Bill to fund large game animal crossings advances
Legislation that would create a dedicated fund to reduce vehicle collisions with large game animals while increasing habitat connectivity cleared the Senate Finance Committee last Friday (Feb. 17), albeit without the $50 million appropriation originally included in the bill.
As of press time, the bill had not yet come to a vote on the Senate floor; were it to pass in the Senate, the legislation would next be sent to the House.
Senate Bill 72 seeks to fund the state’s ambitious Wildlife Corridors Action Plan, which focuses primarily on the movements of six large mammals: elk, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, black bear and mountain lion. Other species could also avail themselves of the proposed infrastructure, which ranges from wildlife overpasses, underpasses, fencing to direct animals to crossings, as well as motionactivated driver warning systems to reduce vehicle-wildlife collisions.
The legislation has the support of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and several other conservation groups. Garrett Vene Klasen, northern conservation director for NM Wild, knows firsthand how fraught rural New Mexico roads can be due to the presence of large game animals that may be migrating in large herds or individually seeking forage or water.
“Just south of Taos, right past where you turn to UNM, that’s an elk corridor in the winter when the snow gets deep,” he said. “And that’s where I hit an elk last winter. And, I mean, it almost came over the hood and right through the windshield, which could have killed me.”
Vene Klasen said his vehicle knocked the elk into the oncoming lane, where it was struck by the driver of a pickup truck who swerved around Vene Klasen’s vehicle from behind.
“He just T-boned the elk and almost flipped his truck; and I hit the elk with my sideview mirror and doorframe,” Vene Klasen continued. “It was terrifying. A friend of mine the other day in Carson, she hit an elk in her truck and completely totaled her truck and said it was a miracle she walked away from it.
“This affects everyone in New Mexico and it’s super expensive and so many lives lost,” Vene Klasen added. “And like so many things, I believe we’re last or next to last in western states with infrastructure projects that alleviate these things.”
Most of the action plan’s 11 priority corridor projects are projected to cost between $30-$50 million each. The proposed fund would largely be used to provide state matching dollars to leverage some of the $350 million earmarked for wildlife crossing projects in the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as well as for feasibility studies, project design, rights of way and maintenance.
“We have a chance to get money from the federal government; they’re looking for state match,” District 17 state Senator Mimi Stewart, the bill’s sponsor, told the Senate Finance Committee last Friday (Feb. 17). Stewart added that wildlife-vehicle collisions cost drivers and the state an estimated $20 million in property damage, emergency response and healthcare costs, not including the cost of “losing our wildlife.”
“There is $5 million in the budget as it’s come over for this project,” she added. “If we could get $15 million into this fund, we could get the rest of the money for the very first project, which is US 550 overpasses and underpasses at a cost of $45 million. This is an expensive project, program and problem. It’s going to take us a while to do this.”
Noting that House Bill 2, the state’s annual budget bill, contains a $5-million appropriation to the New Mexico Department of Transportation for design and construction of
infrastructure to mitigate wildlifevehicle collisions, the Senate Finance Committee opted to strike any mention of an appropriation and gave the legislation a do-pass recommendation.
Vene Klasen said it’s imperative that the state put more seed money in the proposed fund.
“In the enormity of the expense that we really need to invest in, like, yesterday, $5 million is a rounding error,” he said. “That will pay essentially for planning for one overpass, for one project. Many of us did advocate — and are still advocating at the Legislature and at the governor’s office — that, please, let’s put substantive money in this.”
The action plan prioritizes several other locations in northcentral New Mexico, including US 285 within the Rio Grande National Monument in Taos County and Rio Arriba County, as well as along US 550 north of Cuba, which has among the highest frequency of vehicle collisions with large game animals in the state.
An SB 72 factsheet notes that roughly 1,200 crashes are reported to law enforcement across New Mexico each year, a number which is “almost certainly a dramatic undercount. Nationally, wildlifevehicle collisions exceed $8 billion annually.”
Mike Martinez, Taos Pueblo hunt manager, told the Taos News that a $210,000 wildlife fencing project the tribe completed on both sides of US 64 just east of the
Rio Grande Gorge Bridge — on pueblo land known as Tract A — has proven successful in eliminating conflict between vehicles and bighorn sheep, which were reintroduced in the area in 2006.
“With the traffic on that highway, as the population spread and the herd size grew, there was a couple of vehicle collisions with the bighorn sheep,” Martinez recalled, adding that the tribe secured funding to erect 1.5 miles of high fencing on either side of the road in 2015. Two existing drainage culverts under U.S. 64 were fitted with fencing that keep wildlife from climbing onto the highway while still allowing animals to cross beneath it.
“There was question as to whether the sheep would use them or not, but we’ve got pictures of them utilizing it,” Martinez said. “I’ve taken pictures of them inside the culvert; and of course visual observations of them crossing from one side to the other.
“With a fence being up, we haven’t had any collision in that stretch of highway,” Martinez added, noting that the tribe doesn’t oversee the land across the bridge. “There still has been sheep that have been hit on the west side, where the high fence is not there.”
“The focus was to keep the vehicle collisions down,” he said. “And with those culverts there and the passageway under the bridge, we wanted to keep that connectivity between the north side and the south side of the highway.”