TESTIMONY

My name is Diana Cooper, and I am a joint owner of 60 acres of land on the Bethany-Woodbridge town line, approximately 45 to 50 acres of which are in the town of Woodbridge.

The Town may impose whatever restrictions it wants on town owned property. My comments focus on privately owned property, and whether the proposed ordinance would restrict hunting and the discharge of firearms on private property in ways that are inconsistent with state law.

First, in the preamble, there is an attempt to keep landowners from permitting hunting on their private property, when state regulations explicitly permit such activity under carefully controlled conditions which the Department of Environmental Protection has established.

Second, the proposed ordinance is inconsistent with state regulations, in that state regulations provide that 'it is prohibited to hunt with, shoot, or carry a loaded firearm within 500 feet of any building occupied by persons or domestic animals, or used for storage of flammable material . . .unless written permission for lesser distances is obtained from the owner and carried. Landowners, their spouse, and lineal descendants are exempt from this restriction, providing any building involved is their own.' The proposed Woodbridge ordinance arbitrarily triples that distance to 500 yards and entirely omits the landowner exemptions.

Third, wholly legitimate hunting activities on private property under state law, including hunting by farmers with crop destruction permits, are not mentioned at all. Any local attempt to prohibit or discourage these legitimate activities is explicitly counter to the state regulations and is properly unenforceable.

Finally, I would add that this proposal seems to imply that hunting and the discharge of firearms in our state are unregulated activities which the ordinance seeks to put under some sort of control by the Town, when in fact hunting in Connecticut is a legal and strictly regulated activity. Indeed, Connecticut's hunting statutes and regulations, developed according to principles of wildlife management and law enforcement, are among the strictest in the country, and hunter education, stricter regulation, and rigorous enforcement have dramatically reduced hunting accidents in the state over the past two decades.

I am a law-abiding person. I already, to quote the preamble of the proposed ordinance, strictly comply with State regulations regarding the use of firearms on my property. I do not need the Town's 'encouragement' - a troublingly vague and paternalistic word when coming from a government body with police powers - to continue to do so. Nor in my view should the town be empowered to 'encourage' me 'to refrain from permitting hunting on my land' when under state law I am fully allowed, under detailed and strictly enforced state regulations, to do so.