re: Best Deer Hunting WMA in Louisiana

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It’s almost as though you recognize the problem, yet don’t want to do anything about it.

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The problem is you think it's as simple as raising a license fee. You damn well know if the commission proposed such an action the public outcry would be overwhelmingly opposed to it. It would never happen.

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Sorry if you can’t afford a few hundred bucks a year to hunt. Or whatever it takes to properly staff and manage WMAs.

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I can afford it no problem. But you are still failing to see my whole point. People are comparing our public lands to states out west, which is the most ridiculous comparison that can be made. Colorado generated $70 million in revenue from license sales 2 years ago. Gee, I wonder why they have such a well funded department? And assuming their STATE-OWNED public lands are as good as people keep saying, that also makes sense, since of the 23 million acres, they only have to worry about 550k. But they get all of those license sales from people hunting the other 22.5 million acres of federally-owned land. And 83k non-resident hunters (we had ~9600 NR/LA Native/Military licenses sold in 2017).

That's never going to happen here. There were ~36k WMA Permits purchased in 2017; 113k big game license holders. Now throw in bow (27k), duck (54k), and Senior H/F (121k) and you have the 5 most purchased licenses in LA. Throw in basic hunt (152k), and you know what that generated? A whopping $5.3 million.

Why don't we charge more for EVERYTHING? It's not like we are spending a fortune on licenses. Doubling the big game and WMA would generate another $2 million.

But again, you aren't getting anywhere near the Colorado comparison being made. 500k licenses netted them $70 million in 2017. The roughly 500k licenses that we sold netted us $5.3 million. You can't make up that gap just by increasing license sales. It's impossible.

Honestly, the best thing we could do is pass a sales tax like Missouri. That would generate considerably more funding than any license fee increases could. I'm all for increasing license fees, but it can't be the only mechanism.

And this state is so afraid to give anymore money to the government, neither of those things will ever happen.