I think we can all agree that the first goal should be herd health. A related and secondary goal would be funding the agency responsible for this goal. I'm not sure providing non-residents an affordable hunting opportunity is something any state worries about.
If people think there are too many non-resident hunters in CO I'm not sure why you would reduce the number simply by kicking them out rather than pricing them out?
People hold Wyoming as the gold standard with it's long seasons, if you assume that the way to achieve this in CO is to reduce the number of hunters in CO to the same proportion of hunters/elk as WY and then allocate tags R/NR the same way, you are looking at cutting 31,712 NR tags. This will cost the state of Colorado 20 million dollars. My argument is that if the whole point is to fund our agency, so that the agency may have the necessary resources to manage our wildlife, then it logically follows that instead of taking that budget shortfall you would promote voluntary hunter attrition by increasing the price of NR tags.
I prefer the status quo.
(My math on the tags v. budget loss)
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think in these conversations it's important for people to understand how the departments are funded and in general what drives the variations from state to state. Texas derives only 17% of it's DNR budget from license sales while Colorado gets 54% from these sales. CPAW and issues a number of white papers and a full report on alternative funding sources, essentially trying to mirror Texas, MT, WY, etc and came to the conclusion that TABOR prevents them from any of them.
