How many of you have a license plate on your car or truck that has more than a few letters and numbers? The answer is a lot of you do.
The Habitat License plate has been around for a long time and every vehicle I have owned since their inception has one on it. The first one was a light brown plate with a few deer depicted on it. They now come in many different varieties including moose, bees and loons.
The extra $40 you pay – you can pay more if you choose – to have one of these cool plates goes into what is called the Reinvest in Minnesota Critical Habitat Match Fund. This is a dedicated fund used to acquire and restore wild places for all sorts of creatures that call Minnesota home.
It is a dedicated fund. Sportsmen and women in Minnesota know that the only way to keep meddling politicians out of their natural resources money is to ensure it is deposited into a dedicated fund that disallows transfers to non-wildlife-related causes. Every dedicated fund has had multiple raiding attempts over the years, and these efforts to divert dedicated natural resources funds to other uses continues today.
The Reinvest In Minnesota Critical Habitat fund can only be accessed on a one-to-one match basis. If a donor gifts $100,000 to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, a match of those dollars from this fund can be used to restore the area or to purchase additional acres to maximize the wildlife benefits in that area or a different area. The fund usually has a pretty high balance, approximately $10 million, because coming up with big dollars is hard for many donors or smaller conservation groups to raise. An example if there is a $350,000 parcel of land that would make a great Wildlife Management Area and a sportsman’s group would like to try to acquire it, they would have to raise $175,000 local funds and match it with $175,000 from the RIM fund to make it happen. It is really hard for small groups to raise those kinds of dollars. As a result, the fund balance has been growing.
These potential raids of dedicated natural resource funds are normally led by an individual politician or a small group. These raiding attempts are met with stiff pushback from conservation organizations across the state and up to this point have been cut off before they could do any real damage. Outdoor folks have a lot of clout if they actually use it.
The potential raid that is happening today is very different from all the past attempts. This attempt is being forwarded by the DNR themselves along with the Walz administration. They want to expand the fund to include land management costs along with research projects and surveys. This is a can of worms that, once opened, will never be able to have the lid put back on it. This is an attempt by the governor’s office and the department to backfill holes in their annual budgets.
Minnesota ranks really low in the actual amount of general fund dollars spent on the state’s natural resources. This is where these funds need to come from and not from a dedicated fund whose sole purpose was to expand on the wildlife resources of the state. Once you start paying the annual operating bills from this fund, it could easily consume the entire fund.
Who on earth would want to continue to make generous donations of land and cash to protect the state’s resources if they found out it was paying for the day-to-day expenses of the DNR? These donors have historically displayed the general intent of leaving a lasting legacy to the places they love. They are not in it to pay day-to-day expenses.
The proposed expansion of what is eligible to be paid out of this fund needs to be killed, and it needs to be killed now. The one proposed change I do support is that the fund could make a matching amount on a ratio of 2-1 instead of the current 1-1. This would still preserve the original intent of the fund and get more dollars on the ground. It would also allow for bigger projects or at the very least get more organizations involved in protecting Minnesota resources because the private funds needed would be less with a change in the match ratio.
My Pheasants Forever Chapter in SW Minnesota has used the RIM Critical Habitat Match 30 times over the past 20 years. It is great the way it is and only needs a few tweaks, not a full-blown overhaul.
Call your representative now and tell them to allow the change in the match but to kill any other diversions of this critical dedicated natural resources fund. Now is the time to take this attempted raid and add it to the garbage can. It won’t be the last time sportsmen and women will have to do this, and we need to stay vigilant to make sure these raids are never successful.
Scott Rall, Worthington, is a habitat conservationist, avid hunting and fishing enthusiast and is president of Nobles County Pheasants Forever. He can be reached at scottarall@gmail.com or on Twitter @habitat champion.