Budget Could Try To Keep Bears Out Of Neighborhoods
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TALLAHASSEE (NSF) – Lawmakers have set their sights on trying to reduce potentially dangerous interactions between Florida black bears and humans.
As lawmakers continued negotiating a budget Monday, the House had suggested spending $375,000 to help prevent bear-human conflicts, while the Senate was seeking $500,000. Budget talks were expected to continue late Monday as the chambers try to work out differences.
Both proposals would top the $230,000 that Gov. Rick Scott requested to go to bear-resistant trash cans and outreach programs. The goal is to keep bears from coming into neighborhoods to look for food.
"Nobody wants the bears to be there in their front yard, rummaging through their trash cans," said Sen. Alan Hays, a Umatilla Republican who oversees the natural-resources part of the budget. "These cans are relatively expensive as well; it's not like just running down to Lowe's and grabbing one or two for your house. So, we just felt like it was good for the state to help them out."
The proposals come after a controversy about an October bear hunt, the first in Florida in more than two decades. Money from bear-hunting permits would go toward the Legislature's proposals aimed at curbing bear-human interactions.
Audubon of Florida Executive Director Eric Draper pointed to the need to educate people about not making food available to bears.
"Everybody agrees that the source of problems with bears is the source of food," Draper said. "If you remove the food, the bears won't have a conflict with people. This is not a problem with too many bears; it's too many people feeding bears."
Center for Biological Diversity Florida Director Jaclyn Lopez, whose organization was among the animal-protection and environmental groups that supported a lawsuit seeking to stop the state-sponsored bear hunt, considers the funding just a start in what the state needs to do to reduce the conflicts.
The next step the state needs to address, Lopez said in an email, is the growth of residential property in lands that are bear habitat.
"Funding to provide bear proof trash cans will help address one of the side effects of sprawling development: securing attractive nuisances that get bears killed," Lopez wrote. "The underlying illness that the state refuses to acknowledge, much less deal with, is the out of control growth that strips away habitat from Florida black bears, and other Florida plants and wildlife, that all but ensures that so-called conflict resolution measures will be needed indefinitely."
The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has yet to decide if a bear hunt will be conducted this year. Commission spokeswoman Susan Smith said the agency is "still reviewing data from the 2015 hunt."
The commission halted the potential seven-day hunt in October after two days, as the number of bears killed quickly approached the quota of 320. Commission officials acknowledged they "underestimated the hunter success for the first day."
The News Service of Florida's Jim Turner and Tom Urban contributed to this report.