Stream Access Law

[troutfiend1985]

Lets take a different look at commerce. How much do fishermen contribute monetarily to the economy of Missouri? Isn't that commerce? They buy snacks, meals, gas, lodgeing, tackle, line, license, canoe rentals, shuttles.... You can a lot to that list. That all contributes to the commerce produced in this state. And it all comes from the waterways of this state.

I think that you're boot strapping there. However Chief, when you keep a fish you affect commerce, because you keeping one fish from that stream is one less fish you buy at the market. So, as you see commerce is broad enough to cover what you are after , it just gets sketchy as to what a court will say on the tiny creeks.

[Al Agnew]

A few points...

Terry, while it is at present legal to let your cows drink from the stream, too much access to the stream by livestock is in itself a problem, both with tearing up stream banks and causing erosion, and by the cows defecating in the stream and "fertilizing" it beyond what the habitat can easily handle. If you don't think this is a problem, I can take you to places where I'm sure you'd "see the light". People have commented on here before about the upper Eleven Point below Thomasville and how the cows are screwing it up, but there are places on Ozark streams that are a lot worse.

The question there is whether or not you should allow cows direct access to the stream at all. In my opinion, a small fenced in area where the cows can come down to drink is probably okay, but in reality it's all a matter of scale. If every cattle grower on a creek is letting their cows come down to the water to drink, it can get pretty bad. I don't know how you do things, but what was relatively harmless when only a few people did it can be a disaster when a lot of people do it.

This is getting pretty far afield from the original subject, though. It's just that at some point you have to realize that sometimes you can't do things the way you always did them because the world changes.

I think the worry that more and more streams are going to be closed to the public is quite valid. We've already seen big landowners in Missouri attempt with varying degrees of success to close off stream sections that are considered floatable. The upper Osage Fork comes to mind, for instance. And you only have to look at a lot of other states to see horror stories. In upstate New York, a big club bought up long stretches of a popular and floatable trout stream and attempted to close it off, and it took major league lawyers and lots of dollars from canoeing and fishing groups to fight it, although eventually they were successful. In Virginia a club has closed off a long section of the Jackson River to fishing. The Jackson is floatable and great trout fishing, but you can't fish it and you can only float it if you don't EVER touch the bottom or the banks. In Illinois DuPont closed off a section of the Vermillion River to all recreational use, and it's in the courts right now. In Colorado there are vast sections of the state's best trout streams that are totally private water. In Wyoming it's pretty much the same thing, though not quite as much water is private. Having fished Colorado some, I can tell you that the idea of the state buying land along the streams is somewhat impractical. In Colorado, other than in the national parks and national forests, there are places where the state has bought up pieces of land...on the Frying Pan River, there are a couple of public accesses where you can fish about a quarter mile of stream, separated by miles and miles of private water. The state simply cannot buy enough land to give the public access to significant amounts of streams if the public is limited only to the land the state actually owns.

Contrast that with Montana. One of the state's biggest sources of income comes from trout anglers. And I want to say it again...there are very few problems. Somebody said somewhere above that Montana has a lot fewer people than Missouri, and yet with all the out of state anglers, Montana waters are not exactly uncrowded. In fact, in the summer every Fish and Game access will have about as many cars in the parking lot as any MDC access in MO. I'll use the Boulder again as an example...it's a wading size stream, with accesses here and there, seldom more than 5 miles between accesses. But most of the anglers never get more than a mile or two from the nearest access. For a while we had an "in" on a piece of property halfway between two accesses that were about five miles apart. We fished that place a lot and never saw an angler outside our own party, and the landowner told us that he almost never saw anglers.

Like I said before, I don't know what makes Montana different from Missouri, except that Montana has fewer cities, therefore fewer residents that come from a non-rural background. It seems to me that most of the bad apples in Missouri are locals from the small towns nearby. In Montana, more of the users are actually out-of-state anglers that tend to appreciate the streams a lot more, since they had to go to some expense and inconvenience to get to them.

I think the worry that people will not know which streams are flowing year-round and which are intermittent, or which streams actually provide fishing and which ones don't, is a little unlikely. The anglers that seek out such streams can pretty well know which ones are likely to produce.

So the fear that hordes of inconsiderate people would descend upon every trickle if such a law passed is in my opinion probably unwarranted. The relatively few people who would use the law as an excuse to go onto private land to do mischief are probably going to do it anyway.

But...I think that the landowners closest to public accesses would have problems. Not that they don't now. But at least now they CAN close off their stream sections and keep SOME of the riff-raff away. They'd still have problems with the people who come to vandalize or commit crimes, but they can keep out the casual party people who litter and tear up stuff mostly because they are drunk and stupid.

So I still don't have any answers. Philosophically, I believe the streams that have traditionally provided fishing for many people should remain open somehow, and that nobody should have the right to close off a stream that has been used by the public in the past. But I also realize that landowners are having problems with certain segments of the public as it is, and those problems would probably get worse with such a law; the only question is how much worse.

[Chief Grey Bear]

I think it's wrong that I have to have a special tag in order to hunt deer on a conservation area.

Where do you keep coming up with this stuff????

