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A bill introduced to the Montana Legislature this week would add a small fee to snowmobile rentals to fund maintenance and grooming operations on Montana’s more than 4,000 miles of motorized winter trails.
Sen. Barry Usher, R-Billings, brought Senate Bill 165 before the Senate Fish and Game committee on Thursday to add a $5 “trail enhancement fee” for anyone who rents a snowmobile in Montana, with the intent of funneling the fees to the local snowmobile clubs that conduct grooming operations.
The bill is mostly aimed at tourists, Usher said, though he acknowledged that some Montanans would also pay the fee, including himself. But residents and visitors alike would greatly benefit from better trails.
“The snowmobilers have taken the responsibility to groom in the winters for anybody, whether it’s a bicycle, everybody. So they’re stepping up and doing that,” Usher said.
The state’s 4,000 miles of winter motorized trails are groomed by local clubs or chambers of commerce partially funded with grant money provided by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The grooming funds are derived from snowmobile gas tax refunds and decal fees, as well as the winter trail pass fee required to legally ride on groomed trails.
Winter trail passes are required for snowmobilers, dog sledders and other mechanized winter trail users and cost $20 for residents and $35 for nonresidents.
“Tourism has just boomed. Everybody wants to come enjoy our back country, our wonderful areas in Montana, and so rental vendors have expanded like crazy, and they put out a lot more machines,” Montana Snowmobile Association President Fred Bailey said. “Because of it, there are certain high tourist areas, that we can’t, through the state grooming program, with our clubs, we cannot maintain those trails well enough to be safe and to be comfortable.”
Bailey said that poorly maintained trails mean a rough experience for visitors to the state — something rental vendors have noticed and discussed — as well as safety hazards for everyone involved.
The state’s 26 snowmobile clubs are the primary caretakers of the state’s trails, each group grooming a specific portion. The trails are open for all winter uses, including dog sledding, fat-tire bikers, cross country skiers, and other winter travel.
“We don’t limit anything. We share those, even though we do the maintenance on them,” Bailey said.
Grooming machines they use are expensive to own and maintain, and Bailey said collecting an additional fee from rentals would greatly aid the clubs that maintain the most popular trails, such as those around West Yellowstone and up in the Flathead Valley.
The bill is written for FWP to collect the fee, use 2% for maintenance of grooming equipment, and redistribute the rest back to the local club where the sled was rented from, so that grooming in those areas “will be stepped up,” Bailey said.
Rick David, from the Flathead Snowmobile Association, said that he manages the three groomers for the club, plus two groomers of his own, covering roughly 200 miles of trails in northwest Montana.
“I’m very busy when it snows,” David said. “I’ve spend several hours looking through the windshield watching the excess wear and tear on the trail form the rental snowmobiles and realizing they’re using the trails on my volunteer hours, and I would like to see a little bit of this money come back to the club, to help us out with the groomers and the repairs and be able to groom the trails a little bit more.”
Jason Howell, from West Yellowstone, said the five rental operators in the area along with the local West Yellowstone Grooming Committee all supported the bill. Already, the rental outfitters voluntarily give $1 of every rental toward local grooming operations, but surges in snowmobile popularity has increased the need for funds.
Some snowmobile rentals are done “by the hour, they go out and come back on the same trail, and it just gets beat up, and that’s not good,” Howell said. “Now is the time for commercial use on our snowmobile trails in Montana to catch up and pay their fair share.”
Other proponents emphasized that this is a safety bill, not just a recreation bill.
Like skied out runs at a resort, snowmobile trails develop moguls and grooming irregularities throughout the day, said Connie Walter, vice president of the Montana Snowmobile Association. That greatly increases the chances of riders, especially inexperienced riders, getting into accidents or being thrown from their sleds.
“We’ve had deaths because of that, and we don’t want that to happen,” Walter said. “A lot of these places are destination areas … people that are going to ride are going to chase the snow, so you’re always going to have the volume of riders there. Passing this bill is very important to the safety of snowmobiling in Montana.”
In his closing remarks, Usher said this bill is just “good Montanans helping out good Montanans.”
“They just need a little funding to take care of some equipment and some fuel, and and we can take care of our tourism and our residents.”
The committee did not take any action on the bill Thursday.