re: Best Deer Hunting WMA in Louisiana

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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.

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Gov. Edwards? Is that you?

You don’t tax people who aren’t using the resource. I don’t want to pay more taxes so broke dicks like TunaTime can shoot his little spikes. Let the people who use the WMAs pay for them with higher fees. If they don’t want to pay the higher fees, shut it down and lease the land to people who will care for it and manage it.

I would be willing to bet that once the WMAs reached their potential, there would be people from out of state that would come to LA to hunt much like CO and out west.

Or leave it the way it is now and LA public land will always suck. But you are right...this state (and rightfully so) will never go for a tax hike to let a bunch of TunaTime’s shoot all the small deer they want.

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You don’t tax people who aren’t using the resource.

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Go check out Missouri and then tell me a tenth of a percent sales tax is a bad idea.

But thanks for proving my point.

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With all of the funding coming from license sales the state will never do anything to decrease sale numbers.

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Just to hammer home how wrong this assumption is ("all of the funding coming from license sales"), here is some math for you baws. This is all based on 2017 license sales in LA. I've only done the breakdown on Basic Hunt, Big Game, Bow, Primitive, Duck, and Turkey for Resident and Non-residents; Senior Hunt/Fish; and LA Sportsman.

In 2017, there were 551,024 resident licenses sold. That generated a whopping $6,785,701. Nonresident sales were 9,065 licenses, bringing in $868,861.

So that's $7,654,562. Just for the major hunting licenses (there are 105 different licenses/permits sold in LA for hunting, fishing, and trapping).

So is that REALLY alot of money? That is roughly 32% of the total license sales in Louisiana in 2017. Tack on 376,945 resident basic fish (~$3.58 million) and 229,436 resident saltwater (~$3.21 million), and you have 67% of all license sales in LA, totalling roughly $14.44 million in revenue.

We don't have a ton of money coming from license sales. Not by a long shot. And fishing revenue isn't getting used on WMAs, and all of the funding from hunting license sales isn't being used on WMAs. But thinking that we are just going to increase the cost of the WMA permit to $100 or $200 and improve WMAs is idiotic. The sales would drop off significantly, and the increase in funding from that permit would be negligible.

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This won’t (and shouldn’t) happen for the reasons I’ve already set forth.

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No license increases are going to happen, because people don't want to pay to have anything better. You can't just shove it off on the WMA permit purchases, because you'd have to be outside of your frickin mind to think there are only 36k people using WMAs each year.

And a tenth of one percent is hardly a 'tax hike', but again, thanks for proving my point. I get it though, I'm not crazy about putting more money in the politicians pockets, and if you can't guarantee that this isn't going to happen, why do it? But as long as people refuse to pay more money to have something better (or try to push it all off on one user group), it's never going to get better.

But I'll be dead long before I support privatizing public lands in Louisiana.

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I can't believe y'all have been arguing over this for 6 pages. makes me so glad I don't have to hunt public land. It sounds absolutely miserable.

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It's not nearly as bad as people are making it out to be. But, they are most likely comparing it to federal lands out west, which is just a bad comparison.

The management can surely be improved, but as long as the uneducated hunting public in Louisiana can voice their opinion, and that opinion hold as much weight as it does, we will never see improvements on anything.

Sherburne. Buckhorn

On a different note, which actual state owned WMAs do they log? Just curious.

I think every one of the 12 that they recently proposed forest treatments on are owned by the agency. Otherwise, I doubt those would go out for public comment.

They should be logging them all, and alot more than 200 or 300 acres at a time. Sherburne is 40k acres or something like that, and they are going to do experimental treatments in 200 of that. Sherburne as a whole has 3 different owners (Corps, LDWF, and USFWS), and all of the logging this year has apparently been on USFWS- and Corps-owned lands, but man, that whole place needs work.

I looked at a marked timber sale tract in Sherburn once and it was terrible. There are sales that come out, usually a couple per year on average. Dewey had one earlier this year as I recall. I would imagine with current prices, markets like they are and the strict logging requirements it’s difficult to find a logger.

I was told by a biologist years ago revenue from timber sales does not come back to wmas it goes into general fund.

I was told by the same biologist hunting, game and timber mgt aren’t the only priorities on state LDWF lands. I asked some of the same questions posed in this thread after witnessing giant red oaks at boeuf dying of either old age or, thinking back, possibly hydrology changes.