Improved equestrian trails bill gets Senate hearing

Photo by fusatia

Recently a "bad" equestrian trails bill was passed by the Missouri House of Representatives.

I say a "bad" bill, because the intent of it was fine (to preserve access for horse and mule riders to trails where they have historically had access) but the actual wording of the bill that passed the House had some very severe problems.

Those problems could well have affected other trail and public lands users, including hikers, mountain bikers, and even potentially Katy Trail users.

After talking with the supporters of the bill, including sponsor Rep. Larry Wilson, it was clear that the equestrian advocates meant something far different from what the wording could (at least potentially) be interpreted to mean.

Many of you wrote your Missouri House members recently about your concerns about the bill. Various mountain biking clubs and groups across Missouri have been working with unprecedented coordination to communicate with their members and key legislators. MoBikeFed and our lobbyist in Jefferson City have been working behind the scenes to inform people both in and out of government about the issues and develop support for our position.

The result is just as we hoped: The Department of Natural Resources was able to (finally) officially oppose the bill as drafted. That helped encouraged the bill's sponsor, Rep. Larry Wilson, to work with the equestrian groups, the government groups, and other user groups to re-write the bill to fix the problems.

That amended bill was presented in the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Food Production, and Outdoor Resources today.

With unanimous support of equestrians, government groups, and user groups (including MoBikeFed) this bill has a good possibility of passing this year.

But it's a good bill now--or at least a reasonably decent bill!

And that is fine with us--because we do support better access to trails, roads, and public lands for all user groups, especially other non-motorized users.

At the same time we must protect the interests of our members and supporters--and the original, flawed language of HB 250 did definitely threaten the interests of all other trail and public land users. The final version of this bill, however, is far more restricted and should present no major problems for us.

What can you do now?

* Email Representative Larry Wilson, sponsor of HB 250, and thank him for listening to the concerns of the bicycle groups and being willing to compromise and work together with us.

* If you'd like to support the "improved" equestrian bill, you can email your own Senator and let him or her know that HB 250 previously had some serious problems for the bicycling community, especially for mountain bikers, but the Senate Committee Amendment seems to fix most of those problems.

The proposed text of HB 250 as amended is still something of a compromise (as is pretty much everything passed by the General Assembly!) but it avoids all of the very serious flaws that the original version had:

Access to public land owned, managed, or funded by the state of Missouri, for horse and mule use shall not be denied on trails and roads that are currently designated by the state as land upon which horses or mules can be ridden, except that access can be denied where conditions are not suitable because of public safety concerns, necessary maintenance, or for reasons related to the mission of the agency that owns or manages the land so long as a written statement is posted at the trail head stating the cause and estimated duration of the closure. Nothing in this section shall cause horses or mules to be excluded from inclusion in the development of new trails on Missouri public lands.

Most all of the concerns that our trail maintainers and users had (such as being able to deal with erosion, protection of the natural environment, conflicts between different user groups, and so on, being able to close trails to move them to a better location, and so on) are covered under general heading of "reasons related to the mission of the agency that owns or manages the land."