In this episode of NDO Podcast we visit with Brian Hosek, Department administrative services division chief, and Randy Meissner, licensing services manager, about the history, complexities and innerworkings of the deer, elk, moose and pronghorn gratis licenses and lotteries.
(Intro music)
Cayla: Welcome to episode 82 of the NDO podcast. On this episode, we're going to talk about the beast that is the gratis system, specifically for big game, gratis. Just kind of all the nuts and bolts, the history of it. How it all works. And yeah, it should be interesting. We may be confused ourselves at times, But to do that, we have Brian Hosek, our Administrative Services Division Chief, and Randy Meissner, our licensing services manager. That's a mouthful. So if Brian, if you just want to start, like, introduce yourself, maybe a little bit of background and what you do.
Casey: You’ve both been on before, right? Randy you haven't? Okay.
Randy: YeahI'm a first timer.
Casey: All right. Breaking you in.
Brian: Yep. So, yeah, again, Brian Hosek, administrative Services division chief on my background, um, started with the department 2001, uh, kind of the background in data sciences, geographic information systems. And as of recent, the kind of moved into this role. Still getting my feet wet with that one, but, uh, yeah, kind of in, like many in a flat spin a little bit, but, um, yeah, certainly got…
Cayla: I don't really know what he does, but he's busy.
Brian: We get all the, we get all the, you know, the stuff that's not glorified with game and fish, the parking lot services, Facilities like, you know, the lights, all the desk jockey type stuff. Licensing services, grant management.
Casey: Implementation of federal rules that we have to deal with and all kinds of stuff.
Brian: Technology and data. So yeah, a variety of different variety of things there. But um, yeah, this is a this will be a good time to discuss, uh, some of our gratis process. It's definitely a program that's, that's, uh, has a lot of moving parts to it. So and Randy's a Randy's a good resource to bring in.
Casey: Just one small chunk of the things that Randy does down there in the licensing.
Randy: Yeah. Randy Meissner this uh, December actually is going to be my 35th year working for the great state of North Dakota. Now my background is in computer science and technology. And you have to understand 35 years ago there wasn't an internet. There wasn't, uh, the few cell phones we had were were nothing that somebody would call smart.
Casey: Yeah. What's that sound? That.(mimics internet dial-up sound)
Cayla: Okay. Link? Yeah, that was pretty good.
Casey: Dial up connection.
(Laughter)
Randy: I was, uh, in on the ground floor with the department's very first website. We sold our first electronic license in 2001, went to online lottery applications five years later, and then 2016 was when we were 100% online with everything. About 12 years ago, I took on the role of managing the licensing section. So. But I'm still heavily involved in the technology aspects of all all things licensing. Hunting, fishing, lotteries and boat registrations.
Casey: So all 35 of those years have been with the department?
Randy: My first four years were actually with the Bank of North Dakota, so I started with the department in 1990.
Brian: When were you born Cayla?
Cayla: Do you want me to say..
Casey: After that, After that.
Cayla: Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. It is mind blowing to me when they talk about, I mean, just because of my how I grew up, that people had to go to the state fair and flip through binders to see their deer lottery results. That's like.
Casey: That was even before the.
Cayla: Talk about a reason come visit us at the State Fair though. Man, that's kind of we should bring that back one year. Like a throwback.
Brian: Yeah. Tumbler with lottery balls in it. Yeah.
Casey: When you work the administration booth and you're standing there and people were flipping through.
Cayla: Yeah. And yay or nay.
Casey: They find out if they get it or not. It's like some of them want to jump up and down and have a party, and the rest of them just want to take the book and throw it into the pond. Yeah.
Cayla: Gosh that's crazy. So anyways.
Casey: A little bit of history of the gratis and I can go through some of that because I was digging up some stuff for, well, this summer and earlier this fall, but our first gratis which means free in what Latin.
Brian: Latin. Casey is French I think.
Cayla: Yeah. He said, Viva la France, if you can believe in the worst,
Casey: France!
Casey: But, um, and so our first gratis deer and pronghorn license were established in 1975. So that that is before me even Cayla.
Cayla: Okay.
Casey: By a couple of years.
Cayla: I was reading the old ND Outdoors magazine article that was recapping the 1975 legislative session. Yeah, it was weird. I know someone listening might, like, have been deer hunting during this, but yeah, just that there wasn't even a lottery then. It was the that sessions created the lottery and then the.
Casey: Mhm.
Brian: Mhm.
Cayla: Gratis.
Brian: And you had to read it on microfiche.
Cayla: Yeah.
Brian: Do you know what that is.
Cayla: No.
Cayla: I can tell you the pictures were pretty low quality in that.
Casey: Yeah. She was laughing at the picture on the back.
Cayla: You said it was a painting. And I think that's just how bad.
