- A longhorn calf in the Big Bend Ranch State Park herd. Photograph by Valerie Asensio.
According to Robert McCorkle, Media Relations Coordinator with Texas Parks & Wildlife Department there will be no spring cattle drive at Big Bend Ranch SP in 2012. According to McCorkle, “A tighter budget is necessitating reevaluating how parks operate and what they do and…this is one of the casualties.”
In previous years the roundup gave participants the experience of spending three days helping Big Bend Ranch wranglers round up, drive and pen the park’s historic longhorns for vaccinations and branding. TPWD tells us that over the years, hundreds of guests have come from throughout the United States, as well as from Australia, Canada and England, to experience a taste of the Texas’ ranching heritage and the Wild West days at the more than 300,000-acre wilderness park.
Editor’s note: Here’s the rub, as summarized in an article published in the Texas Observer, “Much of the decline in funding can be attributed to the Legislature choking off the flow of the sporting goods sales tax. Since 1995, a portion of the sales tax on sporting goods has generated revenue for state and local parks. Until 2007, the amount TPWD could receive from the tax was capped at $64 million each biennium, even though the tax typically generates well over $200 million in revenue. Although the cap was removed in 2007, the Legislature must still decide every two years how much the agency gets. This session (2011) the House budget-writers are being especially stingy, giving TPWD just $61 million for the biennium – less than what the agency got in the mid-90s.”
The State of Texas has a solution. Some of the Texas State Historic Parks have already been sold to private firms. This will likely continue, and escalate as the legislature continues to drain resources from our state parks.
