Resources
- Protecting Private Roads
- Stream Access
- UPOM in the News! Read Working Ranch Magazine article about UPOM and property rights. (Adobe .pdf)
- What the Limited Archery Permit Means to You (Adobe .pdf)
Our Message
Montana has had a proud tradition of sportsmen working with landowners to find ways to maximize access to hunting and fishing opportunities. It’s a delicate balance based on respect—respect for property and respect for those men and women who each year carry on the outdoors traditions that make Montana such a unique place.
However, we’ve been seeing a trend lately to politicize access to hunting and fishing. It’s being used as an issue to drive a wedge between landowners and sportsmen where conflict really shouldn’t exist. One of the groups driving the politicization of hunting access, Public Wildlife, has gone so far as to introduce a trio of ballot initiatives aimed at severely restricting the ability of landowners to control access on their private property.
In response to the radical, anti-property-rights agenda being exhibited by groups like Public Wildlife and the Montana FWP Commission, a coalition of interests formed a new property-rights group, the United Property Owners of Montana (UPOM), aimed at raising awareness to land access issues and to try to quell the wrong-headed politicization aimed at separating landowners from sportsmen.
UPOM has been mischaracterized by those opposed to what we’re trying to do. UPOM is a group of landowners, not outfitters. We’re a group that is attempting to bring together property owners and sportsmen, and our membership is open to sportsmen, landowners, business owners, and any other parties interested in strengthening the working relationship between these diverse entities. Any implication that we are a group squaring off against sportsmen runs completely contrary to the purpose of our organization.
We formed due to what we see as a consistent, systematic restriction of hunting access in Montana and the FWP Commission’s disregard for public input from hunters, small business, local government, landowners, and outfitters.
The FWP Commission has begun to use their permitting system in a punitive manner. Their justification doesn’t appear to be based on biology, but on misguided sociology that removes any guarantee that an individual will be able to hunt in any given year, thus limiting a landowner’s ability to maintain lease agreements. This is an outright infringement on private property rights and free enterprise. It appears their agenda overlaps that of groups like Public Wildlife who ultimately want unlimited public access on private land.
Many of Montana’s ranching and farming families have diversified to include niche markets. Agri-tourism and hunting operations help to meet escalating operating costs and pay off debts incurred during the decade-long drought. Keeping the family farm running in this day and age requires the ability to diversify, and the positive results from hunting operations have created landowners with a deeper respect for sportsmen.
The negative agenda of the anti-property-rights crowd, including some members of the FWP Commission, will only serve to reduce hunting access, not to mention damaging the working relationship between sportsmen and landowners that has taken years to forge and lead to one of the most successful wildlife restoration projects in the world.
In the last 30 years we have seen property owners embracing the ecology of their land. It’s not about cash cows or farming up fragile ecosystems, but about diversity and sustainability; managing for all resources in a holistic manner. The flourishing wildlife that you see today on private land is directly linked to this cooperative mindset.
Right now Montana property owners have an incentive to improve wildlife habitat on their land. Take that incentive away, and wildlife numbers will decline and hunting opportunities will decrease.
What we are seeing here is a changing demographic. As people get farther from the land perspective is lost. Aldo Leupold said that the “sense of husbandry is unknown to the sportsman who works for conservation with his vote rather then with his hands.” Further regulations and government-mandated restrictions don’t foster the cooperative spirit that best serves both sportsmen and property owners—rather they’ll have no effect but to create more resentment by both sides and drive Montanans backwards.
United Property Owners of Montana will continue to fight the FWP Commission’s efforts to further restrict hunting and fishing access. We’re also committed to organizing an opposition effort against the three ballot initiatives that will also restrict access to Montana hunters and anglers as well as destroy the working relationships that have been so critical to improving access.
Toby Dahl
United property owners of Montana
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