governor tag misinformation

M

muleyguy

Guest
unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation about these conservation and governor tags, below is a quote that is completely misleading from Don at SFW from an earlier post:

"In Utah, these tags generate about $1.6 Million a year, and I believe they help bring another $3 Million of sales tax money into wildilfe programs. There is a long explanation, but I am pretty sure I could prove this point.

So, in reality these permits add $4.6 Million a year. To get the same money, deer hunters would have to pay another $46 a year. Or do as other states do - give a lot more tags to higher cost non-resident permits."

The most glaring misinformation above, is that ALL of the conservation tags generate the 1.6 million dollars, that is all of the elk tags, sheep tags, bear tags, deer tags, antelope etc. So, Mr. Peay is taking the 1.6 million dollars from ALL the tags and dividing it by JUST the number of deer hunters to get his extra "$46/dollars per year for deer hunters!!!! There are something like 100,000 deer tags sold in Utah. The 2004 Governor Tag went for $81,000, so, to get rid of the Governor tag would only add 81 cents a tag to all of the tags sold. Pretty small number. There are quite a few other conservation deer tags sold in the individual units, I was unable to find how much these tags bring in dollars, but lets just say that with all of the conservation DEER tags, and the Governor Tag, maybe $200,000 to $300,000 dollars are raised for mule deer. That STILL only represents $3 additional tag fees.

Mr. Peay then goes on to say that these tags generate an additonal 3 million dollars in sale tax fees. OK, I will take your word on that, but it doesn't matter one bit economically, if the inital 1.6 million is raised by hokey auctions or just adding an extra couple of bucks on everybody's big game tags. The next point to make here is that if there is an additional 3 milllion raised through sales taxes, this money doesn't go to mule deer, IT GOES TO THE GENERAL FUND OF THE STATE OF UTAH!!!

We are here to discuss mule deer, not elk, not bighorn sheep, not bears, not antelope. It might be appropriate to have tag auctions for elk because their populations are at all time highs. It might be appropriate to auction off bighorn sheep tags because it is an efficient way to raise money because there are SO FEW general tags sold. But, we are here to discuss mule deer, and mule deer are declining, especially mature bucks. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of a 100,000 deer tags sold in Utah, a few extra bucks per tag would raise an equivalent amount of money or more.

Like I said in an earlier post, follow the presitge and the money and you will soon understand why we have these conservation and governor tags for mule deer. Pretty sad when the founder of SFW has to resort to minsinformation on MM to somehow justify these tags.
 
Muleyguy,
I agree with alot of what you said. I'm going to repeat what I have already said in another post. "Now that this crap has been started it's going to be really tough to get rid of it. Even if we raised tag fees it doesn't eliminate the fact that there are idiots out there willing to pay 81,000 more dollars for a "shooting tag", and there are greedy individuals willing to take it! It all comes down to this. In order to eliminate this and change the way our mule deer are being managed. A group of average hunters (which are the majority by far)are going to have to stand up and say enough is enough and put some pressure on the DWR to change it. We need go back to giving everyone equal opportunity to hunt and stop this class seperation nonsense. The average hunter is being slowly stamped out. As long as we sit back and do nothing, there are those obviously out there willing to take advantage. How long are we going to sit back and take it?"
 

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