Tuesday, June 16, 2009

It worked

© By Othmar Vohringer

In all the excitement of last week I completely overlooked an email sent to me by Bill Otway regarding our “Poor Box” action in support of the British Columbia Conservation Officers (C.O's).

Since it appears that some of the information in the email is from confidential sources I am not going to provide names in the following post.

In the email Bill Otway informs me the he got an email from somebody at the BC Wildlife Federation (BCWF) to let him know that information has been received from someone in the BC government that more funding to cover Conservation Officers (CO) expenses and gas money for their duty vehicles has been "found" made available. In other words the CO’s are now able again to fulfill all of their duties and patrol their assigned territories.

It is interesting to note that the government “found” the money three days after our “Poor Box” action took place and two days after I posted on this blog. I check my blog stats every day and often see referring urls ending in “gov.ca” (Government of Canada), “gov.us” (United States Government) and “gov.bc” (Government of British Columbia).

Could it be that somebody in the BC government visiting this blog read about our “Poor Box” action and got the ball rolling to find money for our CO’S before more actions are taken around the province by engaged hunters? I don’t know but like to think so.

The media reported about it on the front page the day I went into hospital and the local TV station is still airing a segment on it. Thanks to everybody involved in getting our message out there.

Othmar Vohringer Outdoors
Founding Member of Outdoor Bloggers Summit

5 comments:

SimplyOutdoors said...

That is great news Othmar. And I'm sure that your blog was noticed and definitely helped people to screw their heads on straight.

We had a similar fiasco here in Michigan a few years ago. The DNR was supposedly severely short on cash, and needed to increase hunting license fees, and then magically they found 20 million dollars. Yep, you read that right, 20 million.

I'm glad to hear that the CO's will be able to do their jobs, and it just goes to show that us bloggers can have some pull every once in awhile.

By the way - hope you're feeling better every day. And how did the surgery go?

Caleb Pearce said...

Thats great news!

and I hope your nose is feeling better.

CDGardens said...

It is a sad state of affairs when the funds that should be funneled towards specific activities ends up lost in a general fund.

Great to hear your attention and blogging skill have brought these issues to the surface before they had time to put a damper on future monetary resources.

It is time to keep our lawmakers responsible to the people who put them in office.

Unknown said...

Sounds like government is the same everywhere. They aren't interested in doing what's right for right sake, but when they think it might benefit them, or hurt them, they jump right on it.

Good work keeping them on their toes. Need more of that.

http://www.rodandriflerag.com/

Othmar Vohringer said...

Thanks for all your comments. I do believe that we as outdoor bloggers should take every opportunity to report what is going on. Bloggers reach many people normal media can not reach or at least not as fast a we can.

-ov-

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