Stephen McDaniel St Augustine
What One Day of the Week Was Worth to West Virginia Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida on the push for Sunday hunting
A patchwork that made sense to nobody 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. Stephen McDaniel spent his first year as Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources trying to end it.
The argument was never about Sunday “If hunters don't have to miss a day of work or take any vacation time, they're going to come to West Virginia.”
One legal day
Two legal days
The drive, the lodging, and the fuel all get charged against a single morning in the woods.
Give a hunter Sunday and the arithmetic flips. The trip is worth making.
Who actually benefits •
A hunter who stays a second night buys lodging, two more meals, and another tank of fuel
•
Usually something at a hardware store too
•
Those dollars land in the small county the hunter drove to, not in Charleston
•
Those counties tend to have few other ways of attracting outside money
Seventy percent of the country is eight hours away
70%
8 hours
of the US population lives within an eight-hour drive of West Virginia
drive from roughly 70 percent of the country
“We want you to come here and hunt, not drive through to another state.”
The 2018 bill reached public land
1M+
71,000
380,000
acres of national forest
acres of state forest, roughly
acres of wildlife management areas, about
The 2018 legislation extended Sunday hunting to public land, roughly 1.5 million acres in all.
Credit where it was due “The grassroots campaigns that went on around West Virginia, I don't think we could have done it without all of the elements involved.” Stephen McDaniel A year earlier the legislature had opened private land statewide. The 2018 bill reached the ground that license buyers collectively own.
How policy actually moves •
A proposal sits for years, gets reintroduced, dies in committee, and comes back
•
Someone spent a year in rooms with legislators, sportsman groups, and county officials making the same case
•
McDaniel's business background, 1987 to 2009, meant selling to skeptical buyers was familiar ground
•
Sunday hunting is still law after he left the agency in January 2022
Key takeaways •
Sunday hunting turned a one-day trip into a two-day trip
•
The 2018 bill opened roughly 1.5 million acres of public land on Sundays
•
Grassroots campaigns did the work; McDaniel credited them publicly
•
The measure of a policy is whether anyone would bother to reverse it
About Stephen McDaniel Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida is a business owner and former Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, a post he held from February 2017 to January 2022. He is sole proprietor of Mozark Mountain Tree Farm in Tucker County and co-owner of Readybox of WV, a portable storage container company serving most of North Central West Virginia.
Stephen McDaniel St Augustine