Rich Landers : When computers are involved, it’s not a perfect process

Thanks to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s computerized sportsman’s licensing system, I got the royal treatment in mid-January during my last pheasant hunt of the season.

A friend, who had driven with his son all the way from Portland, met me on some choice Palouse farmland at the appointed time. But even though he had made all the arrangements with the landowner, my buddy announced that he and his son wouldn’t be hunting.

“We stopped at four places along the way and none of them could sell us an out of state small-game license,” he said. “Two places could log us on, but the system wouldn’t let us buy a small-game license unless we first bought a big-game license. One store’s system wouldn’t work at all.”

So they shrugged their shoulders, left their shotguns in the rig, and made the most of our limited time. They accompanied me in the field, doing all the work to handle their two springer spaniels and retrieve the birds while I did the shooting. They even shared their lunch with me.

I felt pampered.

When the hunt was over, they said they had a good time hiking the wheat country and didn’t mind saving $180 in license fees between the two of them.

But they suggested that the next time they drive 600 miles round-trip, they would prefer to hunt.

Washington’s licensing system has been rank with little nagging problems for more than a year since the agency had to go hunting for a new service provider.

Last April, I was hearing from fishermen who weren’t getting delivery of fishing licenses they had purchased online. In August, I heard from hunters who had registered and paid to enter special big-game hunts only to discover that their names were never entered in the drawings.

This fall, some license dealers were having fits with new touch-screen licensing terminals and software at their stores.

The printers were slow and some sportsmen were shocked to see the ink on their license documents faded away after a couple of months in their wallets.

Even in the past couple of weeks, sportsmen were finding glitches in the $2.7 million system for licensing and filing their mandatory hunting activity reports. Wednesday was the deadline to file those hunting reports. Those who missed the deadline will have to pay a $10 penalty before they will be allowed to purchase another Washington hunting or fishing license.

While trying to comply, some hunters were finding that their Social Security number had dropped out of the system and they couldn’t log in.

I went into the system this week to file my report for cougar hunting and was greeted by a new interface that did not recognize that I had already filed reports for my 2006 turkey, elk and deer hunting tags. So I re-filed my reports.

Ron McQueen, Washington Fish and Wildlife Department assistant director of business services, rightfully pointed out that “you hear about bad experiences with the system, but there are a lot of good experiences. Overall, we’re pretty pleased.”

Indeed, the frustration is scattered, but it’s real.

“It’s so bad we might stop selling licenses because it’s too frustrating for our customers,” said a man who identified himself as John, from Waitsburg Hardware. “I’m not a happy camper. … Olympia isn’t responding to my problems. … They see bigger fish than us small businesses.

“I’d like to keep providing this service to our community,” he continued, “but if it’s going to cost us considerable time and money, then it might be time to let somebody else be the local hero.”

But Angela, not far away at the Ameristar store in Walla Walla, said she hasn’t had many problems with the system. “Sometimes it gets a little slow. Other than that, it’s working well. I like the new bigger screens. I don’t have to squint to see the letters.”

Frank Hawley, the agency’s licensing manager who’s had the unenviable job of smoothing these computerized wrinkles, said that overall the new system is more efficient and it allows all the technical support to be done in Olympia rather than diverted to Arizona and Louisiana, as it was under the old MCI system.

This week, however, Hawley was still busy responding to issues, and he seemed to be crossing his fingers when he confirmed that we are just four months away from opening the big game special hunt drawing applications completely under the new system.

“We just sent out new software (to vendors) that increases the speed of license printers and burns the images better to reduce ink fading on the documents,” he said. “We found the problem with the Social Security numbers dropping out and we’ve fixed that.”

Phyllis at The Last Resort on the Tucannon Road near Pomeroy said things are indeed looking a lot better since Tuesday, when she spent hours downloading the new software the Fish and Wildlife Department provided to speed up her licensing system.

“Even here in the country, with dial-up phone service, it’s a lot better now,” she said. “It’s still slow, but people are patient down here because they want their licenses and there’s nowhere else to get them.”

Regardless of whether the system works smoothly or not, Phyllis said, “We’ll have a long line of people come March 1, when the next fishing season opens.”