As anyone who has survived the various social maelstroms of life can attest, one of the toughest tasks of all is to tactfully reproach a friend.
So it is with the Colorado Division of Wildlife and its dealings with nine conservation organizations regarding the sale and spending involved with special auction and raffle licenses.
How these special tags – which collectively raise hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for wildlife conservation – are administered has evolved as a point of ken debate. Not the least of this is the way DOW conducts its own exclusive license affairs.
A bit of background information is in order.
For years, under legislative dispensation, DOW issued auction and raffle tickets for three species: bighorn sheep, Rocky Mountain goats and, later, moose. These hunt-anywhere, hunt-anytime tags carry enormous appeal, both as a status symbol and an opportunity for a trophy animal.
The notion is to stage auctions to attract big dollars from high rollers (both the Colorado Mule Deer Association and the Mule Deer Foundation each raised more than $100,000 from a single license auction this year) while giving ordinary folks a chance through a raffle at $25 per ticket. More about that later.
Participants in these fundraising projects also include the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Society, Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, Colorado Wildlife Federation, Colorado Bowhunters Association, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Northwest and Safari Club International. Licenses are parceled out by formula among these groups.
All are estimable organizations operating with full intent of doing great things for wildlife. These programs not only raise lots of money, they cement useful bonds with the state wildlife agency.
As Rick Kahn, DOW’s state wildlife manager, observed, “Part of the problem with all this comes in policing our friends.”
Under the original legislation, DOW got 90 percent of the proceeds, the nonprofit 10 percent. Then, in 2001, the legislature expanded the program to include deer, elk and antelope. Only this time, the split went the other way, with the nonprofits getting an 80-20 edge.
That is not the only inconsistency in the program. The original plan disallowed any expenditure on administration, a rule that hamstrings DOW in initiating programs. In turn, this often makes it difficult for conservation groups to weigh in with their part of the money. The result is a growing backlog of funds, both among the nonprofits and DOW. The wildlife agency has a $1.5 million accumulation.
Other problems involve a lack of standardized reporting, with a resulting hodgepodge of bookkeeping. Neither DOW nor the Colorado Wildlife Commission has legal authority to exercise any supervision over the way these nonprofits use the money.
Incredibly, there isn’t even a requirement that the money be spent in Colorado.
Since regulations don’t forbid gifting the winning raffle license to another person, suspicions arose this year that a consortium conspired to buy blocks of tickets to accrue to a single person. Such a scheme circumvents the populist intent of the raffle and the stipulation that no single person can possess more than 25 tickets.
“We need new rules, uniform rules that establish standards and hold these organizations accountable,” commission chairman Jeff Crawford declared last Thursday when that body met in Estes Park.
Part of the problem rests in the fact that standardization and reform requires legislative intervention, seldom a pleasing prospect involving wildlife matters.
No one wants to scrap the special license programs, but it’s apparent some tweaking is in order – if for no other reason than to give these well-intentioned conservation groups a better road map toward doing noble deeds.
“We haven’t done a particularly good job with the oversight of this program,” Kahn said.
Which, after all, isn’t a very nice way to treat a friend.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
