Home » 2022 Inductees »
Stan Bradshaw ~ 2022 Inductee
Stan Bradshaw – 2022 Inductee
Stan Bradshaw
1949 –
As an avid outdoorsman and newly minted barrister out of the University of Montana in 1975, Stan Bradshaw knew that he wanted to focus on the protection of water resources.
With the Montana Department of Health and Environmental Sciences (now DEQ) and Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, and later with Montana Trout Unlimited and TU’s Montana Water Project – Stan’s career spanned 40 years.
Over the course of his career, he played a key role in several important resource conservation initiatives.
While at FWP, Stan and Frank Crowley of DHES drafted and filed the Clark Fork Natural Resource Damage complaint (based on pollution caused by the mines at Butte). The complaint was filed against ARCO, and it eventually led to millions of dollars for pollution reduction efforts and habitat improvement that have produced a healthier future for the Clark Fork River.
As FWP chief legal counsel, Stan represented the agency in 1984 as a co-plaintiff with the Montana Coalition for Stream Access before the Montana Supreme Court. The court famously ruled the public owned the water and could use it for recreation regardless of the water’s navigable status or who owned the streambed. Subsequently, Stan helped craft the Montana Stream Access Law of 1985, which defines the public’s right to use Montana rivers and streams for fishing, floating, swimming, and other recreation.
Stan went to work for Montana TU in 1987 where his focus shifted from getting people to the stream, to keeping water flowing in the stream. The 1988 drought brought the dilemma of instream flow protection into sharp focus, as blue-ribbon streams like the Big Hole largely dried up. Confronted with the reality that a basin with oversubscribed water rights could still drink a stream dry, Stan and his colleagues lobbied for, and the 1989 Montana Legislature passed, a startling new law. For the first time in Montana history, FWP could lease for up to 10 years a privately held consumptive-use water right to keep water in the stream for the benefit of fish and wildlife. In 1995, the Legislature allowed nonprofits like TU to do the same.
In 2001, Stan was hired by TU to implement the provisions of the instream leasing statutes for which he had lobbied years before. Over the next 18 years, he helped negotiate and draft more than 20 instream flow agreements with irrigators and state agencies in watersheds on both sides of the Continental Divide, helping create greater recognition for the values of instream uses across a broad cross-section of agricultural interests.
Besides his conservation efforts, Stan found time to partner with his wife Glenda and the late Gary Lafontaine in Greycliff Publishing to guide part-time for the late Paul Roos (MOHF 2020), and to become an expert canoeist and canoe instructor.
Stan Lives in Helena with his wife, Glenda.