At what cost?

A story in the Feb. 24 edition of the Sanders County Ledger brought back memories of my childhood.

The story centered on a plea to the county commissioners for taxpayer funds for yet another study of grizzly bears. I remember as a kid reading National Geographic’s story of the Craighead family’s pioneering work trapping, radio-collaring, and monitoring grizzlies in Yellowstone.

And I remember covering a grizzly bear research project as a young reporter for a Libby newspaper back in the 1980s.  The biologists carried three-day-old road-killed deer up the trails in the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness to bait their traps for another study.  I followed the biologists at a respectable distance. Packing three-day-old road-kill on a hot day in August takes strong legs and an even stronger stomach.

I’m now 58.  I’ve been reading about and writing about grizzly bear research for nearly half a century. And the last story I read, in the Ledger, has the bear researchers looking for still more taxpayer money, this time from the county commissioners.

Why?  What possible return on investment can the taxpayers of Sanders County expect from yet another million-dollar exercise in radio-collaring and tracking grizzlies?  Cabinet Wilderness bears have been tracked for 30 years. At what point do taxpayers say ‘enough’?  At what point do the biologists decide they have enough data?

Of course, asking a grizzly bear biologist if he or she has enough data is akin to a businessman asking me if his firm does enough newspaper advertising in the Clark Fork Valley Press or the Mineral Independent.  The answer’s obvious. Being a grizzly bear biologist is a pretty sweet gig, aside from packing road-kill up the hill. It’s also a gig that depends on steady handouts from the taxpayers.

I’d say the biologists studying the Cabinet bears have had thirty years to do their job. If they haven’t done the job in three decades, they need another line of work, not another million bucks.

Please don’t try to tell me that yet another study will get the bears off the endangered species list and allow loggers and miners reasonable access to forest resources. That’s not going to happen. Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester have been impotent in any efforts they may have made to get wolves pulled off the list. Any attempt to de-list bears will be dead on arrival.

If every school-kid and every teacher in Sanders County has all the supplies she or he needs for the school year, if every senior citizen is warm and dry through the winter, if every pothole on every road has been patched, and if every meth-making scumbag has been thrown in jail or run out of the county, then perhaps the county commissioners might spend money on another grizzly bear study.

Until then, the county has higher priorities for your dollars.

By Dan Drewry, Valley Press-Mineral Independent Publisher