minnesotans may be willing to pay $15 million annually at the pump to subsidize motorized recreation if tax-payers are in turn getting the below Five Standards for Protecting Minnesota from the Unwanted Effects of Motorized Recreation. Years ago, a Minnesota Senator challenged MRR during a committee hearing with the question: “What do you propose we do with the gas-tax dedicated to motorized recreation?” the senator asked. MRR’s response: “Use the funds to mitigate the unwanted effects of these machines. The state of Minnesota does not use the tobacco tax to distribute cigarettes at the door of school buildings, but to implement cessation programs to protect the public’s health. Thus the state should use the gas-tax currently dedicated to motorized recreation to mitigate the unwanted effects of these machines.”
While it is our experience that most Minnesotans, once educated, are strongly opposed to paying any gas-tax to motorized recreation, implementation of MRR’s Five Standards provides a win-win middle ground for reforming this thirty-year-old institution protects our environment and the right’s of the quiet majority and provides a legitimate place for motorized recreation enthusiasts.
Comprehensive Approach to Solving Motorized Recreation Problems: Each of the below Five Standards is effective only in concert with the five as a whole. Environmental review to select routes is ineffective if machines are not required to stay on these routes or there is inadequate enforcement to keep theme there. Keeping riders on selected routes is ineffective if the extensive damage already caused by these machines is ignored. Once an ATV compacts soil and damages vegetation in the riparian zone of a stream, soil will be eroded into that stream with every rainfall whether ATVs return or not. One 2003 legislative audit recommendation requires wetlands delineation – the same required of every road authority in the state - before new routes are designated and club bulldozers roll. This recommendation, even if fully implemented would be ineffective without oversight and accountability. In the end, all the standards and good intentions in the world will have no effect if there is no oversight and accountability in their implementation. Each of MRR’s Five Standards must be implemented as a whole in order to be effective.
MRR's natural resource legislation repeals gas-tax funding of motorized recreation and prioritizes registration fees to implment the below standards.
Five Standards for Protecting Minnesota from the Unwanted Effects of Motorized Recreation.
1. Public and environmental review, i.e., completion of Environmental Assessment Worksheets on proposed ATV, dirt-bike motorcycle, four-wheel drive truck and snowmobile routes to select routes for these machines. The simple three page, thirty-one question worksheet requires proposers of motorized recreation routes – such as the DNR or local units of governments - to discuss the potential effects of the route on fish and wildlife, water resources, soils, vegetation, air quality, and noise as well as unintended, cumulative effects such as off-route travel. A central component of the EAW process is two thirty-day public comment periods which conclude with an agency Record of Decision that can be challenged in court should the public feel their input has been disregarded and the proposed route remains unacceptable. In 2003, despite the legislative auditor’s #1 recommendation that EAWs be completed, this one and only legal right of citizens to challenge bad DNR proposals was suspended until 2008. A top priority of MRR’s Five Standards is to restore this one and only citizen right.
2. Requirement that all machines be restricted to selected routes only with all other routes closed. Currently the Minnesota DNR is designating routes but leaving vast tracts of land and thousands of miles of additional routes open to motorized recreation. Why? In the words of the DNR “The actual effect of [ATV route] designation is to transfer funds from the state to local clubs.” The current statewide designation of ATV, dirt-bike motorcycle and four-wheel drive truck routes does not restrict machines to selected routes but simply sanctions and opens the flow of public gas-tax funds to ATV, dirt-bike motorcycle and four-wheel drive clubs.
3. Adequate enforcement to keep machines on selected routes. The operational word here is adequate. While the Minnesota Highway Patrol employees approximately 650 troopers to patrol our state’s highways the Minnesota DNR employees only 150 Conservation Officers to patrol and protect our entire state. And the State Troopers know where the roads are! While Minnesota’s population has doubled and Conservation Officers – once referred to as Game Wardens – now shoulder the burden of motorized recreation and other enforcement, their numbers have not significantly increased over the past fifty years. Currently the Minnesota DNR does not appear to have any formula for allocating enforcement dollars per mile of motorized recreation routes, despite the fact that the agency is on a fast-track expansion of ATV, dirt-bike motorcycle and four-wheel drive truck routes in Minnesota’s state forests.
4. Statewide damage inventory with Cost of Restoration Analysis and fully-funded program to restore forests, wetlands, streams and private property damaged by motorized recreation. While the DNR engages in a fast-tract designation of ATV, dirt-bike motorcycle and four-wheel drive truck routes to disperse funds to clubs, no statewide or even individual forest-wide inventory of accumulating damage has commenced. As the 2003 legislative audit noted, the DNR has not done a fiscal accounting its existing or proposed off-road vehicle system of routes and scramble areas. If one cannot take care of the house one has, one should not be building a bigger house. In 2006, after a two-year collaboration with Boreal Natives restoration firm, the University of Minnesota-Duluth Environmental Studies Program and Natural Resources Research Institute and the City of Duluth, MRR released a first-of-its-kind Cost of Restoration Analysis of off-road vehicle damage to Duluth’s forests, trails, wetlands and streams as a model of what is needed statewide.
5. Oversight and accountability at the local level to achieve the above objectives. Public funds for motorized recreation are disbursed by 100 local units of government which act as fiscal-agent sponsors of snowmobile and ATV clubs. Each local government sponsor - none of which are currently reimbursed for their fiscal agency - should take 20% of motorized recreation grant-in-aid to implement above standards. One common sense oversight recommendation from the 2003 legislative auditor is to implement the Michigan Model in which a local government employee simply travels to the site of a publicly funded motorized recreation route to observe the condition of the route and see what clubs, with their bulldozers, have done. There exists a well documented history of abuse of public funding for snowmobile clubs – whose members and families are often generously paid and not volunteers as myth would have it. In 2004 it was discovered that Representative Dave Dill, Trail Administrator of the Voyageur Trail Society, Incorporated – a consortium of five snowmobile clubs was taking $40,000 per year in public motorized recreation funds and that his family was receiving $440 in monthly Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance. Oversight and accountability is essential if public funds for motorized recreation are to be used to meet the above program goals.
DNR gas-tax funded ATV route designations transfer gas-tax funds to local clubs without standards!
