Turbo - I hope you come to Montana and have a great time. There are plenty of tags and plenty of places to go.
A couple things about the "up to 10%" rule. Montana, Idaho, and Arizona all implement this rule, in differing degrees. Other states such as Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico have separate non-resident pools that the non-residents compete for, with differing percentages of tags that go into that non-resident pool.
Montana is a different duck in many respects and makes it hard to compare MT to some of the other states. Almost all of our non-resident and resident tags are general unit tags. With the exception of moose, goat, and sheep, we have a very small percentage of our tags issued as limited entry.
We sell 120,000 +/- resident deer/elk combo tags every year. We sell 25,000 +/- NR tags, of varying types each year. In that equation, NRs are getting around 15% to 18% of the tags, depending upon the sales that year.
They get this percentage of tags without being forced to buy a $140 +/- non-refundable license just to apply, as is required in Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and cheaper licenses in New Mexico and Utah.
Non-residents can get a large percentage of their money refunded, well into the summer, for no stated reason. In most states, license purchases are non-refundable.
The cost to buy a point for our limited entry tags is very cheap for NRs, relative to some other states. In Wyoming, it is $100 per point for M/G/S. For elk it is $50, deer it is $40, and antelope it si $30. To build points in AZ, UT, and NV, you are buying expensive non-refundable licenses, plus paying application/point fees on top of that.
Additionally, in MT for moose, goat, and sheep, NRs get 10% of the tags by region, not by unit. There have been years when NRs have drawn the majority of the goat tags in my back yard, the Bridger Mountains, one of our best goat areas. They have drawn more than 10% of the ram tags in some of the good areas of the state, as the application demand for NRs in our best sheep units is very high and the 10% is based on other sheep units in the region that might not have very good rams.
Example being Unit 482 in the Breaks. Great sheep. Region 4 gives out a ton of sheep tags over on the Rocky Mountain Front, though few NRs apply there. In many years, NRs can end up with more than 10% of the sheep tags in Unit 482, as they get 10% of all Region 4 tags, capped at the region level and not the unit level.
I am curious as to what other residents, outfitters, and non-residents think about a 10% pool for NRs. Personally, I have no problem if Montana put together a separate drawing pool for NRs, like other states. If we did that to conform more to the models of other statets, I would want us to make changes that are more like other states' systems for NRs. Ideas I think might be worth at least considering as part of a license system overhaul would be ....
>> If we do that, we put 10% of our tags in the pool and round down from .5 or less, round up from .51 or more. That means NRs will never draw a Bridger goat tag, be capped at 2 sheep tags in Unit 680, be capped at 1 sheep tag in Unit 482, etc. If the statewide total is under 10%, we would round up in units that had only 5 tags, until we got to a 10% total NR quota.
>> I would demand that we get rid of the refund clauses that allows NRs to get big refunds way after the draw date that causes MT to be stuck with many left over tags to sell at the last miinute. You apply and draw, you just bought it. No test drives.
>> We would charge a non-refundable license fee as NV, AZ, ID do, at a similar price, just to apply.
>> I would raise our NR moose/goat/sheep prices to something more in line with other states. I would also raise resident fees on these to a price more in line with other state resident fees.
>> As an option other than a non-refundable license for those who do not want to apply and send in the entire fee but still want to earn a point, I would demand that we would allow the purchase of "points only," at the price similar to Wyoming. I would allow that for both R and NR, at fees that reflect the value of being allowed to keep building points without sending in the big money.
>> We would no longer calculate the 10% NR quota by Region for M/G/S, rather 10% by unit. If the state wide total was less than 10% due to rounding down in cases of 15 or 25, we would round up in units with 5 tags until we reached the 10% NR statewide quota.
>> I would ask that we "decouple" the elk-deer combo tags. We would sell them separately to NRs and probably reduce the price on both, but the combined price if someone wanted both would probably be higher than today. I would also get rid of the fishing and small game part of that combo license. We are making NRs buy licenses in a package where they don't want/use much of the package. Let them apply for what they need.
>> The last one I would propose and I know it would get the most resistance is this. We would be like North Dakota, where the number of general deer/elk tags available to NRs the following year would be 10% of the numbers of resident tags sold the previous year. So, if we sell 120,000 resident elk tags and 180,000 resident deer tags in 2013, in 2014, we would sell 12,000 NR elk tags and 18,000 NR deer tags, decoupled as I explained above. This would require a resident fee increase to make up for the lost NR revenue, if we end up selling fewer NR tags. That is fine by me, given how low our resident fees currently are.
Right now, we have a statutory requirement to sell a set number of non-resident tags, regardless of herd health, etc. It ends up with 17,000 elk tags, alone. Wyoming has a similar statute, but caps NR elk tags somewhere near 7,500.
Not saying all of these would fly. Hell, if allowed to think about them for more than twenty minutes it took me to type these ideas, I might not like some of the ones I tossed out there.
If Montana is going to catch up to the other states in how we do our tag pricing, it seems a lot of changes are necessary. Some would benefit specific groups, while other ideas may hurt specific groups.
Interested in ideas other folks have the would get Montana out of the 1970's as far as our tag pricing, format, and allocation systems and get us closer to what other states are doing.
A big part of what we fight about in Helena is due to the archaic old system we have for tag allocations. The amount of legislative tinkering that happens to that system, reminds me of how Congress uses the IRS tax code changes for their social engineering. It is not nearly as complicated as the tax code, but rather than tinkering and complicating each legislative session, we need a total revamp. Adding new tag subsidies as we have over the last few years, and as would happen with SB 380, does nothing but exacerbate the problem.
Now that I am sure my ideas for consideration have raised hackles on all sides, I will take my dogs for a walk and see how much hate mail I get by the time I return.
