Changes afoot with regulatory board schedules

During the past year, the Alaska Board of Game voted to extend its two-year regulatory meeting cycle to a three-year cycle. This change will spread out the board’s workload and lighten the workloads of most Fish and Game Advisory Committees around the state. It should also help save the state money and staff time.

Each board addresses concerns affecting all the hunts or fisheries statewide over their multiyear cycle — the Board of Fisheries has done this over three years, and the Board of Game has done theirs over two years, until this recent change. Given the overlap in areas covered by the respective boards in their two- or three-year cycles, advisory committees oftentimes were scrambling to address both fish and game proposals affecting their area in the same year.

I can tell you from experience that creates a lot of work and a significant time commitment for committee members. This Board of Game change to a three-year cycle will stagger the timing of when each board addresses fisheries and game issues impacting the same area.

As a part of the transition from two-year to three-year reviews, the Board of Game is scheduled to hold only one meeting for the 2015-16 year. This meeting will address all statewide regulations pertaining to hunting, trapping and the use of game. Local or regional issues will not be reviewed.

According to a press release, the statewide regulations specified on the Call for Proposals include the following general categories: permits, licenses, harvest tickets, tags and harvest reports, methods and means, possession, transportation and use of game, intensive management and predator control, definitions, and emergency taking of game in game management units.

The original May 1 deadline to submit proposals for this meeting has been extended to June 23.

At its Wasilla meeting earlier this year, the Board of Game talked about establishing a Dall sheep working group to develop approaches to address many of the contentious issues regarding Dall sheep hunting in Alaska. Little direct action on sheep issues was taken by the board at this meeting.

The following Board of Game meeting in Anchorage saw limited action on sheep proposals, some of which were strongly opposed by many residents with their own airplanes, and still no Dall sheep working group.

At a teleconferenced Board of Game meeting April 24, the board voted to broaden the allowable proposal format to include statewide changes to hunting seasons and bag limits for Dall sheep. Because of controversies regarding the jurisdiction for antlerless moose hunt re-authorizations, which also surfaced during this past year’s meetings, proposals for this topic will also be accepted.

That’s where we are at the moment. I had been planning to submit some proposals addressing methods and means, but wasn’t sure how many proposals I would need to represent my concerns.

I gave the matter some thought and ended up submitting two proposals this week. I wanted to be sure to get them submitted in a timely manner, so I adhered to the original submission schedule.

Proposals

If you’ve read my last few columns, you’ll remember I wanted to submit a proposal to the Board of Fish to legalize bowfishing for pike with a crossbow. In the course of researching the affected regulations, I learned that crossbows are already legal for bowfishing in the areas in which I had an interest.

Upon further investigation, I found crossbows are also legal for hunting small game. The only two hang-ups to hunting with a crossbow are: first, crossbows are not legal to use in any bow-and-arrow-only hunts or areas; and second, crossbows are not legal to use in any general “weapons restricted” hunt or area.

I don’t want to ignite the internal archery battle between vertical and horizontal bow hunters (even though 36 states currently classify longbow, recurve, compound and crossbow all under the definition of “bow-and-arrow”), so item No. 1 was specifically not addressed in my proposal.

I did ask the Board of Game to add the term “crossbow” to the list of legal hunting tools in state management areas, game refuges and special hunts where a muzzle-loading firearm or shotgun is also allowed, along with bow-and-arrow use.

If a firearm of any sort is legal, there is no practical reason not to allow a crossbow.

In my second proposal, I specifically ask for crossbows to be legal for bison hunting. There’s another part to that proposal, but I’ll address that in a future column.