The Environmental Quality Council has spent a good part of their time during the interim in putting together a study to assess access on public land in Montana, in particular on how road closures on federal land have affected access. Their study also looks at elk distribution and how less access may have affected elk harvests. A copy of the draft report can be found here.
And below you can read the comments that we submitted to the committee:
The recent decision by the Montana Supreme Court in the Mountain Water case, in which the Court reversed itself from an earlier decision, has set new precedents that weaken the property rights for all Montanans. It’s apparent to us that the decision was more politically motivated than grounded in the law—and we’re not alone, Justice Jim Rice described the Court’s conduct as “apparently hell-bent on condemnation” in his dissenting opinion.
This is an example of why Montana’s Supreme Court is ranked so poorly nationally. Each time it reverses itself—and it does so often, hundreds of times in the last two decades—it creates more uncertainty about what the law really is. And when the Court is viewed as a political animal—active in creating law rather than just interpreting it—Montanans lose faith that they’ll get a fair shake.