Columnist takes controversial conservation message on the road

Anyone who reads his column knows Larry Dablemont is an avid outdoorsman, however, he's as well known for his criticisms of the Missouri Department of Conservation as he is for his avocations.

Thursday evening Dablemont spoke to a group at the Eagles Lodge about forming a new group, a common sense group named appropriately enough the Common Sense Conservation Group, to keep an eye on the Conservation Department, which Dablemont feels has become a power unto itself because of its massive funding.

Dablemont said that the conservation department's budget was $171 million last year, with the sales tax amounting to more than $100 million, alone. Permit sales brought in another $30 million and Federal funds and other sources made up the rest of the money. Because of that, Dablemont says, the department has grown from a group of concerned and caring agents to a power-hungry group that is more concerned with acquiring and keeping power than in serving the citizens of Missouri.

For all of that Dablemont said the group he is attempting to form is not attempting to hurt the department.

"We're not trying to destroy the Conservation Department, we're trying to make it work better," Dablemont said.

Dablemont said that the examples he cites are of department agents overstepping their authority in a particularly offensive manner and that he did not want anyone to think he was supporting any breaking of the law.

"I ain't standing up for no violators," Dablemont said. "If you're a violator, pay your ticket and mend your ways."

Dablemont gives as an example of someone being traumatized by an out-of-control agent a disabled woman who shot a deer and was in the process of butchering it when confronted by the agent, ending up ticketed for what the couple and Dablemont saw as an unfounded claim.

Department employees have come to Dablemont with examples of misdeeds that have caused them to give up and quit out of frustration he says.

"I've had people come up to me and say they can't do the job anymore because they can't lie and do the things the department wants them to," Dablemont said.

Another reason he feels the department needs outside scrutiny is their lack of such use of resources while at the same time wasting others. One example he gave was on the Niangua River where a young man had gotten a $17,000 grant to study the Niangua Darter, a small fish that is experiencing stress because soil erosion into the river was filling in holes with soil and gravel.

"They gave this guy $17,000 to study the Niangua Darter while at the same time they have a problem on the Niangua because cattle are watering in the river and the banks are eroding," Dablemont said. "The federal government has a program that will pay for planting protective vegetation as a fence and pumps and tanks to water the cattle to solve the problem but the farmers have to pay for it first and then the government will reimburse them. Well there are a lot of farmers who would take advantage of it but they can't afford to pay out that money first. The Conservation Department could give the farmers the money to pay for it, they could put it in and the federal government could pay them for it and they could pay the department back and it wouldn't cost them anything to solve it but they would rather pay someone to do a study - the reason the Niangua Darter is having a problem is because the banks are eroding. Give me $20 and I'll write a report for them."

Dablemont said that to confront the department and get it to pay attention people needed to band together so their voices could be heard. To that end he was asking people to sign up for the group and, if they could, donate a little to the cause. In addition he asked anyone who had a talent the group could use to donate their services. He said that no one would make money off of the group if he could help it.