Commission drops plan for yearly fee hikes

OROFINO, Idaho – The Idaho Fish and Game Commission has abandoned an idea to ask the Legislature for authority to implement small increases in sportsmen’s fees each year.

The commission reaffirmed its commitment to a 13.7 percent fee increase to recover lost revenue since the last fee hike in 2000.

Without significantly smaller but annual fee increases beginning in 2006, Budget Director Steve Barton said the Fish and Game Department will be back in a financial bind a year from now.

But Commissioner John Watts said that while the large increase effective next July appears to have broad legislative support, the incremental plan promoted by Department Director Steve Huffaker does not, and Huffaker agreed.

“I don’t think it’s got a prayer,” Huffaker told the commissioners, who wrapped up their regular meeting in Orofino on Friday.

The 13.7 percent increase that survived the latest round of commission scrutiny would hike the cost of the department’s basic permit, the combination hunting-fishing license, from $29 to $33. A deer tag would go from $16.50 to $18.75. The plan would generate about $4 million a year.

The Fish and Game department receives no direct taxpayer support and is funded mostly by the hunting and fishing license fees. The last fee increase averaged over 40 percent and kept the department solvent for five years.

Without the fee increase next summer, the department would have to cut $2 million from the $30 million side of its budget financed by sportsmen’s fees after drawing down its operating fund balance as far as possible. That balance has steadily eroded over the past four years. The total budget is about $75 million, with the rest of the cash coming from federal or other sources.

After authorizing the incremental fee increase plan earlier this year, members of the commission began having second thoughts this fall as concerns were expressed by both lawmakers and their sportsmen constituents.

Commissioner Cameron Wheeler, a former state representative, maintained that there remains some skepticism about how much the annual increases will be and what that money will be used for.

The department has promoted indexing to limit political backlash on the less frequent but larger increases. But while the 13.7 percent fee increase seems to have support, the political environment has significantly improved from the highly charged atmosphere that surrounded the last fee debate.

Since Huffaker took over in early 2002 as the third director in less than two years, the heated confrontations that often marked fish and game management decisions have disappeared.

Also this week, the commission rejected a whitetail deer management plan that would have eliminated the Clearwater deer tag in west-central Idaho and given hunters the choice between a whitetail tag good anywhere in the state through the entire season or a general deer tag, which would not be good into the later part of the season.