The Middle River Group, LLC

fly fishing, conservation and politics.

The Roosevelt Mandate Articles

Offering My Opinion On Fishing Responsibly

By

“Anglers, both recreational and commercial, need to take a long view if they want to keep fishing,” Sadler says. “Nobody wants to catch the last fish, but nobody wants to stop fishing either. Something has to give … there is a personal responsibility aspect to it that requires action by everyone.” He adds that “we are at the tipping point where our collective impact on the planet is causing a cascading series of events that are robbing future generations. We need to get a grip on that and start thinking about our grandchildren’s grandchildren — not just our present-day needs.”

Read the InsideHook article, How to Fish the Chesapeake Responsibly, Before It’s Ruined for Everyone.

Remembering Jim Range

By

I can only believe that if Range was alive today he would be happy to see that this new administration heralds a better future for those things we hold near and dear. I also believe he would continue to be proud of how his wisdom has lived on and of those who fight the good fight, they are true keepers of his faith.

The following is a tribute I wrote for the News Virginian in 2009. I don’t think I can do any better today and still have tears in my eyes. May his wisdom live on in all of us.

There are some columns one would prefer never to write. This is one of them.

Please indulge me as I reflect on two people who are no longer with us. Not to mourn their loss so much as to celebrate their lives.

Jim Range and Jean Ince (courtesy of John Ince)

On Tuesday morning one of my very closest friends lost his battle with cancer.
He was like a brother to me. The best man in my wedding, a hunting and fishing partner of many years and the voice on the other end of the phone keeping me strong when trouble came. And oh, the whiskey we drank.

Many of you have never heard of James D. Range. But all of you have been touched by his work. He was a conservation hero. Embodying a conservation ethic on the scale of Roosevelt, Leopold, Muir and Pinchot.

One of my most cherished memories, from many years ago, is standing with him in my dining room one night. We got choked up looking out at the fields and woods where I lived.

He told me that not a lot of folks were willing to protect the things he, I and many of you love so much like fish, wildlife and the wild things of this earth. He said, “Tommy we have to protect the wild things. If we don’t do it, it won’t get done.”

Tears streamed down our faces. Big men do cry.

Range was a modern architect of natural resource conservation. A skilled bipartisan policy and political genius with an extraordinary network of friends and contacts.

Range had wonderful oratorical gifts, a way of always speaking from his heart, sometimes in language not fit for a family newspaper. You may not have liked what he said but you surely knew what he thought.

He was the personification of “if they don’t see the light, we can surely make them feel the heat.”

Range’s fingerprints are all over the nation’s conservation laws, including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. His championing of conservation tax incentives earned him a profile in Time magazine.

He ably chaired the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s Board of Directors pouring his enormous energy into its resurrection.

He served with distinction and candor on the Board’s of Trout Unlimited, the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation, the American Sportfishing Association, Ducks Unlimited, the American Bird Conservancy, the Pacific Forest Trust, the Valles Caldera Trust and the Yellowstone Park Foundation.

Range was an original board member of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, helping to chart the outstanding course it is on today. He also held presidential appointments to the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin and the Sportfishing and Boating Partnership Council.

In 2003, Range received the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Great Blue Heron Award, the highest honor given to an individual at the national level by the Department.

He was also awarded the 2003 Outdoor Life Magazine Conservationist of the Year Award and the Norville Prosser Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sportfishing Association.

Range’s greatest love was the outdoors. He fished and hunted all over the world. I suspect he was happiest however, at his place on the Missouri River near Craig, Mont.

Flyway Ranch was his sanctuary. A sanctuary, which, in typical Range fashion, he shared with friends and colleagues so they too could enjoy a respite from challenges both personal and professional.

Beside his multitude of friends and admirers, Range is survived by his father, Dr. James Range of Johnson City, Tenn., brothers John Neel, Harry and Peter, twin daughters Allison and Kimberly, and loyal bird dogs Plague, Tench and Sky.

Range may be gone but we will be telling stories about him for the rest of our lives.

