AGFC director’s gaffe offends wildlife officers

With one verbal gaffe, Austin Booth’s honeymoon as director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission ended Tuesday after just 20 days.

It happened at the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Arkansas Game and Fish Commission/Arkansas State Police subcommittee meeting at the Capitol. Booth’s brief appearance before the subcommittee followed an hour-long presentation by William Bryant, director of the Arkansas State Police. Bryant spoke at great length about the emotional challenges of being an Arkansas state trooper. For example, the average lifespan of a state trooper is only 59 years. It’s a stressful, lowpaid, increasingly maligned job with frequent traumatic exposure to society’s worse images and elements.

Booth, who began as Game and Fish director July 1, intended to summarize his vision for the Game and Fish Commission. Sitting behind him were all seven of the commission’s governing members. Attempting to be deferential to the state police, Booth said — paraphrased — that Arkansas Game and Fish employees don’t put their lives on the line every day the way state troopers do.

It is well known that wildlife officers have some of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcement. They work alone in remote locations, and almost every person they contact is armed and often hostile.

In a small garden near the front entrance to the Game and Fish Commission’s headquarters, which houses Booth’s office, is a monument to the Arkansas wildlife officers who died in the line of duty. I covered the deaths of two, Monty Carmikle and Joel Campora. Matt Flowers was shot in 2006 while accosting an illegal bowhunter in Burns Park, and Michael Neal narrowly avoided death in a desperate gun battle against two cop killers in the West Memphis Walmart parking lot.

Sitting directly in front of me at the meeting were Col. Brad Young, chief of the Game and Fish Commission’s enforcement division, and Major Nakia Crims, assistant chief who supervises the north region. They visibly bristled at Booth’s comment.

Sen. Charles Beckham (R-McNeil) immediately asked Booth to clarify his statement. Booth compounded the error by saying that the agency’s “professional” conservationists, its biologists, do not work inherently hazardous jobs, and that the agency’s wildlife officers remind him of United States Marines. Booth is a former Marine Corps captain.

Young and Crims bristled at the clarification, as well.

Beckham said he requested the clarification to help extricate Booth from an embarrassing situation.

“I wasn’t trying to bust his chops, but he needed to clarify a statement like that,” Beckham said. “Look, I like Austin and I want him to be successful. A lot of what he says and the way he says it resonates with me, but that [statement] couldn’t go by without a clarification.”

Booth apologized for the misstatement on the podium and at a reception afterward.

Before the day was done, word of the incident reached almost every Arkansas wildlife officer, active and retired, in every corner of the state.

During the commission’s monthly meeting in Little Rock on Thursday, no uniformed wildlife officer was in the auditorium. That is highly unusual. About half a dozen are usually present.

Booth’s error was not malicious, but it is the kind of error that a person might make who has less than one month of exposure to the organization that he leads.

That is what we meant on April 8 (before we knew that Booth was a candidate for director) when we opined: “The AGFC is unique in that its culture and the specialized nature of its mission requires an insider who knows all the players and the playbook. An outsider might have impressive credentials, but it’s reasonable to assume that it would take at least one year to figure out how all of the pieces fit together, how the turf is divided … and to be aware of all the potential, career-ending traps that one could stumble into and compromise his viability as a leader before he even knew what happened.”

We don’t know how this will play out behind the scenes, but Booth’s faux pas is a self-inflicted wound whose healing will exhaust energy and effort that would be more profitably spent elsewhere.