Utah anglers took a big hit to their stream access rights after the governor (oddly) signed legislation largely stripping anglers of access rights accorded them in a 2008 Utah State Supreme Court decision. Now it appears something similar could be afoot in Colorado.

First, in Utah, House Bill 141 wasn’t part of a collaborative process, which makes the goring taken by anglers far more understandable.

In essence, a bunch of landowners – apparently unhappy with giving the public any access to streams – walked out of a negotiation designed to create new stream access law (which included anglers groups), found a friendly legislator, wrote their own bill, and then pushed it through.

Bizarrely, the governor’s staff seem to tacitly suggest 141 was a hummer – that it will hopefully be revised – yet the reason they offer for its signing is counter-intuitive at best.

(KCPW News) Governor Gary Herbert signed a controversial bill aimed at protecting private property rights this morning. House Bill 141 prohibits sportsmen from using streams that run through private property, unless they have permission, or the stream has already been used by the public for at least 10 consecutive years. Ted Wilson, the governor’s senior environmental adviser, says Herbert wants to bring anglers and landowners together to reach a compromise. And that means the bill could be revised in the future.

“By getting both sides together, by coming up with new ways to deal with things, we’re looking at a potential amendment to this bill, or even a brand new bill, hopefully that both sides would agree to,” he told KCPW.

Political spin like this is astonishing. “Yes, this isn’t a great law” we’re told. But maybe it will bring both sides together to talk, ignoring the inconvenient reality that both sides were talking until one side stormed out.

And of course, when both sides come to the table again, it’s clear who holds the upper hand. And it’s not anglers.

While Utah’s debate appears to be over for now, it seems the access wars are only heating up in Colorado.

Same Story, Different State

In Colorado, a new round of battles over streams access are heating up – as illustrated in this piece from the Wall Street Journal:

The debate has spilled into the state legislature and inspired at least 24 citizen-sponsored ballot initiatives. The core question: Do paddlers have an absolute right to float down any river in the state, even rivers that run through private property reserved for fly-fishing?

Steve Roberts says no.

His family owns a 150-acre dude ranch amid the aspens and lodgepole pines of southwest Colorado. The Taylor River runs through the property for three-quarters of a mile, and a few years back, Mr. Roberts spent $100,000 to reshape that stretch of the riverbed into a haven for trout. He makes his living renting cabins to anglers, who come for the plump fish, the Monday night steak fry and, above all, the serenity.

That blissful setting is fairly well destroyed, Mr. Roberts contends, when dozens of rubber rafts come bumping past, crammed with tourists of a less contemplative sort.

“They come bebopping right on through…going over the dam I built for the fish, yelling ‘Whee!’ ” Mr. Roberts says. “I’ve got 60 boats a day doing that. My guests are unhappy.”

Too bad, the rafting community responds. The state constitution declares Colorado’s river water a public resource. Private landowners can reasonably lay claim to the structural frame of a river—the bottom, the banks, perhaps even the boulders. “But that doesn’t mean they own the water,” says Duke Bradford, who owns two commercial rafting companies. “You can’t privatize a river.”

Colorado’s public stream access laws are already among the weakest in the west, and in this instance, we see the same dynamic as found in other access disputes: Wealthy landowners don’t want public access to “their” rivers.

In this case, there’s also shades of a rafters vs anglers dispute – a dynamic I’ve witnessed locally. In our case, a small group of fly fishermen seemingly tried to ignite a fly fishermen/rafters class war over the McCloud River hydro relicensing deal by sowing a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) over the process.

There’s little doubt that stream access laws in the west are coming under attack, and anglers had better pay attention.

Anglers clearly lost the river access fight in Utah (to a bill that was crafted by landowners without the input of anglers).

And there’s a move to make Colorado’s already-restrictive laws even more exclusionary. And yes, we’ve seen regular assaults made on Montana’s wide-open stream access laws.

Buckle up, Undergrounders. As the west gentrifies, we’ll continue to see more of these battles instead of less.

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