The Valley lost another friend recently as well. She was one of Range’s favorite people and the mother of his girlfriend Anni.

Jean Marion Gregory Ince, died on Jan. 12 at the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville. She and her husband Eugene St. Clair Ince, Jr. and her beloved golden retriever “Meg” were residents of Madison.

Like Range, Jean Ince was a giver. She and Meg, a certified therapy dog, worked with patients at the Kluge Children’s Rehabilitation Center in Charlottesville and at the Augusta Medical Center in Fishersville.

Anni told me her mom, like Range, loved the outdoors and animals, particularly horses and dogs. She said that love was passed on to her children and grandchildren as well.

Jean and Bud enjoyed a special relationship. They wrote about it in the December 1978 issue of GOURMET Magazine. An Evening at the Waldorf chronicles the evening of their engagement.

It is a wonderfully engaging story of a young couple, a special hotel, and a time when doing for others was a common practice.

I hope you will take a moment to read it. It is a gift that will make any day a better one.

You can find a copy of An Evening at the Waldorf at http://www.usna.org/family/waldorf.html.

Jim Range and Jean Ince have made our world a better place. Their friends and families miss them but their memories will warm our hearts forever.

Insurrection most foul

By

I’m still having a hard time finding words to express my outrage over the horrifying events of January 6 in our nation’s capital. Until I can, Michael Gerson’s column, The U.S. must punish sedition — or risk more of it, in The Washington Post, will suffice. He captures much of what is going through my mind at this moment.

First and foremost, the murder of United States Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick defines the outrage I feel. Gerson writes of it:

One moment captured on video stands out to me for its brutality and symbolism. An insurrectionist pulls a police officer down the steps of the Capitol, where he is stomped and beaten with the pole of a U.S. flag. The crowd chants “USA, USA.”

Gerson notes that Republican appeasement to Trump and his sycophants has lead to what we witnessed on January 6. The path forward is clear.

Stopping this rot in the political order will require accountability. That begins with the president, who deserves every legal and constitutional consequence our system offers. He should be impeached for sedition. He should be prevented from holding any further elective office. He should be stripped of all the perks of the post-presidency. He should be prosecuted for insurrection against the U.S. government.

Those appeasement should come at a price.

But the responsibility does not end with a single man. Many elected Republicans enabled the president’s political rise. Trump could only attempt the occupation of the Capitol because he had already occupied the Republican Party — in that case, with little resistance. Elected Republicans who cheered that takeover deserve to lose, and lose, and lose, until their party is either destroyed or transformed.

As Gerson notes in his title, this sedition cannot go unpunished or it will continue.

Fair Returns for Public Lands Act

By

A recent New York Times opinion piece by U.S. Senators Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) titled Oil and Gas Companies Keep Taking From Taxpayers. And Taking, got my attention. The piece makes the argument that Congress should enact legislation to raise the royalty rates on federal lands. Senators Grassley and Udall make this key point:

oil and gas companies should pay fair market value for the public resources they extract and sell. They aren’t doing that now — not even close — and the American public is the big loser.

As the environmental, economic and public health malfeasance of the current administration comes to an end, Congress and the Biden administration will have an opportunity to address the inequity Senators Grassley and Udall point out. The extraction industries deserve scrutiny to insure the American people are getting a square deal. As Theodore Roosevelt put it:

When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.[2]

Fair Returns for Public Lands Act

Early in 2020, Udall and Grassley introduced S. 3330, the  Fair Returns for Public Lands Act of 2020. The following information from Udall’s office explains the legisation:

The legislation modernizes the public lands leasing system since royalty rates were set a century ago in 1920. The legislation increases both the share of royalties that taxpayers receive from public lands leasing as well as rental rates. The new rate reflects the current fair market value, while the bill also establishes minimum bidding standards to lease public lands. Similar measures implemented in Texas and Colorado did not affect the states’ overall production.

