Robert Bryant

Gretchen Mehmel

Senior managers at both the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should be held  to account for allowing the misuse of federal grants to facilitate logging in Minnesota’s wildlife management areas and aquatic management areas. Both agencies cooperated to fund and allow aggressive logging, which has devalued habitat and undermined the legitimacy of federal grants. It seems the only accountability that will work is to step outside the respective agencies’ control systems and go public, while relying on the Office of Legislative Auditor to do its work. The OLA recently announced a special review of DNR’s oversight of wildlife management areas. …But there still hasn’t been any substantive changes in policy… The solution is to stop treating wildlife management areas like conventional state forest — we need a timber harvest system for WMAs that considers the best interest of the critters, and not just profit-seeking timber companies.