Talk about a slam-dunk no-brainer.

Here’s a gift, worth millions in plain money, and more in measures money can’t match.

It’s for everyone. First for residents of the Northeast Kingdom, but also for all Vermonters, every American, even anyone in the world.

Not to mention the world itself.

Who could turn it down?

Maybe we could.

“We,” here, is technically the United States of America, or to be precise the Fish and Wildlife Service of its Interior Department, which now has 62 days to accept the gift of  more than 400 acres of land, including 1.4 miles of shoreline along Lake Memphremagog and 228 acres of wetlands.

Or it will turn into a pumpkin.

No, worse. Or it will be sold to whoever will pay the most for it, likely to be someone who will build immense and nearly identical McMansions.

Such are the terms of the will of Michael Dunn, who died on September 1, 2007, and who bequeathed his more than 800 acres on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border to governments, hoping to preserve the land’s “open state” and recreational potential.

But only if those governments agreed to accept the donations within three years of Dunn’s death. Otherwise, the land is to be sold to provide the maximum benefit to another passion of Dunn’s life – the Modern Museum of Art in New York. That doesn’t give Fish and Wildlife much time.

(The federal government of Canada actually rejected the offer, but Quebec Province accepted, so the Canadian portion is saved. For whatever reason, Dunn did not offer a similar option to the state on this side of the border).

It isn’t that Fish and Wildlife is against accepting the gift. At an afternoon tour of the site yesterday afternoon, and later at a public hearing in Newport, Agency officials left little doubt that they wanted to preserve the land and that “we are aware of the deadline,” in the words of Janet Kennedy, the Massachusetts-based regional supervisor of the Service’s Wildlife Refuge System.

So what’s the problem?

Actually, there are two problems, and though right now it looks as though the deadline will be met, both problems illustrate how difficult it often is to get anything done these days in America, and perhaps especially in Vermont.

The first problem is that there is actually some opposition to accepting Dunn’s bequest. Not from the town of Derby, which considers saving the land “a real asset,” Selectboard member Karen Jenne told the hearing. Not from the State Legislature, which overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging the feds to take the deal. And not from the owners of neighboring lakeside cottages, several of whom came to the hearing to urge acceptance.

But Sherb Lang is against it, and so is Hunters, Anglers, Trappers of Vermont (HAT), of which Lang is the president. Lang raised no specific objections to federal ownership of the Dunn land. In fact, he called it “a wonderful piece of property.” But he and his associates are angry at the State Fish and Wildlife Department over other issues, and they remain furious about the 12-year-old sale of what were once called the Champion Lands to the state and federal governments.

This is, in short, a policy position founded on resentment, not an unusual phenomenon in rural Vermont.

The other, more influential, dissenter at the hearing was Duncan Kilmartin, the Republican State Representative from Newport. Kilmartin contended that the plan under consideration by state and federal officials didn’t really honor Dunn’s will, which specified that the land should remain available for “hikes and campers.”

Instead, Kilmartin said, the draft Environmental Assessment (the official subject of the public hearing) gives priority to conserving resources and wildlife habitat rather than human uses such as hiking and camping.

It’s unlikely that Kimartin has a better grasp of what Dunn wanted than does Michael Hickcox, the long-time family friend of Dunn’s who flew to Europe to bring Dunn’s remains home and who flew to Vermont from his San Francisco home for last evening’s hearing.

The proposed plan for the land is “in terms of spirit, exactly what (Dunn) would want,” Hickox said.

Besides, the draft EA does specify that under federal ownership the land will be open to hunting, fishing, and camping. But the proposed new owner is the Fish and Wildlife Service, whose basic mission concerns…fish and wildlife and their habitats. The Service can’t very well take ownership of land primarily for another purpose. Still, people fish, hunt, and camp on its lands all over the country.