“Public lands and their natural resources belong to the American people, and it’s only fair to ask those who profit from them to return a fair share to taxpayers.” Udall said. “Oil and gas companies are paying significantly higher royalty rates offshore and on many state and private lands, and there is no need to give federal onshore producers a sweetheart deal at a time of record U.S. production along with rising climate change and habitat impacts.  After one hundred years of the Mineral Leasing Act, it is high time for real reform that gives state and federal taxpayers their fair share of royalties that fund important education, infrastructure, public health and environmental needs in communities across the country and particularly in the West. I am proud to introduce this commonsense, bipartisan bill with Senator Grassley to ensure that New Mexicans and the American people get a fair deal when they let for-profit companies operate on their public land.”

“Low royalty rates on oil produced on federal lands has deprived the federal treasury of billions of dollars. Today marks 100 years since Congress passed the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. Since then, the royalty rate has not been addressed. This is just one example of Big Oil saying it wants a free market, but lobbying for taxpayer-funded corporate welfare. It’s time for my colleagues in Congress to end this oil company loophole, end the corporate welfare and bring oil leasing into the 21st century,” Grassley said. 

According to studies by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Government Accountability Office (GAO), modernizing public lands royalty rates for oil and gas could increase federal revenues by as much as $200 million over the next decade with little to no impact on overall production. The bill would increase the royalty rate from the 12.5 percent rate established by the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 to 18.75 percent. Many states have already updated royalty rates for public lands leasing to as much as 25 percent, double the current federal rate. 

The federal royalty adjustment will also benefit taxpayers on the state level. Taxpayers for Common Sense calculated that New Mexico’s state government has lost an estimated $2.5 billion in revenue over the last decade because of outdated federal rental rates, below-market royalty rates, and waste from oil and gas wells, with federal taxpayers losing an equivalent amount as well. 

“Thank you to Senators Udall and Grassley for their leadership addressing century old policies that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “States charge higher rates to drill on state lands and the federal government charges higher rates to drill offshore. It’s time our nation’s archaic policies caught up to the real world and stop short-changing taxpayers.” 

“Oil and gas companies should not be allowed to lease New Mexico’s breathtaking public lands, which provide habitat for critical wildlife, for pennies on the dollar. Senator Udall’s new bipartisan legislation will put an end to this practice by updating the federal onshore oil and gas leasing system to ensure that our state’s long heritage of fishing, hunting, and outdoor recreation will remain for generations to come,” said Jesse Deubel, Executive Director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation.

The Fair Returns for Public Lands Act of 2020 would modernize public lands leasing policy by:

– Adjusting Royalties—The bill will increase royalty rates on new or reinstated leases to 18.75 percent over the current royalty rate of 12.5 percent established in 1920 under the Mineral Leasing Act. CBO estimates that an increase to 18.75% would generate $200 million in net federal income over the next 10 years, with an equivalent amount being dispersed to the states based on current revenue-sharing laws. An increase to 18.75 percent will put onshore oil and gas royalty rates on par with offshore rates and on par with many state royalty rates—a strategy that the CBO concluded would have negligible impacts on oil and gas development.

– Minimum Bids—The legislation will increase minimum bids for leasing public lands to $10 per acre. Current minimum bids are only $2 per acre. Higher minimum bids will encourage oil and gas developers to more selectively purchase leases and clarify the companies’ intentions of pursuing actual exploration and development. The legislation will also set a $15 per acre minimum fee for an expression of interest to lease a specified location—known as “nominating” a parcel of public land. This fee will reimburse administrative costs for processing nomination requests and deter speculators from nominating wide swaths of public lands at one time.

– Rental Rates: Rental rates will increase to $3 per acre for the first five years and $5 per acre for the next five years. These increases account for inflation since the first rates were established in 1987. Additionally, reinstated leases will be subject to rental rates of $20 per acre and royalty rates at 25 percent. The bill also establishes mandatory adjustments to ensure that rental rates account for inflation and adjust at least every four years.

The full bill text can be found HERE. A background summary can be found HERE. A section-by-section summary can be found HERE and statements of support including a list of supporting organizations can be found HERE.

-#-

As use and consumption of resources of our public lands continues we must be sure everyone is included in the responsibilities of stewardship.