Thursday, May 12, 2005
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: New format for setting hunting and fishing regulations
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries is scheduled to adopt several new hunting and fishing regulations in late October under a redesigned review process.
Listen carefully. This gets complicated.
From May 23 through June 7 there will be seven meetings where the public will be given an opportunity to comment on regulations issues.
On Aug. 18, DGIF board members will meet in Richmond and, after weighing the input of its staff and the comments of sportsmen, will propose regulations they think merit consideration.
Those proposals subsequently will be discussed during a series of 11 meetings scheduled across the state from late August to late September.
Then it is back to Richmond for the board to vote the proposals up or down. The ones that survive this gauntlet become law in 2006.
I plan to follow the process carefully in order to provide information for readers of this site. The new system a bit overwhelming, but I am willing to give it a try.
In the past, hunting regulations have been considered in one cycle and fishing regulations in another. Combining them, and also throwing in boating and non-game issues, is going to make for some arduous board meetings.
Why change the system? DGIF officials say that consolidating the regulation process will “increase administrative efficiency” and will “expand public involvement.” Maybe, let’s see. In reality, it gives the agency the opportunity to operate with fewer board meetings, which can lead to less public involvement and less accountability. One of the options allows the agency to activate the review cycle every three years instead of the current two. Three years is too long between regulation reviews.
For now, let’s concentrate on the May and June public meetings. At these gatherings outdoorsmen are invited to discuss some rather broad regulation issues that have been identified by the DGIF staff. At its March 24 meeting, the board voted to pass them on for public comment.
The idea is to get broad issues -- concepts, if you will -- out for public review, not specifics. During the last hunting-regulations cycle, the DGIF got into a verbal slugfest with bear dog owners who said that they had been blindsided when the process failed to include their input. That painful encounter had a lot to do with promoting this new process.
The question: are the discussion issues going to be so broad, so fluid that sportsmen will have difficulty engaging in meaningful input?
An example, one regulation issue up for discussion is this: “Address deer population objectives through antlerless deer harvest.” With that comes five lines of rather general background information that promotes the idea of killing more antlerless deer in some regions of the state in order to meet the objectives of the DGIF deer management plan. No pre-hearing details are provided as to where additional doe hunting should be encouraged or how that could be carried out.
In an upcoming column, I will discuss some of the issues that are under consideration.
Here are the dates and locations of the pending public meeting. They are scheduled from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., with fishing, boating and nongame to be considered the first hour and wildlife, hunting and trapping the second:
May 23, Holiday Inn, Suffolk
May 25, Halifax County High School, South Boston
May 26, Augusta County Government Center, Verona
May 31, Izaak Walton League Building, Centerville
June 2, Virginia Highlands Community College, Abingdon
June 6, DGIF headquarters, Richmond
June 7, Northside High School, Roanoke
