Rest easy- Your hunting licenses will not be increasing by 85%, for now.
Keeping with tradition, the odd years in Wyoming bring odd and sometimes tired old retreads of legislative bills gone by the wayside from the past legislative session. Senate bill SF0103 is one such case. This bill has been refined from the last time it was introduced but still lacked any real serious support at the state legislative level. The bill failed miserably to emerge from the senate TRW (Travel, Recreation and Wildlife) committee by a vote of 1-4, meaning this proposal was far from favorable once the Committee looked further into the repercussions of such a bill on the Game and Fish Commissions fiscal responsibilities to the state’s sportsman and the department as a whole.
On a bit of a side note, Wyoming is a very traditional and conservative state by nature. Bills like these have a very, very tough road to reality in Wyoming. When it comes to wildlife related legislation, the state has a very guarded approach to wildlife related bills that do not have the full support of the Governor’s Game and Fish Commission. Wyoming sees wildlife management through ballot measures and stiff-arm legislation as a true threat to their system. I do not see our Governor ever signing a piece of wildlife related legislation without the full consent and recommendation of the Game and Fish Commission, period. The Governor appoints the commission at his discretion for a reason. There are lessons to be learned from the Colorado wolf reintroduction debacle.
The details of this bill are somewhat straightforward which is surprising for politics these days, but this is Wyoming after-all. In a nutshell, this bill aimed to cut the nonresident tag allocation for big game licenses to less than 10% from the historic norms of around 20%, depending on the species (moose-16%, sheep-25%, deer, elk and antelope-20%). The original bill introduced a few years ago was very simple and straightforward to that change. But the bill quickly ran into a brick wall regarding funding concerns given the fact that nonresident hunters contribute a massive haul of more than 77% of the total licensing revenue generated by the state of Wyoming. In addition, nonresident applicants in Wyoming contribute more than $12,000,000 worth of preference point fees each and every year to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s budget, while resident applicants only pony up an anemic $100,000. Plain and simple, slashing nonresident hunting licenses by half did not sit well with Wyoming legislators, Game and Fish Commissioners, Outfitters or our Governor. The original bill died quickly.
With the bloom of another legislative year brings another opportunity at a run for this bill as a more refined version including a funding realignment component that would, according to the bill, actually increase revenues to the state Game and Fish Department. This new retreaded bill, Senate Bill SF0103 again sought to cut the nonresident tag allocations by more than half, but also sought to nearly double the cost of what tags were left to nonresident hunters and applicants. In addition, the bill seeks to increase application fees slightly for both resident and nonresident hunters ($5 to $7 for resident, and $15 to $17 for nonresident) alike. The bill would also eliminate nonresident applicants from any hunt that garners less than 10 tags in the quota altogether and would create a $500,000 wildlife crop damage fund with the increased license fees, obviously a landowner crumb thrown in to increase potential legislator support.
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© Eastmans
