Increase in hunting license fees needed
An editorial opinion from the Erie Times-News:
Eight workers at the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s Western Game Farm near Cambridge Springs learned they will lose their jobs just in time to cast a pall over their Christmas.
The Game Commission decided to close the pheasant farm next month, along with the Northcentral Game Farm in Lycoming County, to help close a projected $8 million deficit in its budget year. Closing the two farms is expected to save $1.5 million.
In addition to the lost jobs, the closures will be bad news for the state’s pheasant hunters. The Game Commission, which put about 240,000 pheasants afield this year, projects it will raise and release about 70,000 fewer in 2017-18 season.
As Game Commission Executive Director R. Matthew Hough pointed out, closing the farms amounts only to a down payment on the agency’s deficit. Without an increase in revenue, he said, “additional programs will have to be reduced or eliminated.”
Sometimes tough choices have to be made when money’s tight. But the financial squeeze facing the Game Commission has been created in Harrisburg and smacks of the dysfunction that’s so common in the state capital.
The Game Commission receives no direct financial support from state government. It funds its operations through hunting license fees and other sources of income, including leases for oil and gas drilling on state game lands and the federal excise tax on the sale of guns and ammunition.
The cause of the current crunch isn’t hard to trace. The last time there was an increase in the cost of a resident adult hunting license was in 1999, when the fee was set at $20.90.
License fee increases require legislative approval, which the Legislature declined to provide again this year. A bill that would have given the Game Commission control over its fees passed the state Senate but died in the House.
Legislators in 2017 should work with commission officials to develop a fee increase and structure that squares with today’s financial realities and avoids crisis management like the abrupt closing of the game farms.