With summer just around the corner, the State Bureau of Trails and local snowmobile clubs are starting to approach landowners for permission to let snowmobile trails on their land for next winter's snowmobile season. With 90% of the State's snowmobile trails on private land, individual landowners are key to the future of snowmobiling.

When private landowners are asked to open their land to snowmobiles, they justifiably expect the State to provide ironclad protections against liability risks. This is basic fairness. Landowners who agree to snowmobile trails should not be exposed to additional risks as a result.

The State holds out its "trail liability insurance policy" as a key protection for landowners. Each year the State Bureau of Trails obtains a $2 million liability insurance policy for the benefit of landowners with snowmobile trails. The policy is supposed to cover the legal expenses and damage awards a landowner may suffer if there is a snowmobile accident on a landowner's property. Snowmobile proponents, including State officials, point to the $2 million coverage amount and tell landowners this insurance policy gives them strong protections. Indeed, the head of the Bureau of Trails has stated publicly that the policy is "an insurance model for all over the country".

Unfortunately, this is hogwash. We finally managed to obtain a copy of the 2003 snowmobile trails policy. It certainly is a model -- a model for misleading landowners into believing they have good protection when in fact they don't. The policy's limited aggregate dollar coverage, exclusion for any accidents "off trail" and a hard cap at only $5,000 in medical expenses make the policy more disappearing ink than substance.

Here's a good way to understand the State's snowmobile policy. Imagine your house burns down. You have been told you have $250,000 of homeowners' insurance. But when you call your insurance company to collect, the company says "Sorry, we've already had $250,000 of claims from other folks in the next town over whose houses burned. We're covering only $250,000 in total for everyone's houses, so you're out of luck. No more money for you." Needless to say, you'd be outraged. When someone says there is a $250,000 insurance policy, unless they are trying to mislead you it means there is $250,000 available for you if you suffer a loss.

That's common sense, but unfortunately common sense does not apply in the special world of State advocacy for snowmobiles. The State's snowmobile trails policy has a $2 million dollar amount, but that is the TOTAL amount the policy will pay in a year to ALL landowners for ALL claims. As the fine print in the policy makes clear, this $2 million cap on total payout applies whether there is one landowner claim or 1,000 landowner claims due to snowmobile accidents on their land. The result is the $2 million of "headline" coverage is meaningless. If you are the third landowner in 2003 to make a claim, and the claims made by the first two landowners use up the $2 million of coverage, you get nothing. You don't even get any assistance in defending yourself from a lawsuit. We believe it is highly misleading for the State to present this policy to landowners as "$2 million of coverage" when in fact there may be no coverage at all.

The State Bureau of Trails has repeatedly stated to the public that the State's insurance policy covers all of a participating landowners' land, not just the trail itself. They say it in simple words: "all of your land is covered, even off the trail". This is critical. Many snowmobile injuries and fatalities occur when snowmobiles veer off the trail into trees or other objects. Also, snowmobilers regularly ride their sleds off the trails onto the adjacent land, where the risks of accidents are higher because of lack of grooming and uneven terrain. But as the State bureaucrats have said, landowners are covered in these cases, right? Wrong! Unfortunately, the Bureau of Trails doesn't appear to have read the fine print. The policy clearly states that it covers "only that part of the land leased to or borrowed by the State...or [snowmobile] clubs". So, the insurance policy covers the only the trails. This means landowners are left fully exposed for accidents that occur "off trail" on their land, another huge hole in the State's "model" coverage.

There are other elements of the trails policy that should make landowners fearful. After a snowmobile accident, recoveries for medical expenses are limited to an absurdly low $5,000 per person. It strikes us that the likelihood is about zero that a serious snowmobile accident victim will get out of the hospital for less than $5,000. Guess who may be on the hook for the rest, depending on the circumstances -- the landowner, of course. Also, a special note for towns -- the insurance for medical expenses is not available if the snowmobile accident occurs on a road. This is a bizarre exclusion in light of the Bureau of Trails' willingness to register trails on town roads, including the 3 miles of snowmobile trails on town roads in Dalton (mixing cars, trucks and snowmobiles on town roads was the only way forward in Dalton because private landowners said "no" to snowmobiles). Do the selectmen in these towns understand the limits of the State's coverage? Probably not, since it appears not even the State bureaucrats understand the policy.

There are other gaps and errors that would be laughable if they were not potentially so serious. For example, the trails policy expressly excludes coverage for damages arising from "vehicles designed for use principally off public roads". Let's read that again -- doesn't it sound like the definition of a snowmobile or ATV? Does that mean the policy doesn't cover, um, snowmobiles? Don't laugh yet. New York State had to shut down its snowmobile trails in January when someone read the New York trails insurance policy and discovered it excluded "snowmobile accidents". We certainly hope someone at the Bureau of Trails is reading the New Hampshire policy and is getting some help with the words.

The bottom line for landowners, and their own insurance companies, is that the State's policy may, depending on the circumstances, provide absolutely no protection at all from landowner liability for snowmobile accidents. That is a huge and serious point, and yet you can't find it anywhere in the Bureau of Trails literature. For some reason the State bureaucrats are so single-mindedly focused on expanding snowmobile trails that they are willing to sacrifice basic fairness to landowners, including an accurate, complete description of how the State's insurance policy doesn't work. Until the system is fixed, more and more sophisticated landowners will continue to "just say no" to snowmobiles.