At the March 4th public hearing on LD 468 - the now infamous ice fishing bill - I lamented my own poor business sense. Like the story you occasionally hear about the fellow who passed up the chance to buy IBM stocks at fifty cents a share or the baseball scout who thought Ted Williams wasn't much of a prospect, I can only speculate about the wealth I would have generated as the prime sponsor of this bill if I'd had the foresight to sell Matt Dunlap voodoo dolls.

If you're a regular reader of these pages, you may recall a recent article of mine about the ice fishing bill I had submitted with some "thought and prodding." If passed it would delay the start of ice fishing season until February 1st, set a two trap limit on the number of holes anyone could work, and limit derbies to alternating years on any given body of water. In that article, I asked for input on the idea.

Boy, did I get an earful. It got to the point where my wife hated to answer the phone. My mailbox at the statehouse was jammed every day for weeks. My email was loaded up every day with ice fishing explosives. Dutifully I tried to answer every one, although some correspondents hadn't provided return addresses or phone numbers, and some came in right before the public hearing on March 4th.

The general gist of the messages I received was a spectrum of disbelief to outrage. The letters ran roughly 10 to 1 against the proposal. Those who favored the idea really favored it, however. But more on that later. What I learned for certain was much of what I had already suspected; people care a lot about their ice fishing. Bait dealers in particular voiced concern about the viability of their businesses if the season was cut practically in half. Others worried about stemming by so much a great family activity.

Some letters were thoughtful, blow-by-blow accountings about why the bill was a lousy idea. Others skipped the thoughtful, blow-by-blow part and went right to the lousy idea message. One day, George Smith of the Sportman's Alliance of Maine stopped me in the rotunda of the state house and urged me to withdraw the bill. "They're killing you out there," he warned. "It's not going anywhere. Why do you do this to yourself?"

The reason why I didn't withdraw the bill was because of some of the accusations about why I had put it in - that I had submitted at the request of some snobby outfit like Trout Unlimited or the BASS Federation, something the bass clubs were surprised to hear when they contacted me to add to the pig pile. I left it in to get all the stakeholders together and find out what's important to who.

To that end, the letters, calls and emails were extremely helpful. Also helpful were those outnumbered proponents, including a woman who complained that ice fishermen thought nothing of trespassing across her property to get to the lake, and then when she and her family go swimming in the cove during the summer they retrieve an enormous amount of trash from the bottom - including batteries - that fishermen throw down the ice holes. For those concerned about access and the ability to defeat bills like LD 468 in the future, it's sobering information.

In the end, to the relief of the seventy-five or so opponents of the bill (for the record, no one showed up at the public hearing who favored the bill), I made the Ought Not to Pass motion. Sen. Bruce Bryant, my co-chair, seconded the motion, which was accepted unanimously by the committee. The bill is dead. Next time, it might be harder to kill such a bill if we don't continue to hear from people who are affected in the outdoor community. In making my motion, I urged those in attendance - nearly all of whom were wearing brand new patches signifying membership in the Maine Ice Anglers Association - to stay involved. After all, I added, the world is run by people who show up. And then I joined MIAA too. Like actual fishing, banding with fishermen in public policy presents an opportunity unto itself.