Before you call or write your legislator, I thought some background on the nature of legislators might be helpful.

I spent my professional life working for, working with, and always closely observing legislators at the state and local levels. For most of those years and historically, every legislator's fundamental impulse was to say yes—as in getting something done for his or her district, some organization or business, or a constituent. Creating a new program or expanding one was a favorite pursuit. That could make winning support for the Stewardship Fund (SF) easier if you could show a legislator how the program would help her or his district—a city or village, for example, might need land or development funds for a new park. The biology for some legislators has changed in recent years. For a few, the fundamental impulse is to say no, often to long-lasting programs. New or expanded funding is usually a target, not a goal, for such legislators. These folks are almost always very conservative Republicans. They will be skeptical of a program such as SF that has been around for years and is financed with borrowing in the form of long term bonds.

Photo by David Musolf / Madison Audubon

In the conservation community, Stewardship is incredibly popular and its successes (recall that interactive map) are widespread and well documented. Why so tough to renew the program?

To answer that, we can clarify a possible point of confusion in the last blog. I noted that Madison Audubon had used the Stewardship Fund (SF) to buy many acres in our sanctuaries, which mostly prohibit hunting. Now we don't use those grants because of the requirement to allow hunting. In the early days of Stewardship some organizations, including Madison Audubon, had used those grants to buy large tracts of land that they did not open to the public for some traditional and popular forms of outdoor recreation—hunting would head that list. Some legislators used that as a point of attack against the entire program. Policymakers reached a compromise to continue SF but require most of the land so purchased to be open to hunting.

Photo by Roger Packard / Madison Audubon