Love it.
As far as the rest of this dumpster fire, I sat down and put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, except in a productive way which is antithetical to this thread). First, let's agree on the tag breakdown. The total NR elk and deer A tags for the last 5 years is 32618, 32483, 32806, 32685 and 32603, median of the 5 yrs was 32618. So not 70K. ***Before someone asks, I did not include B licenses for a simple reason, there is no good way to keep them out of NR hands. Those that are draw are on 10% already, if they go to surplus it is first-come first-serve, whether resident or NR. If residents don't want those tags (which it appears they don't want a lot of them) NR are going to scoop them up***
So, 32618 NR A tags for elk and deer. This includes all the recent set-asides (come home to hunt, relative of resident, ad nauseum) and the original cap. Total outside of the standard elk combo, deer combo and big game combo are 3556. Because they are half priced, they are the easiest (easy being relative here) to eliminate. Cost to the dept based on 2025 license prices is $2,561,244. Running the numbers, raising elk license to $30 and deer to $24 makes up that cost.
Now let's run them for the half-priced licenses plus the 2500 deer combos that were removed last year (?). The funding loss to the dept is $4,461,244. Doubling the cost of resident deer and elk licenses ($32 and $40) would take care of that.
Now, let's get crazy and decrease total NR A tags from the current 32K and change to the number everyone (falsely) quotes, of 17.5K of general combo tags. The funding gap then is $9,306,308. If we raised resident deer and elk licenses to $40 and $60 respectively, this would cover that funding gap. At that level, NR:R funding split would be ~60:40. Total NR funding would likely still be closer to 70:30 with the all the other licenses and costs included (upland bird, fishing, turkey, B tags etc etc etc) if not more.
