ST. AUGUSTINE, FL, October 21, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ -- In an era when state wildlife agencies are judged almost entirely by how much ground they acquire, a different measure has gone largely unexamined. Acres purchased is a number that can be announced. Acres a person can actually walk into is a number nobody reports.

Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida has spent considerable effort arguing that the second number is the one that matters. He led the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources for five years, and the acquisition figure from his own tenure is the one he keeps complicating.

The Number He Will Not Let Stand Alone

Under McDaniel the agency added 85,896 acres of public hunting ground. It is a strong figure, the kind that closes an annual report cleanly.

He raised the problem with it in public, which is not what most officials do with their best statistic.

"We have a lot of beautiful Wildlife Management Areas where we're spending millions of dollars to create great hunting," McDaniel says. "But in a lot of cases, you can't get to them." There is a ridge roughly eleven miles into the Tomblin Wildlife Management Area in Logan County, West Virginia, with good hunting on top and no practical route up for anyone who cannot make the climb.

What a License Buyer Is Actually Owed

The funding structure makes this more than an aesthetic complaint. Public land in the United States is paid for largely by the people who hunt and fish on it, through license sales and federal excise taxes on firearms, ammunition, and tackle.

In a single fiscal year of McDaniel's tenure, West Virginia sold 809,509 hunting and fishing privileges. Those buyers get older every year, the same as everyone else.

That arrangement is unusual among public goods. Nobody charges a hiker at the trailhead to fund the trail, but hunters and anglers have paid for wildlife management in this country for generations, largely without complaint and largely without recognition.

"We've got to focus on getting better access for our hunters on public lands," McDaniel says. The argument he builds from there is less sentimental than it first appears. A person who paid into the system across a working life now helps fund ground he is no longer able to reach.

A Half Mile, and the Argument It Started

The proposal McDaniel put forward was deliberately small. A permitted route for an ATV or UTV, half a mile long, in one section of one wildlife management area, aimed at older hunters and hunters with limited mobility.

"It's too steep to take a truck all the way to the top, but you can go right up with a four wheeler or UTV," he says.

He also knew what would be heard. Before anyone had accused him of it, he addressed the assumption directly: "In no way are we proposing letting ATV's run through the WMA."

The objection arrived regardless, and McDaniel has never treated it as unreasonable. Public land in Appalachia has been logged, mined, and promised things often enough that residents have earned their skepticism. Every extraction proposal in the region's history arrived wearing a public benefit argument, and enough of them turned out to be what they looked like. When an agency says limited and selective, people hear the first cut.

Why the Suspicion Deserves an Answer Anyway

McDaniel is not an outsider to the instinct he is arguing against. He holds life memberships in Trout Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Quail Forever, Ducks Unlimited, and the West Virginia Deer Association, organizations that spend real money defending wild country from exactly the kind of incremental access he proposed.

His position is that the groups wrestling with the question are the right ones to settle it, and that leaving it unsettled is itself a decision with consequences.

"That's why we have these Wildlife Management Areas and shooting ranges, it's for people who enjoy the outdoors," he says. The sentence is almost too plain to argue with, which is the point.

Every method of acting on it is where the fight begins.

The Quiet Arithmetic Underneath

There is a less noble version of the same argument, and McDaniel makes that one too.

"An aging hunter who can't get out there eventually stops buying a license," he says. "That isn't a feelings problem. That's the funding structure going soft underneath the agency." Recruitment and retention are the slow crisis in every state wildlife budget in the country, and the people hardest to retain are the ones who can no longer manage the terrain.

Measured that way, access is not a courtesy extended to a sympathetic group. It is maintenance on the revenue base that buys the acreage in the first place.

The same logic drove his push to reopen a public shooting range that had been closed for years, where he brought in a safety evaluation rather than argue the point abstractly. His case for it was economic before it was recreational. People who drive to a range buy fuel, snacks, ammunition, and targets in whatever small county the range sits in.

Land Outlasts Every Rule Written About It

Most of what a state agency does can be undone. Regulations get rewritten, programs get cut, charges at the gate get repealed by whoever finds them unpopular.

Land is the exception. A wildlife management area brought into public ownership is extraordinarily difficult to move back out, which is why McDaniel treats acquisition as the most consequential thing the agency did and also the least discussed.

The acreage added during his tenure will be hunted a century from now by people with no idea any of it happened. That is the argument for buying it, and it is also why the work is chronically underfunded, because no official collects political credit for a transaction whose beneficiaries have not been born.

Which brings the question back around. If the land is being purchased for people who do not yet exist, the least an agency can do is make it usable for the people who already paid.

A Call for a Different Scoreboard

McDaniel left the directorship in the early 2020s and now grows Christmas trees on a mountain in Tucker County, West Virginia, where the terrain is not noticeably gentler than Logan County's.

What he is asking agencies to change is the scoreboard. Not to buy less land, which he spent five years doing at scale, but to stop treating the purchase as the finished work. An agency that reports acres and never reports reachability is grading its own homework on the easier question.

His management philosophy has always been to hire people who know more than he does and then get out of their way. On this one question he has been unusually willing to stay in the room.

"The ridge is still there," McDaniel says. "So is everybody who can't climb it. Somebody has to keep asking who the land is actually for."

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