The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its final management plan for the upper Mississippi River refuge on Tuesday, scaling back several earlier proposals restricting hunting, fishing and boat access.
The revised plan for the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge now goes to the agency's Midwest regional director at Fort Snelling in Minnesota, who is expected to sign off on the plan in late August after a final 30-day public comment period.
While the plan backs off on several restrictions proposed in a May 2005 draft plan, it still includes zones in mostly backwater areas where people could use only non-motorized watercraft or boats with electric motors instead of more noisy gasoline motors. It also calls for no-wake and no-hunting zones.
Refuge manager Don Hultman said the plan tried to balance the needs of wildlife and people who use the refuge.
"I believe we have been responsive to the public, but also know that it is perhaps impossible to please everyone on a refuge of this size and scope," he said in a statement.
The Fish and Wildlife Service decided to revise its 600-page draft last year after nearly 3,000 outdoors lovers showed up at public hearings in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin to complain about sections of it.
The agency loosened some of the proposed restrictions in a revised draft plan released in December. Many of those changes were included in the final plan announced Tuesday, including:
-Dropping a 25-shell limit for hunters. That proposed limit had been made in the hopes of discouraging "skybusting," the practice of shooting excessively at out-of-range waterfowl that often results in crippled ducks that can't be retrieved.
"It was really controversial to the hunters," Hultman said in a telephone interview.
-Dropping a "no fishing, no motors" provision in areas of the refuge closed to hunting during the fall. This proposal was made because boats can disturb migratory birds, Hultman said.
"It was dropped because there was concern by people who like to fish in the fall," he said.
Instead, the refuge management will ask people to voluntarily stay away from these areas in the fall. Hultman said if that approach doesn't work, the refuge can restrict access to the area.
-Dropping proposals to limit camping to main channel islands and shorelines, to ban campers with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent or higher and to allow district managers to declare some beaches booze-free.
The new plan lets people camp wherever they want in the refuge and wipes out both alcohol provisions, although managers could still remove rowdy campers.
Brad Redlin, Mississippi River coordinator for the Izaak Walton League of America, a conservation group which supported the original draft plan, said he was OK with the changes.
"We don't believe there's been a poison pill in the revisions," said Redlin, who is based in St. Paul, Minn. "We don't think anything has been particularly egregious."
U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., a duck hunter with a house on the Mississippi, called the new plan an improvement over last year's draft plan. But he said he would have preferred the agency to rely more on "voluntary compliance" - people refraining from impacts on sensitive areas without rules - than restrictions.
"Voluntary compliance has been working very successfully in parts of the refuge," said Kind. "That's why I asked Fish and Wildlife to continue with compliance. We won't have the money to hire 200 agents to enforce these restrictions."
But he praised the agency for taking into account public comments in its final management plan.
More than 3 million people a year visit the river refuge, which includes islands, channels, forests, marshes and prairies. The refuge is home to ducks, bald eagles and dozens of fish species.
A federal law enacted in 1997 calls for every national refuge to have a new conservation plan in place by 2012.Associated Press via Minnesota Public Radio