The other problem has to do with bureaucratic sclerosis, some of it created by environmental law, which, in this case at least, might end up making it harder to protect the environment.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 creates a complex and elaborate system of processes that have to be followed before a federal agency can acquire property, even for free.

As Janet Kennedy explained it last night, the first step was a “preliminary project proposal,” which started the NEPA process, leading to the draft EA examining whether the proposal “would significantly affect the environment” and proposing alternatives (in this case just two: take it or leave it).

What is happening now is the legally required comment period, after which a final EA will be issued and the regional supervisor will or will not issue a Fonsi, which is not a character in an old sitcom but a Finding of No Significant Impact, after which the Acting Fish and Wildlife Director in Washington may grant “permission to expand the boundary” of the existing Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge, which will include the Dunn land, non-contiguous though it may be.

Got all that?

There is also the possibility that the whole process didn’t start soon enough. The trustees of the Dunn estate seemed to have had trouble navigating the political shoals in Washington until they turned to the Vermont Land Trust for help.

“You would think that giving away this land would take a ten-minute meeting and a handshake,” said Mark Frederick of the Community Financial Services Group, which is handling the Dunn trust. “But some said it wasn’t their jurisdiction, others said the property was too small for them, or they didn’t have the funding.”

When the VLT came into the picture, Frederick said, so did Vermont’s Congressional delegation, and then the process began to move.

In time? Jonathan Wood, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources Secretary who conducted last night’s hearing with a booming voice and a soft touch, said he thought so. The state’s Fish and Game Department (part of Wood’s agency) will probably end up managing the new addition to the federal system, but it won’t cost much. The basic management plan is to leave it alone, and anyway the feds will pay for most of what has to be done.

See? A no-brainer slam-dunk.

Unless it isn’t.

Wild boars have come to Vermont.

No, this has nothing to do with the campaign for governor. These are the O-A-R boars – the four-footed, perhaps 500-pound rooters — not the O-R-E bores – the two-footed, 100-250-pound preeners.

In the interests of scientific precision, let’s acknowledge that these latest Vermont boars are possibly not even full-fledged boars (Sus scrofa in the official nomenclature) but some combination of boar and the regular old pig (sus domestica).

Boars are not native to Vermont. Neither, probably, are cattle (bos), of which there are many more, but there are at least two major differences between the two species: (1) Cows do less damage (although they do their share); (2) cows were brought to Vermont on purpose.

Wild pigs do a lot of damage to gardens, lawns, streams, fish, other wildlife and some tame life, primarily livestock and pets, though possibly also their human owners. As to the wild pigs now (apparently) resident in the state, they were not brought here on purpose.

They emigrated from New Hampshire, where they are not native, either, but where they (sort of, and no insult intended toward the fine citizens on the far side of the Connecticut) belong.

Details shortly, but first let’s make sure this post does not cause panic. Vermont is not being over-run by wild swine. According to the generally recognized authority on the subject, John J. (Jack) Mayer, Jr., there are not even enough wild hogs in Vermont to constitute a breeding population.

Yet.

And there may never be, said Mayer, who is a research scientist and manager at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., and co-author (with I. Lehr Brisban, Jr.) of Wild Pigs in the United States: Their History, Comparative Morphology, and Current Status (University of Georgia Press, 1991).

“The advantage Vermont will have is the weather,” Mayer said. “Piglets may not be able to survive a cold winter.”

The adult wild hogs, he said, rarely live for long, either, because they are so eagerly hunted.

“Word gets out (that there’s a wild pig in the area) and typically it doesn’t last very long. So far, Vermont really hasn’t had a sustaining population,” he said.

But Michigan, where it’s comparably cold,  does, Mayer said. So do four western Canadian provinces which are colder than Vermont and where the wild pigs, Mayer has been told, burrow into hay bales or make snow tunnels to survive a winter night.

But the animals are rapidly expanding their range, so much that the whole country faces what Mayer calls “a pig bomb.” As recently as mid-2008, wild pigs lived in 37 states. Now Mayer estimates 44, all but Connecticut, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Utah, and Wyoming.

