Every county is a little differant depending on how many miles of trails the have or how they decide to set themselves up.
Our county has indivdual clubs that totals 10 in all. The clubs brush, maintain, mark, talk to landowners, etc. Anything to do with the trails. Then we also have a county association which meets and through this association we meet and talk about the bigger things. We buy our grooming equipment as a county, at least the majority of our clubs do. The smaller clubs don't have enough miles so we have to pool our monies and share the groomer. From these meetings we have a director and a representative that meets at the state level, which is the AWSC. The AWSC then has meetings and assigns differant committees plus their Pres., VP, Sec., etc. These people then meet with the Snowmobile Recreation Council, DNR, and the other agencies at the state level to work out laws and inforcements. A good example is the Cap/Step and Deer Hunts plus other important state business. The AWSC employs a lobbiest for political connections at the capital, plus the AWSC leaders will meet with the International Snowmobile Council, or whatever its called. It actually works quite nicely to get information passed on to the clubs from the state level and vice versa. Problem is participation. Not every county is involved with AWSC, most are but not all. Some don't have a director or a rep. Now include that 95% of snowmobilers are not ACTIVE club members so they don't get the info on the issues and wonder why some trails are not open because they don't think about it til there is snow to ride on. It sucks that snomobiling has to play the political game but if you don't play you will get beat, and beat bad! IMO, it is set up quit nicely that the people who are involved with snowmbiling have a say in how things are done. And if everyone who rode was at least a paying member of a club and the AWSC, that would be a voice of 200,000 instead of 25,000. No enviromental group would even try to shut down trails in Wisconsin, they would get squashed like a bug. I have been involved with the AWSC for twenty years and I'm still learning how it all works, too. But this is a nutshell of how our county works.
