you guys make my head hurt with wrong and mixed up terminology.
PLO, private land only tags. Anyone can apply for and draw these public draw tags. They are as the name suggests, valid only on pvt land. And are not specific to any one landowner. Get permission for free or for a fee and you are in. A landowner can of course allow as many folks as he wants.
Landowner Voucher, a voucher that entitles the bearer to exchange for a unit wide license for the exact species and season stated on the voucher. When sold, these vouchers (and the tag purchased with them) come, by law, with permission to hunt the parcels that are tied to the voucher (the qualifying land). The landowner may acquire, if drawn in the priority landowner preference draw, any number of available tags using the following formula:
"For a species that is eligible for landowner preference, up to 15% of the general quota is allocated to the landowners. Registered landowners receive a number of acreage applications based upon the number of deeded acres owned and properly registered:
160 to 639 acres = 1 application per species
640 to 1199 acres = 2 applications per species
1200 to 2399 acres = 3 applications per species
2400 to 3999 acres = 4 applications per species
4000 to 4999 acres = 5 applications per species
5000 acres or more = 6 applications per species"
So a landowner could draw a lot of landowner vouchers and if they sell them, they have to let the buyers access the land (but just the parcels tied to each voucher) for each and every day of the hunting season at the hunters preference. With no limitation to certain days or weeks of the season. Note a landowner with 50,000 acres could break up his parcels into many large blocks and get a pile of vouchers for each block of land, and thus is not limited to a max of 6 tags as the table might suggest.
I know this stuff cause a louse of a ranch manager tried to deny me my legal pvt land access entitlement this year after I bought a voucher and he, not I, got the crap end of that stick as served by CPW.
The thing to know is a landowner can sell all his vouchers to individual DIY hunters AND also lease the land to an outfitter whose hunters may have drawn limited tags on their own, or have OTC tags for a different species creating a mess of a hunt. No firm restrictions in the landowner voucher program that says you cannot let a pile of guys onto your land including and in additon to any vouchers sold. The rules say the landowner is supposed to obtain and sell a reasonable number of vouchers that would allow alhunters to have a reasonable quality hunt. But no hard and enforceable rules about that general guideline.
In DKOs case, the landowner may have owned that 20 acre piece, but if the tag was actually a product of a landowner voucher that was turned in to obtain the tag, then the landowner ABSOLUTELY had a contiguous parcel of not less than 160-640 acres for the first Landowner Voucher, and then another 600+ acres (can be noncontiguous) for each additional voucher as shown in the table I pasted from the regs. All the landowner needs is at least and only one contiguous 160 acre parcel to qualify. he could have a pile of small noncontiguous parcels and they would all count toward his qualifying acreage amount. Also, the voucher-sourced tag DKO alludes to could have been tied to a different landowner's land and the hunter could have had permission to hunt this other 20 acre parcel--tags obtained via a Landowner Voiucher are good unit wide for all public land and the qualifying private land that the voucher was drawn for, plus any other private land a guy might ge permisson to access within the applicable hunt unit(s)....Or unless DKO knows for sure he saw a tag that was obtained via a Landowner Voucher, the hunter(s) could have been hunting using public draw PLO tags, unrelated to Landowner Vouchers.
Holy smokes, way too wordy. End of semon.
In short a big mess with way too little accountability or transparency.
