Water access bill dies

Published 6:00 am Sunday, April 22, 2018

BATON ROUGE — A House divided, with many state legislators wooed by “powerful opposition,” defeated a bill that would have restored boaters’ rights to access public waters in Louisiana.

By a 59-37 vote, House Bill 391 submitted by Rep. Kevin Pearson, R-Slidell, died on Tuesday afternoon in Baton Rouge. The hotly debated bill would have opened up closed waters for public access and navigation.

Two hours of debate on an unusually large number of amendments was spent on the House floor. The amendments included the ways landowners could build structures to block waterways, the liability of property owners and, even, how to define “running waters.”

Pearson told reporters that amendments addressing those issues were “poison pills” to help kill the bill.

He said his primary concern was to introduce a bill that eliminated the risk of charges being filed against boaters.

“This bill was never, ever about access to any land. We are trying to allow Louisiana, which once was called the Sportsman’s Paradise, to remain the Sportsman’s Paradise.”

Daryl Carpenter, a Louisiana Sportsmen’s Coalition board member who supported the measure and watched the proceedings with more than 100 other anglers, told the Louisiana Sportsman magazine he actually thought the vote would have been a little closer. 

“Watching this ‘quote-unquote democratic process’ today was totally mind-numbing … We were surprised by the vote. We were expecting it to be closer to 50-50,” Carpenter said Tuesday evening in a story written by Andy Crawford. “But in the last 48 hours, the landowners and oil companies did exactly what they said they were going to do: They brought in their battleships. It was probably close to 30 lobbyists for them — against two for us.”

That helped created obvious doubt and confusion amongst the legislators, Carpenter said.

Pearson said he had reached out to landowners but had received less-than-enthusiastic response from them.

“I have not had any assistance there. It’s just, ‘We’re going to kill the bill,’” the Slidell representative said.

Other proponents were disappointed but not surprised by the loss, according to Gene Gilliland, national conservation director for B.A.S.S.

“Everyone knew going in that this was likely to be a contentious issue and that it might take several years to find a good fix. When the vote came to the full House of Representatives, wealthy landowners and energy companies with deep pockets and armies of lobbyists persuaded legislators from many parts of Louisiana that are not even affected by this issue to vote again the bill,” Gilliland said in a prepared statement released by B.A.S.S., the nation’s largest fishing organization.

“Almost everywhere else, the law says that, ‘If you can float it, you can boat it,’” Gilliland said. “Louisiana is one of the only states in the nation where you can be traveling by boat on public, navigable waterways, and suddenly with no warning find that you are not,” the Louisiana Sportsman’s Coalition said in a news release.

Carpenter said the effort will be renewed next year, noting the group “learned a lot.”