Vermont’s boar population is low, fewer than 100, Mayer estimates, all of them in Windsor County, having swum across the river from their New Hampshire home.

No, wild hogs are not native to the Granite State, either. They were brought there, the first of them more than 100 years ago, to live and be hunted in the immense fenced “park” created in 1886 by Austin Corbin, the founder of the Long Island Rail Road.

After enclosing some 9,500 hectares (about 23,000 acres) with 58 kilometers (almost 35 miles) of fence, buried to make it “wild boar-proof,” Corbin bought 1,000 Black Forest wild boars from Germany.

The problem was that the fence was not people-proof, and then and now, according to Mayer, some of the locals, angry that all this land and all that game was available only to Corbin’s fellow-millionaires, kept tearing holes in the fence. Lately, he said, “vandals have been cutting holes you could drive a truck through.”

It is from those gaps in the fence, Mayer said, that according to his sources (whom he will not name; some of them may be among the fence-cutters) several wild hogs have swum across the Connecticut, probably making landfall somewhere between Windsor and Hartland.

Those travels illustrate how relentless and resilient these animals can be. The eastern edge of Corbin Park is about eight miles from the river, and while the area is not densely populated, it isn’t wilderness, either. Those hogs made their way to and across the Connecticut through human habitat.

Should they establish a breeding population here, the consequences would be consequential, and possibly catastrophic. It isn’t that boars are human-eating killers. There would be no need, Mayer said, “to keep the kids home from school.”

But they are voracious eaters who root into the ground everywhere—gardens and farm fields. They will eat, Mayer said, anything “ if they can get their mouth around it — fawns, goats, lambs.”

And pets. Mayer said wild hogs don’t like dogs, and some of the rare confrontations between the animals and humans have arisen when a hog attacked a dog being walked by its owner.

Boars are as ravenous about water as about food, Mayer said, and will root up a lawn’s underground sprinkling system.

They also damage trout fisheries. By rooting, eating, and excreting along riverbanks, they pollute the water and, by removing vegetation, cause erosion that covers trout redds (spawning areas) with silt.

Bears, bobcats, and coyotes eat wild hogs, but not enough “to have any impact on the population,” Mayer said. That’s why, once they establish a breeding population, they are almost impossible to eradicate.

“Hunters will take a certain numbers,” he said. “But hunting will only take 10-to-50 percent of a wild pig population. To control it, you need to take 70 percent out of the population ever year. Lethal removal just isn’t going to do it.”

Besides, not everyone wants to get rid of wild hogs. Hunters don’t, and hunters are a potent lobby in every state capital, including Vermont’s. The boars are “fun to hunt, good to eat and make a really impressive trophy on the wall,” Mayer said.

A wild pig population, then, creates a political problem as environmentalists, farmers, gardeners, and hikers favor extirpating them while hunters fight to keep enough of them around to hunt.

Well, that’s when happens when folks mess around with nature.

As everyone does and must. Agriculture is messing around with nature, and imposes some negative impacts on the natural world. But it’s necessary. Shipping wild animals far from their native habitat so that a few folks can pay big bucks to hunt them is not. There being no such thing as an indestructible fence, such shipments should perhaps be discouraged, or at least controlled.

Raising, of course, the matter of Pete the Moose (see the August 28 post, “The Moose is Not Loose”), about which a progress report. There has been no progress. Maj. Dennis Reinhardt of Fish and Wildlife’s enforcement division, said Fish and Wildlife officials are “continuing to meet Mr. (Doug) Nelson (on whose farm Pete is being illegally confined) and the Department of Agriculture “trying to resolve it amicably.” But Reinhardt made clear that the department is convinced that keeping the moose “absolutely is not legal.”

Correction: Terry Macaig represents Williston as a Democratic member of the House, not Burlington.

