YOUR DUES DOLLARS AT WORK MEMBERSHIP SETS 2024 POLICY PRIORITIES AT ANNUAL CONVENTION by CCA Vice President of Government Affairs Kirk Wilbur More than three-hundred California cattle ranchers converged upon Sparks, Nev. from Wednesday, Nov. 29 through Friday, Dec., 1, 2023, for the 107th Annual California Cattlemen’s Association/ California CattleWomen, Inc. Convention and Tradeshow, hosted again this year at the familiar Nugget Casino Resort. One of the primary purposes of the three day meeting was to afford members the opportunity to establish the policy principles of the Association and to dictate CCA’s priorities for the year ahead. That policy consideration kicked off early Thursday morning with a special meeting of CCA’s Wolf Policy Subcommittee. Subcommittee members heard from Tina Saitone, Ph.D., and Ken Tate, Ph.D., of U.C. Davis, who provided updates on their research into cattle’s contribution to wolf diets in California, current gray wolf population trends and the status of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Wolf Compensation Program. The Program – which reimburses ranchers for the costs of implementing non-lethal deterrents, the value of cattle killed by wolves and the impacts of wolf presence upon livestock – was initially funded at $3 million in 2021. State law provides that those funds must be expended by 2026, but increasing wolf populations and the recent development of the Department’s ‘pay for presence’ program threaten to deplete those funds as soon as
2024 or 2025. CCA is committed to ensuring that compensation funding remains available so long as gray wolf management is precluded by the species’ status as fully protected under the California Endangered Species Act. To ensure that there is no gap in funding, the Wolf Policy Subcommittee has directed CCA staff to request upwards of $15 million for the Wolf Compensation Program in the 2024-25 State Budget to be available through June 30, 2029. The funding request could be an uphill battle amid projections that California could see a $68 billion budget deficit next year, but CCA is committed to ensuring that the Wolf Compensation Program remains properly funded to mitigate financial impacts on producers in wolf territory. CCA’s six standing committees also met on Thursday to consider readoption of expiring policy resolutions and to advance new policy to guide CCA’s lobbying efforts in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Below are the operative provisions of newly-adopted policies advanced by those committees and approved by the general membership during the CCA Board of Directors meeting. While “whereas” clauses have been omitted for brevity, additional context has been provided for each policy below. CCA’s full policy book can be found online at: https://calcattlemen.org/cca-policy/. FEDERAL LANDS
Hundreds of federal grazing allotments throughout the state are vacant, in large part due to the agencies’ inability to complete sufficient National Environmental Policy Act analysis on those allotments. The U.S. Forest Service alone has 220 vacant allotments throughout California, and failure to manage these allotments via livestock grazing degrades habitat and results in the accumulation It was a full house for policy commitee meetings at the annual convention. of fine fuels that can promote
18 California Cattleman January 2024