Helps shift cost of rescues to people who mostly need them.
CONWAY — More than a year after it was first proposed, lawmakers in Concord are moving forward on a voluntary hiker safety card designed to offset the cost of rescues.
House Bill 256, which was proposed and spearheaded by Mount Washington Valley legislators, would create a $25 card hikers can buy to reduce their liability for the cost of a rescue should they need one.
The bill made it through the senate last week and now goes back to the house for final approval. Then it will go to the governor to become law, all of which local lawmakers are confident will happen.
“We’ve been working on this for quite a few years,” Rep. Gene Chandler (R–Bartlett), the bill’s primary sponsor, said on Monday. “Now we’ll just have to see how much money we can raise.”
Chandler proposed the bill in an effort to get hikers to help shoulder the cost of funding the Department of Fish and Game’s rescue fund. Fish and Game is the agency tasked with conducting searches and rescues in New Hampshire. Currently the rescue fund generates money through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses and ATV and snowmobile registrations. Hikers, meanwhile, comprise the bulk of the rescues in the state, particularly some of the more high profile and expensive ones.
Many sportsmen, including Chandler, have long held that the funding mechanism as it now exists unfairly burdens them, while hikers get the service for free. Over the years there have been various efforts to solve the problem, from charging for rescues to tacking a fee onto overnight stays at high mountain huts, but each attempt has encountered resistance. State law currently allows Fish and Game to charge hikers deemed reckless or negligent who needs a rescue the cost of finding or extracting them, but often times that raises the ire of the volunteer groups who work alongside conservation officers.
This new card, however, could be a way to help fill the coffers of Fish and Game without provoking a backlash.
“The hiker safety card is voluntary, voluntary, voluntary,” said Sen. Jeb Bradley (R–Wolfeboro), an avid hiker and co-sponsor of HB 256. No one will be forced to buy it, but those who do will be supporting local rescues and giving themselves an additional layer of protection should they ever find themselves out in the woods needing help.
The hiking community needs to be part of the puzzle in paying for rescues, he said, and this card is “a good step in the right direction.”
One of the card’s benefits, Bradley said, is it’s sort of like a get out of jail free card: those who buy one will not be charged for rescues, “as long as you’re not reckless.”
New Hampshire law used to allow Fish and Game to charge people for their rescues if they were deemed reckless, but that standard was raised to “negligence” several years later. “It’s tougher to prove recklessness,” Bradley said, so those who get the card will have an added layer of protection.
When the idea of the hiker card was first proposed, Bradley said, it included provisions to charge everyone who was rescued some portion of the expense of their rescue, but that was eventually stripped from the bill. As it is, unless 10,000 people decide to buy the cards there are still going to be challenges filling the rescue fund coffers. “There are big issues that Fish and Game faces,” he said.
Chandler made similar remarks. He’s hoping several thousand people will buy the voluntary hiker safety card, but “even if it’s wildly successful it will not solve the problem,” he said.
And at this point, with no precedent in New Hampshire for such a card, it’s unclear how many people will pick one up.
“If 500 people buy them that’ll be a good first step,” Bradley said. “If a thousand people bought it I’d be pretty pleased.”
“It’s never been done or tried here,” Chandler said, so “we don’t know” how much revenue it will raise.
Bradley said he wants to see the cards available in the local outdoor stores, not just sold online, so people can get their hands on them easily.
“We’d certainly be glad to sell them,” Rick Wilcox, owner of International Mountain Equipment in North Conway and president of the all-volunteer Mountain Rescue Service, said, though he is skeptical they’ll be effective. “In an ideal world it makes a lot of sense,” he said, but he’d be surprised if many people will be willing to pick up the voluntary cards. In his experience, he said, many hikers and climbers are “too cheap to do that.”
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