Forenote: There will be an extra News Guy posting tomorrow, Thursday (as well as the usual Friday posting), along with an announcement about some new developments at the web site which we trust will be received favorably.

Actually, it might be more accurate to consider today’s post the “extra” one. Tomorrow’s will have more news; what follows is a bit of musing on Vermont and consistency.

Back in the day, Sen. Russell Long, the Louisiana Democrat who chaired the Senate Finance Committee for a century or so, used to sum up the average person’s attitude toward taxation as follows: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.”

Bad poetry, but good political analysis.

As Vermonters are now learning (and proving), the same phenomenon applies to spending. From Gov. Jim Douglas on down, the attitude of the body politic is: “Cut the other guy to the bone, but leave my favorite program alone.”

Poetry no better. Perspicacity identical.

Exhibit A comes right from the top. For years, Vermont farmers and woodland owners have gotten a tax break thanks to the “current use” tax assessment. Nobody opposes this policy in principle; it’s kept thousands of acres open and green by removing an incentive for landowners to sell to developers.

But it’s also expensive.

According to whom?

According to the Douglas Administration, whose tax commissioner, Richard Westman, just a few weeks ago identified the Current Use policy as one reason everybody else’s property taxes keep rising.

As it happens, over the last year or so, the various “stakeholders” of Current Use – farmers, foresters, environmentalists, local officials – have been meeting to try to figure out a way to get a little more money for the state treasury without seriously diminishing the advantage to landowners.

And they succeeded. Or at least most of them thought they did, and they presented the Legislature with a plan that would bring in another $1.6 million in revenue.

Oh, no, said the Douglas Administration, represented in this case by Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Jonathan Wood. Yeah, we need money. We’re $150 million in the hole. But we don’t want money from these landowners because…well, because it’s a good program, Wood said.

Yeah, but they’re all good programs. Maybe what he really meant was—These are our friends.

Then there was the Governor’s major power play to get a special Legislative Board to approve spending several more million dollars for one of his pet programs even as he insists on cutting almost everything else. This was the cap-raising of the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive . (See VEGI Burgher,” the January 13 post)

Assume for the sake of discussion that this, too, is a valuable program. But it never seemed to have occurred to Douglas to apply the same standards to it that he wants imposed on other agencies—spend less than you have in your budget this year because we all have to tighten our belts.

Do not suppose, though, that this “cut everybody but me” attitude is limited to Douglas and his fellow Republicans. At a Democratic fund-raiser a couple of weeks ago, former Gov. Howard Dean scolded lawmakers who might be willing to consider reducing the budget of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.

“We need that program,” Dean said. “It is the perfect public-private partnership.”

It may be, and like Current Use, it has been useful as a conservation mechanism. But it couldn’t survive a year or two with a little less money?

The liberals are somewhat less inconsistent than the conservatives here, because some of them openly call for some targeted and temporary tax increases to help the state over its $150 million budget shortfall. But everybody agrees that programs will have to be cut.

Just not their favorites.

OK, some folks are willing to take less. State workers took a three percent pay cut. Yes, they did it under pressure and to avoid more layoffs, so it wasn’t just an act of noble sacrifice. But it was a sacrifice, as was the five percent pay cut taken by their bosses, the “exempt” state workers who earn more than $60,000 a year. The Stowe teachers agreed to give up the 5.5 percent pay hike they had negotiated for this year.

But these seem to be the exceptions. The default position for Vermont advocates left and right remains a firm and forthright conviction to cut spending. On everybody else’s programs.

Aftnote: Because the News Guy rarely misses an opportunity to ridicule or insult the Burlington Free Press when it deserves ridicule or insult, it’s only fair that the paper’s triumphs be recognized. Last Sunday alone it had three pieces of first-rate journalism: Sam Hemingway’s lead story about tritium contamination at nuclear plants nationwide, Nancy Remsen’s story about the potential impacts of state budget cuts, Candace Page’s fascinating account of niche marketing agriculture in Vermont.