Good morning. I just want to take a few minutes to talk about a public initiative that's gathering signatures right now. It's I-161, written by Kurt Kephart from Billings. It calls for the removal of the outfitter sponsored guaranteed license. This is the license that we use to book our hunting clients; this license ensures that when we take a deposit, when the client books a flight and schedules time off from work, when we schedule our crews and submit our itinerary to the Forest Service and pay the appropriate use fees ... this license guarantees that our client can come to Montana and hunt.
Let's be crystal clear right now- the hunting client does not have to buy one of these licenses. He or she can choose to put in for the draw, but there's no guarantee that they will get a license, so the vast majority of outfitted clients in Montana choose to buy the Outfitter Sponsored B-10 combination, as it's known by. This year the guaranteed B-10 is $1250, and the draw combo is $643.
Montana FWP uses the vast majority of the money from the guaranteed B-10 to fund our state Block Management program, providing access onto private land for the state's public hunters.
Kephart believes that eliminating the guaranteed license will "break the tie between the outfitter and the FWP" and somehow create public access onto private land that was once leased by an outfitter. That's kind of a stretch, don't you think?
Anyway, I want to hear from you people. I'm available to write about this, talk about this, whatever you want. I strongly encourage you to pay attention to this iniative. It is bad for outfitting, bad for Montana, and honestly, it's really bad for Julie and I. It could cause irreparable damage to our business.
Do we really want an initiative that's bad for small business and tourism in Montana?
Let's be crystal clear right now- the hunting client does not have to buy one of these licenses. He or she can choose to put in for the draw, but there's no guarantee that they will get a license, so the vast majority of outfitted clients in Montana choose to buy the Outfitter Sponsored B-10 combination, as it's known by. This year the guaranteed B-10 is $1250, and the draw combo is $643.
Montana FWP uses the vast majority of the money from the guaranteed B-10 to fund our state Block Management program, providing access onto private land for the state's public hunters.
Kephart believes that eliminating the guaranteed license will "break the tie between the outfitter and the FWP" and somehow create public access onto private land that was once leased by an outfitter. That's kind of a stretch, don't you think?
Anyway, I want to hear from you people. I'm available to write about this, talk about this, whatever you want. I strongly encourage you to pay attention to this iniative. It is bad for outfitting, bad for Montana, and honestly, it's really bad for Julie and I. It could cause irreparable damage to our business.
Do we really want an initiative that's bad for small business and tourism in Montana?
No comments:
Post a Comment