As rocker Neil Young once proclaimed on a collectible album cover, rust never sleeps. Neither, apparently, does Western Slope landowner greed over big-game license vouchers.
The latest example, one that again will be trotted out before the Colorado Wildlife Commission at its Thursday meeting in Denver, is a proposal to convert three Gunnison-area management units to totally limited draw for elk.
This conversion of units 54, 55 and 551 to draw-only would mean no over-the-counter bull tags would be available for the entire Upper Gunnison Basin. Units 66 and 67 on the south end of the valley already are totally limited.
The Gunnison Valley Stockgrowers Association previously made this proposal at a January Wildlife Commission meeting and followed up with a presentation to the Gunnison County commissioners last month.
The crux of the stockmen’s contention is that the county has too many elk and the remedy is to issue fewer bull tags. Confused? By this convoluted logic, restricting the number of hunters will cause those who do get tags to be more successful.
While this small part indeed may be true, the result almost certainly will not be a greater overall harvest. No matter how the commercial crowd spins it, less is not more.
Nor does it hide the real purpose of the proposal, which is to make more big-money landowner vouchers available while eliminating the riff-raff competition from ordinary hunters who buy bull tags over the counter.
Most prominent in this latter group are sportsmen from Colorado’s Front Range. Rank-and-file hunters generally oppose any action that would reduce their chances at a license. Further, Gunnison businessmen worry that fewer hunters in the field would cause a negative economic impact during these troubled times.
Landowners are allotted 15 percent of all limited big-game tags. These vouchers — often sold for sums in excess of five figures — can be used on public lands in competition with public hunters. Various sportsmen groups are pushing to restrict voucher use to the private land to which they were issued, which was the original legislative intent.
Now here’s the kicker. At a long, drawn-out presentation to the Gunnison County Commissioners, the head of the stock growers declared that vouchers weren’t the purpose of his proposal and, furthermore, he wouldn’t even talk about it.
Which, of course, means that vouchers are completely the point of all this.
The Colorado Division of Wildlife staff hasn’t formulated its recommendation on the three units to the Wildlife Commission. Here’s hoping nobody gets fooled by this latest shell game.
Commission boost.
The baseball season hasn’t officially begun, but Gov. Bill Ritter already hit a home run with his appointment of wildlife commissioners. Ritter last week named John W. Singletary of Pueblo to represent sportsmen on the nine-member policy panel and Kenneth M. “Mark” Smith of Center as representative of agriculture.
Both men have impeccable credentials as avid outdoorsmen and conservationists. Both also have extensive ties to the land — Singletary as a farmer, rancher and chairman of a water conservation district, Smith as manager of Bosselman’s Meadow Ranch.
As such, they can be expected to promote a much-needed balance on a commission exposed to extreme political pressure of late.
Charlie Meyers: 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com
