Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting 500,000 acres of public hunting....gone

Bowater land sale may close thousands of acres to hunting

Wed, Jul. 05, 2006

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. � The sale of thousands acres of timberland in Tennessee by a private paper company could hurt hunters, officials said.

The South Carolina-based paper and timber giant Bowater Inc. plans to sell off 250,000 acres of its holdings on the Cumberland Plateau and another 100,000 acres in the Tennessee Valley.

Hundreds of hunting clubs in the state lease acres through the company to hunt on their lands, said Barry Graden, the company's director of sustainable forestry.

"We won't own the land anymore, so we won't have the ability to lease it," Graden said.

J.L. Porter, a deer hunter in Rhea County, said he and 26 other hunters leased several thousand acres on Evensville Mountain.

But Porter said the land had been sold and the lease would not be renewed, forcing him to hunt in a public wildlife management area.

"If you're not a doctor or a lawyer with a sufficient form of income, you won't be able to hunt," Porter said.

Much of the land Bowater is selling has been used by hunters for years, Graden said.

"As long as the company has owned lands, going back to the 1950s, we've always opened up the land for hunting," he said.

The state has lost a lot of available hunting grounds with the purchase of timberland by private developers and other paper companies, said John Gregory, chief of real estate and forestry for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

"We probably had more than half a million acres of public hunting areas from timberlands at one point," Gregory said. "Now we're down to a few thousand acres."

Gregory said the sale will likely reduce hunting land, but hunters will probably still have the options to lease the land from the new owners or purchase acres directly from Bowater.

Gregory said the Wildlife Resources Commission will meet this month in Nashville to discuss the loss of hunting lands.

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As state elsewhere, it's time to renegotiate the lease.

Seen and know of of few timber companies that won't lease to hunting camps. Of course, ymmv...

BTW - 'tis the private land owner's perogative what to do with their land. Be it 5 acres or 500k acres; it's still theirs and they can do with it what they wish.

I was interested because I lease a piece of former Bowater land.
I worked at one time as a consultant to Bowater. They had full-time staff in charge of organizing hunts for corporate guests.

A lot of this land will not be up for lease. The reason it is being sold is the loss of tax deductions, thanks to Congress. Last week I went to a private dinner for large real estate developers. The speaker was one of the most successful developers in America. He explained how he was using these tax law changes to buy out farmers and timber companies for subdivisions.

Not disagreeing with you on the lament of good game land lost to poor development. That sucks.

What does amaze me is how the leaseholders in many cases get this sense of entitlement to "their" hunting on "their" land. The land is owned by another and leased out at their leisure, and good, normally, only so long as their ownership lasts. Change owners; change lease conditions.

What also amazes is me is how many times these same leaseholders raise plue-perfect Helll if/when the land is sold to a conservation group EVEN if the conservation group will permit hunting... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />

I agree. As a landowner myself, I used to not care about public hunting land, but I have changed my mind. I think it is an important part of our RIGHT to hunt. In SC, when Duke Power was convinced to stop selling off land piecemeal to developers and sell it in one chunk, a bunch of wealthy people and groups banded together to buy it, and got the state to buy a chunk.

Then the anti-hunting, anti-road, fringe granola types showed up and started demanding this and that use be prohibited, after contributing exactly nothing to the preservation of the 49,000 acres of mountain range.

Lee24;

My suggestion?

Get as many hunters/anglers/etc. as you know to get involved with groups like The Nature Conservancy. I worked for TNC, that group buys land like this and is very open to hunting. FAR, FAR better than the alternatives, and with more of US on it's membership and leadership rolls, the better off we all are.

Abolition of property taxes, estate taxes and income taxes would be necessary to prevent farmers and ranchers from having to sell out to development vultures.

Unfortunately, too many hunters expect to be able to hunt for free, so they do nothing to preserve anything. Then they are the first ones to bitch, whine and poach when a big timber company sells off their WMA land.

Very true on the second point. Amen...

Not true on the first point. Conservation easements, PDRs (purchase of development rights), and a host of other options are available. The trick is to get that word out to folks BEFORE they sell off to developers.

Contact the Land Trust Alliance (www.lta.org) or The Nature Conservancy (nature.org) for more details.

Trust me, I used to do this all the time. It worked beautifully.

not trying to start a war, just suggesting another way to look at it........

loss of tax deductions can also be read as loss of government subsidies.......as in corporate welfare.......every taxpayer was paying for those subsidies, but not all of us were reaping any benefit..........

I don't like the loss of public hunting lands, but, private land that is subsidized by tax dollars and then leased by hunting clubs.....well, that isn't my idea of public hunting land.......

Sounds like you are guessing, and using a slogan.

Since I grew up in the timber and farming business, I am not guessing. I have worked as a consultant in operations to Bowater, I lease from Catawba, and discussed this matter at length with the president of another large forestry products company over dinner just last month.

Farming and timber have special tax breaks because property taxes are too high for a businesses with 3 years of total failure out of every 10 (farming and ranching) or long returns on investment (pulpwood and timber). An economist would assert that the necessity of exceptions to prevent bankruptcy is an indication that the taxes are too high. But politicians find it cheaper to grant a few exceptions than to lower or eliminate taxes which bear no relationship to revenue, like property taxes.

The executives who run these paper companies get paid bonuses based on stock price performance. Most came from outside of the business, and they don't care how they drive up the price. If the government changes the rules, they will just liquidate old assets with high paper profits. In a few years, they are gone with a $20,000,000 package. It's a whole different mentality than the men who built the business, or the farmer who thinks of it as HIS land.

How is it 'public hunting' land if it was leased to hunt? A club of guys put up a chunk of money and hunted thier own little slice of heaven... I'll put $100 on it they didn't let the 'public' hunt on thier lease!

If you have the money for a lease with them, I'm sure you could scrape up the cash for another lease can't you? I really don't see how this hurts average Joe hunter who can't afford a lease in the first place. The only thing I see that this hurts is the guy that already has pockets deep enought to 'pay to hunt' as it is. So either these guys will have to pony up more cash or come hunt with us heathens on public land.

Same thing happend out here in MD sort of. Except the timber land was bought by the state and made into PUBLIC land and all the leases where/are being disolved. It was a win win situation for average joe hunter... Most of the leasee's cried and whined about it, and in the end gave up because they didn't want to compete with us average joes on 'thier' ground... Funny thing is most of the public land that was once leased is hunted less or equally as much as before.

Hunting leases are as bad as any development IMO. Both lock hundreds of hunters out.

Bowater provided over 1,000,000 acres of its lands for public hunting through Game Management Area designation, throughout the South and in Maine.