I think that you're boot strapping there. However Chief, when you keep a fish you affect commerce, because you keeping one fish from that stream is one less fish you buy at the market. So, as you see commerce is broad enough to cover what you are after , it just gets sketchy as to what a court will say on the tiny creeks.

Ehh, maybe. But you shut down stream fishing because the land is not public on both sides and you will loose a butt load of money. I don't have current figures but even though these are 10 years old, it is very eye opening.

Top 10 Fishing States Ranked by Resident Retail Sales

Florida $4,412,241,741

Texas $3,366,961,760

Minnesota $2,832,442,963

California $2,677,352,981

Michigan $2,099,582,373

Pennsylvania $1,794,966,426

Wisconsin $1,754,539,873

South Carolina $1,492,735,367

North Carolina $1,204,118,689

Missouri $1,179,604,443

That is Billion with a "B"

[Terry Beeson]

So I still don't have any answers. Philosophically, I believe the streams that have traditionally provided fishing for many people should remain open somehow, and that nobody should have the right to close off a stream that has been used by the public in the past. But I also realize that landowners are having problems with certain segments of the public as it is, and those problems would probably get worse with such a law; the only question is how much worse.

Al, I agree with this statement TOTALLY... As I keep saying, my issue is NOT with anglers in general. The last seven words of your post say a lot. What I keep hearing from many is that they "think" there will be no problem. I feel I'm just looking at it from a much deeper voice of experience than some.

In all honesty, I think all our time and efforts would be much better spent preventing the closing of the streams used by the public than trying to open up new ones.

[FishinCricket]

In all honesty, I think all our time and efforts would be much better spent preventing the closing of the streams used by the public than trying to open up new ones.

Would you mind holding off until I own my own piece of paradise?

[Al Agnew]

Al, I agree with this statement TOTALLY... As I keep saying, my issue is NOT with anglers in general. The last seven words of your post say a lot. What I keep hearing from many is that they "think" there will be no problem. I feel I'm just looking at it from a much deeper voice of experience than some.

In all honesty, I think all our time and efforts would be much better spent preventing the closing of the streams used by the public than trying to open up new ones.

Only one thing about that...there are a LOT of small streams that have traditionally been fished by wading rather than floating that have been closed off in the last few years. One creek close to me has five public bridge crossings. Twenty years ago, all five were usable as accesses and were used by many local anglers. Now, three of the five are full of no-trespassing signs, a fourth one is still usable but the county has put up no-parking signs right at the bridge so I park 100 yards away where the signs stop and there's still a place to park--not sure of my legality there--and the fifth is unusable because of a new high bridge with no parking, but there's a place to park on a side road a few hundred yards upstream. Other than that, there is still a place to park where a county road goes along the creek, which I am worried will be closed sooner or later. That county road used to go for seven miles up the creek with many accesses, but landowners got part of it closed.

I floated this creek a couple of times in the spring, but I doubt that a dozen people have actually floated it in the last twenty years because it's far too small to float in the summer and too rough in the spring. It's a wading creek, and in fact is the creek where I caught my first smallmouth, and where my grandfather took me many times when I was a kid.

You see what I mean? It isn't just the floatable streams that have traditionally been (informally) open to the public. A lot of wading streams were open to everybody in the not too distant past, but are gradually being closed off. In reality, we are losing the "right" to fish a lot of streams that we could have fished twenty or thirty years ago, because the "right" has been deemed to be a "privilege" that the landowners can take away at any time. I'm not talking about law, though, I'm talking about the reality, and the reality is that our access to fishing streams is being squeezed more and more.

[Terry Beeson]

Where do you keep coming up with this stuff????

I'm speaking of managed hunts. Since my hunting is done in Arkansas, my comment was more directed toward the regulations there where you have to draw a special tag to hunt on a Wildlife Management Area during muzzle loading or rifle season. I was assuming (I know... I know...) that the Missouri Managed Hunts were very much the same when it comes to MDC Conservation Areas. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

FC... I don't think we have that long... Just raggin' ya, bud... I hope you get a piece of paradise.

[Chief Grey Bear]

A managed hunt and hunting on Conservation land are two totally different things. If you hunt a MDC mangaged hunt you do have to purchase a Managed hunt tag. But you do not have to purchase any special tags to hunt on Conservation land.

[Liv2flyfish]

You can read the last Mo. Supreme Court ruling on Stream rights in Mo. at http://www.liv2flyfish.com/id22.htm . It is important to understand the current law and help protect it.

[Wayne SW/MO]

"I think that you're boot strapping there. However Chief, when you keep a fish you affect commerce, because you keeping one fish from that stream is one less fish you buy at the market. So, as you see commerce is broad enough to cover what you are after , it just gets sketchy as to what a court will say on the tiny creeks."

Boot strapping, NO, but maybe too much common sense? A fish replacing A fish from A market would be boot strapping. You don't even know that the person would buy fish? We do know how much money the outdoor sports contribute to the state, at least to the point that it's a bunch. There's no reason that Chief's point isn't valid today. After all Eminent Domain is used constantly to support large important sections of the economy.

The point that any stream that is wet all year could be considered navigable can be made. If its wet year round then it's a permanent landmark that could be used for navigating.