Stephen McDaniel St. Augustine

For most of its history West Virginia told hunters they could not hunt on Sunday. Then it told them they could, but only on private land, and only in counties that voted for it. The patchwork made a certain kind of sense to nobody. Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine , Florida spent his first year as Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources trying to end it. "When I came here last year and sat down with folks at wildlife, one of the biggest things we wanted to do in the legislative session was to get Sunday hunting," he said in March 2018. The Argument Was Never About Sunday It was about a two-day weekend versus a one-day weekend. A hunter driving in from Ohio or Maryland has to decide whether the trip is worth it. If Saturday is the only legal day, the drive, the lodging, and the fuel all get charged against a single morning in the woods. Give him Sunday and the arithmetic flips. McDaniel put it in those terms directly. "If hunters don't have to mis...

West Virginia ran a 45-park system for years without charging a soul to drive in. Only nine states in the country operated that way. The bill came due anyway, in the form of lodges pushing 50 years old and a maintenance list nobody had budgeted for. Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida inherited that list in February 2017, when Governor Jim Justice appointed him Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. The parks were drawing about seven million visits a year. They were also drawing roughly $17 million a year in state subsidy just to keep the doors open. Free Was Never Free Somebody pays for a park. If it is not the visitor, it is the taxpayer, and if it is neither, it is the building itself, quietly, over 20 years, until the roof fails. McDaniel put the problem plainly at the time. "Many of our lodge parks in our system are approaching 50 years of age," he said. "We have a lot of deferred maintenance." That is not a complaint about money. ...