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Show Hunting and fishing licenses to be raised By John C. Dickerson In case you missed the news ; yes, the Legislature did grant an increase in hunting and fishing license fees effective ef-fective April 2. The big question now is "What did we get?" and by "we", I mean, not only the Division, but the sportsmen of Utah too. Our Division is, of course, a State Agency, but the manner in which we are funded is distinctly different from other agencies. agen-cies. For many years we did not receive any general tax monies to run our operations basically our revenue came from hunting and fishing license fees. In the last five or six years, we have received some general fund monies (approximately 14 percent of our budget last year) because our programs benefitted people other than hunters and fishermen and this benefit was not being supported by these people. The amount of service that we can provide to the sportsmen is directly related to the amount of revenue we have to work with. On that note, let's take a look at the license increase and what it means to us. First of all, we can only take an educated guess as to how much additional funds will be generated, but that estimated figure is $300,000 for this license year. We asked that combination licenses be raised from $18.00 to $31.00 but that request was cut to $23.00. Our other requested fees for the various licenses were also cut. Out of each license sold, the license agent gets 30 cents for his services and in addition, $1.00 is taken from each hunting license which is earmarked for our hunter education program. We asked that these two fees be added to the basic license fee rather than be taken from the top. A new short term resident fishing license was also created that being a 10-day license for $5.00 for adults and $2.50 for juveniles. Prior to this, a resident had to buy a full season license. As most of you know, everybody and his brother are out fishing on opening day, but after that, the pressure falls off drastically. The obvious question now is "How many people will buy the $5.00 license rather than the $10.50, full season license?" Could this new license actually reduce revenues? We'll have to wait and see. Our people have been under a number of restrictions the past six months in an effort to save money. Our truck mileage has been reduced 15 percent; our time on the job is now limited to a 40 hour week (incidentally, we have never been paid straight time or overtime for excess hours) ; our land acquisitions programs and capital improvements have been completely cut out; fish production has been cut 15 percent and ten to twelve vacant positions have been left unfilled. In addition to this, we just received the t word this week that all activities will be further reduced by 5 percent. Last year we operated in the red by $1 million. Obviously if our estimate of additional funds is correct, the new license fee structure is not going to do the job. The sad fact now is that our programs are going to continue to suffer and the big loser in the end is the wildlife resource of Utah. |