The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Dan Waite of Turner is an Army combat veteran who founded and manages Operation Reboot Outdoors.
Operation Reboot Outdoors takes veterans on outdoor adventures, including hunting and fishing trips completely free to the veteran and their family. We provide overnight trips, day trips and we even have gold panning and fly-tying classes for our vets. We are nonprofit and our goal is to reduce veteran suicide through comradery and spending time outdoors.
Anecdotally, we have been a great success. We regularly have wives or children of our vets reach out to us and tell us how much of an impact our services have had on the veteran in their lives.
Recently, Rep. Jared Golden’s office was successful in getting us $770,000 toward building our state’s first ADA-accessible hunting lodge so that we can have a wide range of vets, including the severely disabled, do overnights with us and have the comfort and accessibility that they require.
One of the benefits of us building this new facility is that we could apply for the lottery to receive a so-called “lodge permit.” It’s a moose permit that the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife raffles off to sporting camps, that they can then sell for profit to the highest bidder. Operation Reboot Outdoors being able to obtain one of these permits and sell the hunt could raise us up to $20,000 or more per year. When we embarked on this project, we built that into our financial plan moving forward.
Unfortunately, there is a group trying to prevent nonprofits from being able to receive these permits. They apparently want this program to be exclusively reserved for for-profit enterprises.
The bill they are pushing, LD 1737, would create a new term, “commercial sporting camp” to replace the current “sporting camp.” With the new definition of commercial sporting camp, organizations would: need to have a caretaker on premises or nearby; not solicit reservations on electronic platforms for short-term rentals; not be a children’s or educational camp; not be in a town larger than 1,500 residents; be able to collect sales tax; not operate primarily to serve day visitors; and not be a nonprofit organization.
Even without the nonprofit exclusion, I believe this bill has problems. This definition falls under Title 22, which is the Department of Health and Human Services jurisdiction. That means that some bureaucrat from DHHS is potentially going to be judging whether caretakers live close enough, whether they got too many short-term rentals or whether their share of day visitors (food, gas, lodging customers) was too great to qualify for a lodge tag. This should be a major red flag to all sporting camp owners.
The original intent of the hunting lodge tag law was to give rural communities an economic boost. Most people who can afford these hunts are from out of state. They bring their check here and we spend it on the supplies, labor and other expenses required of the hunt.
It does not matter whether you are a nonprofit or for-profit organization, we give the community the same benefit. Additionally, we have the same organizational overhead and variable costs that this influx of cash can help with. The only major difference is instead of the owner of the camp pocketing the profit, we put the profit toward our mission — reducing veteran suicide through comradery and outdoor experiences. We put all of the money back into our community.
This bill would do some good things, like change some statute language around plumbing code for sporting camps. However, overall I think this bill is dangerous for our state’s nonprofits’ ability to deliver the necessary services to our most vulnerable populations. One organization that currently gets a lodge tag, serves kids who are suffering from diseases like cancer or other life-threatening conditions. Who would want to take away their funding?
I think the Legislature must resoundingly defeat this proposal and bring a different bill that addresses the other issues specifically.