House supports license fee hike

A proposed increase in Montana hunting and fishing license fees is likely bound for the Senate after receiving strong support in a preliminary House vote Wednesday.

House Bill 140, introduced by Rep. Jeffrey Welborn, R-Dillon, would provide increased funding for the state fish and game agency to avert a deficit projected to reach $5.7 million by 2017.

Hunting licenses would increase by $10 for residents and $15 for nonresidents,  resident fishing licenses would go from $3 to $21 and discounts for a number of hunting and fishing user groups would be eliminated or reduced.

Currently, Fish Wildlife and Parks is required to budget for 10-year cycles. The bill would change that to four years, which proponents argue makes it easier to address funding needs quickly and improve fiduciary oversight of the agency.

“It’s a small increase to both all residents and nonresidents to use the resource in Montana for a world-class experience,” Welborn said. “This is something that’s being asked for by the very people that will be paying the bills, which are the sportsmen of Montana.”

During the bill’s Jan. 27 committee hearing, most of the testimony was supportive, with opponents primarily concerned with the elimination of discounted or free licenses under the existing license fee structure.

During the House floor debate, Rep. Keith Regier, R-Kalispell, attempted to amend the bill to bring the threshold age for senior discounts back to 62, from the proposed increase to 67.

“Senior discounts are throughout our society, and this would help grandparents be able to hunt and fish with their grandkids,” Regier said. “I’m just saying, it’s 62 now, it’s been 62, let’s leave it there.”

Welborn responded that while changes such as the senior discount age weren’t easy, a large part of the proposal aimed to be fair to different user groups, comparing the discounted licenses to tax breaks.

“A tax credit to one person comes at a cost to somebody else,” he said, adding that the change in projected revenues from the amendment would need to accompany a bigger hike in base license fees to keep the agency solvent. The amendment failed by 12 votes.

Opponents to the bill focused their comments on the agency’s alleged mismanagment of funds and urged their colleagues not to pad its budget until the problems are addressed. Bill proponents objected on the grounds that punitive funding decisions would not solve problems that need to be addressed through legislation.

Prior to the afternoon floor session, Rep. Kerry White, R-Bozeman, put a paper on all the representatives’ desks copied from a 2013 audit of Fish, Wildlife and Parks that found block management funding going to landowners that already had  conservation easements on their property.

The state’s block management program compensates landowners for allowing hunting on their property, and White argued that the payments were misplaced given that conservation easements already require property owners to allow hunting access.

“Money that is in this general license fund is not used for conservation easements [or block management],” responded Rep. Ed Lieser, D-Whitefish. “There are different funds that the state uses to pursue conservation easements, but that’s not part of this bill.”

If it passes today’s final vote, House Bill 140 will next head to the Senate.

The product of 14 months of discussions between agency officials and the state’s environmental quality and license funding advisory councils, the proposal contains a number of provisions to bridge the gap between Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ annual revenue and their ever-increasing budget.

Two years ago the agency cut $1.2 million from its budget, which for 2015 sits at $67,104,680. The new fee schedule would not restore those cuts.

The agency anticipates an additional $5.7 million in revenue each year, enough to zero out the books with the assumption that operating budgets and inflation don’t increase.

Nonresidents would be more deeply affected than residents, with significant jumps in their big game special licenses and increased two-day and 10-day fishing licenses of $10 and $12.50, respectively. Special licenses that are currently free would instead becomes half-price.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks requests to the advisory councils were cut back before being drafted into the bill, including a $500,000 contingency fund that would have required an additional $3 raise in fishing license fees.

Should the bill fail, the agency has begun preparing contingency plans focusing on either cutting budgets for fish and wildlife programs or shuffling around money in programs with dedicated funding sources.

A report prepared by the agency lists possible conservation and wildlife programs that could be affected, including overall enforcement, hunter harvest surveys, grizzly bear management, cutthroat trout restoration, regional support staff and the closure of two hatcheries, resulting in reduced fish stocks.

The report also lists several dedicated-funding programs that could be targeted by up to 40 percent cuts, including block management, habitat acquisition, search and rescue, fishing access sites, fish habitat restoration and wolf predation control.

Speaking about the bill on the floor Tuesday, Rep. Tom Jacobson, D-Great Falls, noted the cuts will mostly affect the agency’s boots-on-the-ground employees.

“The cuts don’t come at the top. They come from the bottom,” Jacobson said. “What we’re going to lose are the game wardens, what we’re going to lose are the biologists, what we’re going to lose are the folks that work on the hatcheries and fisheries.”

If the bill passes, the new fee structure would go into effect March 1, 2016.

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com