Dire warnings emanated from Michigan Department of Natural Resources bureaucrats: Budget shortfalls loomed and threatened the state's precious outdoor bounty.
They'd have to lay off conservation officers and cut game management programs, they clucked. Reduce research, slash fish-stocking programs. Whack the walleye, trim the trout.
Nothing, they said, could pull the state from the financial abyss.
Nothing, of course, but a big tax hike on state hunters and anglers. The DNR could fend off its funding woes by demanding outdoors-inclined folk swallow double-digit price increases on the licenses required to shoot or hook fish and game here. The plan could generate millions of dollars and float the DNR's boat for the next couple of years.
Otherwise, so long, steelhead. Buh-bye bears.
No way around it. Dire, dire. Do it or die.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the DNR's deeming of Michigan as a not-so-pleasant peninsula. Some state politicians balked at approving their overly aggressive push for license fee hikes. (Save the back-patting, pols. It's your continued looting of the DNR's general fund that helped create the budget problems).
Then, wonder of wonders, some alert DNR employee found $10 million and change that ostensibly slipped through the sofa cushions somewhere in Lansing.
Whoops, crisis averted. Suddenly, hunters and anglers were off the hook. For 2008, anyway.
No one in their right mind would dispute Michigan's status as a prime destination for hunting, fishing and other natural wonders. Top-notch resources -- though plenty of hunters and anglers would argue there's already been slippage -- cost money.
But the DNR wrongly attempted to dump its money burdens on hunters and anglers who pump millions into local economies and who, by the way, just shouldered a state tax increase, not to mention an avalanche of state and local tax hikes disguised as "fee" increase hikes in recent years.
The whole thing smacks of going to the same well much too often.
And this irony: DNR officials loudly bemoan the fact that fewer residents are buying licenses to hunt and fish. Nothing like threatening big license fee hikes to chase away the very same people you're trying to attract. It's senseless.
But it's apparent that many branches of government, from state to big city, from county to the smallest village or township, simply don't fully grasp how difficult times are for average folks caught in the clutches of a lengthy recession that threatens to slip into a depression.
More fees, more taxes. For government officials, it's the easy way to go. But it's time they -- not hunters and anglers -- learn to bite the bullet.
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