Missouri - good on funding, bad on public land?

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_254d0ea1-9bf5-558e-887d-c4e06ec5e8aa.html

I have long held that Missouri has the best strategy for fish and game funding, a small state sales tax. But based on the article above they may not appreciate public land very much. While I can agree that aquicition should include public participation. Once it's in the public domain it should stay there, even if they don't "manage" it at all. The future Missouri residents will thank them later.

I actually lived in Missouri and voted for this. But unfortunately politicians frequently show an inability to make good decisions when it comes to Fish and game and the environment.
I had the same conversation with someone else when Montana was facing problems with funding their budget. I thought it would be a good idea for here in Montana to help solve some of the funding problems as it would be a fairly steady source of income. It would also allow everyone living in the state as well as visitors to contribute to the people who were supposed to manage the resource we all enjoy. The problem would be the politicians in our state. They frequently show the inability to make good decisions regarding the wildlife and environment. Without fixing that, all the money in the world won’t help. I personally think they need to do more to show that the wildlife and outdoors contributes more to the economy than the agriculture. Hopefully someday this would help with the strangle hold the agriculture has on the decisions. Sorry for opening a can of worms.

I live in MO and have been following this somewhat. One thing before you read anything from the STL Post is that they are very liberal and anything Republican's do they will write something without all the facts and present something in a very liberal way. Basically these parks where purchased under the previous governor(one to be named after him) and some people believe they where purchased illegally with funds diverted from other areas. So all they are doing now is letting the public chime in on what to do with the parks, keep them or sell them off.

This is different from our Conservation Department which is where the 1/8 cent of all sales tax goes to which brings about $110 million a year for our conservation department and a long time ago our Supreme Court ruled that the funds must go strictly to conservation. The Parks Dept and Conversation Dept are two separate departments. The conservation department still owns and manages millions of acres of land and so does the parks department. Basically all they are doing with this land is saying "hey, this land was bought a few years ago, no one is doing anything with it let's see what the public wants us to do with it".

Thanks BLB, it is truly amazing the opinions one makes when they finally get all of the info instead of a leftist slant.

Yeah I figured it was a little apples and oranges, but still, once you have public land I can't believe selling it would really be an option anyone (except prospective buyers) would support.

neffa3 said:

Yeah I figured it was a little apples and oranges, but still, once you have public land I can't believe selling it would really be an option anyone (except prospective buyers) would support.

Click to expand...

Yea I'd like to keep it but at the same time I'd like to know just how they where purchased by the previous Governor. That is the real issue that caused all of this. It's one of those things where a few years back the Governor approved the purchase of thousands of acres of land but no one really knows where the money came from type of situation. What if the money was for veterans, schools, roads, etc, etc. That's kind of what brought all this up. The way I see if the state really wanted the land in some way our Conservation Department could of bought it with no issues. Like I said in the previous post from sales tax alone they get about $110 million a year, that doesn't include fees from licenses, farming of lands they have, etc, etc. They're kind of like the Amazon of Conservation/Fish&Game Departments, they have a little of everything going on and make a log of money doing it. So why not have them buy it because they have the money and the resources to maintain it. So now they're are letting the public comment on what should be done with the land so at least the people get to decide....hopefully.