Went to the meeting last night and didn't get home until around 1am. 8 hours round trip driving for a 2.5 hour meeting - a little rough.
Wish we could have met for at least 4 hours if not the whole day or even 2 days.
As a whole it was time well spent. Not sure how many of your will be attending any of these focus groups, but they made it clear that I was fortunate to be selected as they had around 10K people that had expressed interest in being part of these focus groups. The group I was part of consisted of 8 attendee's and they said they broke the state up into 4 groups and would have one additional Non-resident group via zoom call. All of the groups with the exception of the non-residents are in person only focus groups.
I probably wasn't the most popular guest as I wish the CPW had been a little more transparent with the whole agenda. They asked us to bring some of our ideas and to be demonstrate how the concepts would work. The phrase of if you were "king for a day" was mentioned a few times.
For the most part some of the ideas that would impact preference points were completely off the table - such as license allocation between residents/nonresidents, which we told separate focus groups would or had been discussing. Application and license fees again were something that we were not to discuss and we told that upfront license fees would not be reinstated and this was off the table for discussion.
We briefly touched on the weighted point concepts, but it sounded as if no changes were going to be made. The group did discuss making the entry into weighted pool higher than 3 years, as we all know of have heard of someone getting their 2nd sheep or goat hunt shortly after they reentered the pool while the rest of applicants sit with 10-20+ years of paying fee application fees without getting one opportunity. Not sure if changes will be made but a 5year or 7year application period was briefly discussed. My read on this was no changes will be made. And the CPW is aware that weighted statistics are rough if only a couple tags are being issued for the unit/species.
Each of us were given time to discuss our top 2 suggestions. Several people shared some of the same ideas so we didn't have a total of 16 separate ideas to discuss.
It was very educational that essentially all of the point creep and frustration is really based on a very limited number of licenses being issued for Areas 1,2, 10, 201, 40, 61 and 76 if memory serves me correctly. And the CPW commented that we need to remember the number of licenses issued for these units in minimal in the statewide picture as a whole. We needed to find a better solution for the whole and not necessarily these few tags.
The group agreed as a whole that no matter what changes will ultimately be made that we want a fair understandable system to issue licenses and would like the opportunity to hunt each year. There was a fairly lengthy discussion about OTC tags and OTC with caps, but again it was mentioned that this is not the focus of this group and belongs in one of the other focus groups.
By the time my turn came to discuss my ideas most of my ideas had been somewhat discussed and I recommended to make all buck/bull tags limited which again conflicts with the OTC models.
I could keep rambling on, but ultimately this groups top 2 ideas were:
Reinstitute Point Banking at least 3-5 years so we can see the better picture of this model. I wasn't aware that last time they tried it, they had many of the applicants returning tags to restore points because of the initial point creep the 1st year. Therefore the model didn't get a chance to play out.
2nd idea was to change the high point units to different model.
50% of the tags go to the max point holder
50% go into random draw for the applicants of this unit/license. The threshold to get into the random draw was still being worked out, but a 10 year period was mentioned.
If this model is used it would replace the Hybrid Model.
Between these two ideas all of the longer term applicants would have 3 choices:
1)Hold the course and hope you live long enough to draw the tag.
2)Use point banking to start shedding some points and enjoy other hunts.
3) Get enough points or keep enough points to stay in the random draw for one of the highly coveted tags.
Again none of this may ever happen, but this was in a nut shell what we came up with. The CPW said there will be another round of public comments available later this year after they have met with all of the focus groups and encouraged us to comment once these compiled recommendations come out.
Happy Hunting!!