Wildlife Crossing Bills Get Governor’s Signature
Montana motorists have a higher risk of hitting an animal while driving the state’s roads than almost anywhere else in the country and two new laws seek to address the problem.
Research from State Farm indicates Montanans have the second-highest chance of striking an animal of any state in the country.
Wildlife crossings over and under roads have been a solution some states in the Western U.S. look to. Sometimes those crossings are bridges with grasses and bushes on them, and other times they’re small pipes underneath roadways that turtles can wander through. House Bill 855 and House Bill 932, tandem legislation, created an account dedicated to wildlife crossing work and a mechanism to fund it.
Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bills on Monday, Aug. 25, surrounded by members of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Montana Department of Transportation, and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The signing was near the Jens exit of I-90, where MDT recently completed a fencing project to push elk into the underpass instead of crossing the interstate.
Gianforte said Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks will administer the account and support construction of “needed” crossings.
HB 855, which created the Big Game and Wildlife Highway Crossings and Accommodations Account, also creates a new speciality license plate. Money raised from the plates will go to building and maintaining wildlife crossings.
“These collisions hurt animal populations, including animals that are endangered and that we would like to see delisted,” Rep. Katie Zolnikov, R-Billings, said during a March hearing for HB 855, which she carried. “It hurts opportunities for Montanans who like to hunt. It creates public safety problems, and it raises the cost for Montanans through repairs on their vehicles and through higher insurance premiums.”
There’s currently a contest going on for the artwork on the plate and those submissions are due Oct. 17.
Rep. Ken Walsh, R-Twin Bridges, carried HB 932 and spoke at the event, saying revenue from that bill — which stems from recreational cannabis sales — will be sustainable long term.
“I think we’ll be able to continue these projects long into the future and hopefully save a lot of vehicles and save a lot of wildlife,” Walsh said during the event.
It’s hard to know exactly how many animals are killed by cars in Montana each year, said Kylie Paul, an ecologist with the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. Paul has been working on the issue for 20 years and went to graduate school to specialize in wildlife crossings.
There are thousands of carcasses each year however, she said. For elk enthusiasts, seeing a dead animal hit by a car is a little tough. Ryan Bronson, the director of government affairs for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, said better tracking of animals has given them a sense of where the “bottlenecks” are, which helps them decide on locations for projects. Habitat for the animals is fragmented across the west and elk need to migrate around. In an easy to conceptualize example, the City of Missoula closes down Mount Jumbo each year to allow elk to return to their winter range without human interference.
“We’ve been working for quite a while as part of that whole migration effort to get to those bottlenecks and open them up and give wildlife a chance to be able to get across those barriers so that they can go on to where they want to be for the winter,” Bronson said. “And so highway crossings is part of that.”
There’s also federal legislation on this issue that’s up for renewal, Bronson added.
While Montana’s legislation targets vehicles including single cars and large semis, in a similar vein, railroad companies have also been working to reduce animal strikes on their tracks — an issue that led to a lawsuit in 2023.
