re: HR 391 (Water Access Rights) Passes 5-3 in committee

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arguments from the other side are so asinine

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These clowns get their way and my deer lease (which we've had for going on 70 years) will become public overnight.

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Yeah, because the other side is arguing for access to your land, right?

If you're going to blast someone for an asinine argument, don't follow that statement up with an equally asinine argument against the bill.

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Yes, they are. They just don't realize it.

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How so? I read the bill. All I saw was water; nothing about land.

You're trying with a gotcha, but there are already rulings on area above the physical ground that landowners own

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It introduces the concept of conditional ownership.

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I can see that. However, what logical argument could one make that would allow one to access someone's private deer lease? The deer may be held in publoc trust, but the land is private. The water bottom may be private, but the water came off a public waterway, is tidally influenced, and is navigable, and thus should rightly be considered public access. If you want to say the guy cannot anchor or tie-off to any land, fine. But he does not own the water, and therefore should not be able to block access to it. If it's a marsh, and is not, by definition, navigable, then it is also not publicly accessible, and should rightly be considered private.

A properly written bill would make the canal public (relieving the landowner of the tax burden for that canal) and the marsh on either side private, the same way a state highway is public while the deer lease on either side is private.

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You can't come in here during waterfowl season, but you can outside of it.

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Which is why I thought it wasn't written very well. This would be solved with good definitions of "navigable water" and the boundaries that this legislation applies to. Take away the tax burden of people who would lose "land" because now the canal they dug is publicly navigable, and you solve the problem.

The bill should not allow access into a marsh. But a canal isn't marsh. Apply the Army Corps of Engineers definition of a navigable waterway, and marshes are not public; canals are.

Yes, exactly. That is the problem here. Clearly define navigability, and you don't have this issue. Define it in such a way that the canals are navigable and marsh is not (protecting private property rights), and you have solved the problems.

Wait, what? None of that makes the slightest bit of sense. The marsh is certainly not "the sea", nor does protecting the canals because they are "clearly bounded on two sides by private land" make sense. Just stick with "John Doe dug the canal on his land, so it' private". There are too many examples of public access routes being bounded on two sides by private land to make that ridiculous argument.

Cowboy fan

You ever deer hunted the marsh?
Terrebonne parish is probably 70-80% marsh. It isn’t like most of these canals are passing through dry ground you can access by truck.
Allowing public access down every bayou and canal is going to very much disrupt people’s private property an open up opportunities for theft

Yes and it sucks arse. Can’t have nothing nice or it gets torched/ broken into. Plus the hunting is usually shitty since you are constantly being bothered by bassholes or flat bill wearers driving gator tails.

Problem is that if you make all water public you will have people tearing up your ponds, frogging your lease/property etc no point in owning the land if you have no control

And when I say land I mean everything boundeed by your property lines

No, I understand perfectly. People are using lame excuses for why canals shouldn't be accessible by the public, regardless of how well a proposed bill is written or not.

I guess somehow trespassing isn't an issue on any other land in the state adjacent to public access routes, but somehow in the marsh it would be.