Casey: But, um. Yeah. And then. So then it wasn't a whole lot of changes, little changes and tweaks. But in 87, then we had the addition of the Elk preferential landowner license, which is the one landowner license that they have to pay for. Um, and part of that is, is they get to hunt the entire unit for that elk unit, and they also have to qualify for that license. The property has to qualify. So in other words, they submit a piece of property that they own to us and we qualify if that is worthy of an elk preferential landowner license. And then there's an establishment of 15% that came later. Um, and so then in 93 there was a study for eligibility. That was the year huh Cayla?
Brian: Found it.
Casey: Um, and some eligibility changes were then made in 1995. That is pretty much what we see today for who's eligible to get one of these landowner licenses. Most of the eligibility stuff stays pretty close to the same across these landowner licenses gratis elk preferential little tweaks like with the elk one, you need to qualify that property. It's not necessarily any property you own. Um, and so yeah, and little tweaks happen along the way. One interesting one was in 2005, it was 160 acres, was the minimum acres. Um, it was brought up in legislature to increase that to something higher. I believe it was close to 640. They were thinking of going to a section, and it came out as 150 acres, ten acres less than it started.
Cayla: That's an interesting story on the legislature, though. Like.
Casey: And part of.
Cayla: That, anytime you tee something up.
Casey: Yeah.
Cayla: Yeah.
Casey: Part of that was, is because there was a lot of people who weren't eligible at 160, who owned what a lot of us would think of as a quarter of land that had a state highway that cut off five acres, or a railroad track that went through it.
Randy: Partial acreage off of it.
Casey: Or a correction line, even a correction line for the curve of the Earth, um, would shift that under 160. And so enough of those people showed up. That's what it turned out to be. Um, and then, as many people know, the most recently we had the pronghorn gratis changes here recently. But that's kind of like a general history. There's a lot more things in between there. If you went and looked at every legislative session where they maybe tweaked one thing or the other, but essentially, North Dakota Century Code sets up who can get a gratis. How many of those gratis in a lot of cases can be divvied out, and in some cases, how we can distribute those gratis. Um, and so those things we have to then, as Brian said earlier, implement that legislature says, here you go. This is how we want it done. Now we we do have input into that. They'll ask us, is this workable? Um and some of that kind of stuff. But, um, for the most part, we go to Randy and say, good luck, Randy.
Randy: Good luck.
Casey: Yeah. So I don't know if you got Randy. I mean, if you got anything to add to that as far as just kind of a general overview of the history, but.
Randy: Like you said, the biggest part is, uh, qualifying ownership. Um, yeah, it has to be, uh, leasing or owning for leasing for agricultural purposes or owning 150 acres or more to qualify. And, uh, so a lot of it has to do with validating and ensuring that what people say, they, you know, it'd be be a great world if everybody told the truth. But that's not the reality we live in. So it does have to be verified and ensure and sometimes honest mistakes are made. So we we want to ensure nobody gets a license that's that shouldn't. And then at the same point we also want to make sure we have opportunity for everybody that is eligible to get those licenses as well.
Brian: And yeah, there are a lot of little a lot of little nuances on there. We do make a lot of that available on the website when you're applying. So there's some some guidelines and some help documents out there to kind of show what qualifies you for for this license. So and then again, with the movement to online services, we're able to direct a lot more of that to making sure they're going down the right path, clicking the right boxes, asking the right questions to just ensure that as they go along and apply.
Casey: Well and with technology, we've had the ability to help kind of clean up some of that stuff. We were always chasing down that Randy was talking about with like the, you know, especially even the honest mistakes. If you got to type in 14 legal descriptions section, township, range, you put one of those in wrong, you hit a three instead of a two in a in a fat finger moment, you know, and all of a sudden it's like, well, that's not even your land.
Brian: Right.
Casey: You know?
Brian: And so and then the next person wants to apply for that and that on their application. They're upset. Why it's not you know. So yeah, a lot of those things are.
Casey: We've cleaned that up a lot with our.
Brian: Correct. Yeah.
Cayla: Well before were they having to like mail in.
Casey: Yeah. Write it down on a piece of paper and then you had to read it.
Cayla: But. And then like a form or like you said like FSA documents or something.
Brian: So they would, they would put when they would submit that paper application, we would, we would enter that information into the system, a lot of that. So again, you got to think of reading that everyone's handwriting as you can imagine that would vary. So just moving online really helped. And that's just that's also progressed over the years too. I mean, we started, you know, kind of an open text box where people can type information into. Now we've moved recently here to to using the state parcels, the county tax parcels. It's just really helpful where you don't have to type it. You can just select it. It's it's something that's available. So really, really there's a lot of things that that can help out. Um, kind of like what we mentioned earlier here where there's duplication. So let's just use like siblings or maybe some of these partnerships that we've kind of talked about. But you know, someone or a lessee too I mean, so maybe the landowner used that land on their gratis application. Lessee wasn't aware and tried to use that same land. So all this new this new system here that uses the parcels, it really helps out to kind of say, hey, this has already been this, this land has already been submitted in an application by, you know, so it's yeah, it's that's certainly going to help clean things up quite a bit.
Cayla: And then they call you to sort it out.
Brian: Every time we change something the first year. Absolutely.
Cayla: No,I mean when it's like, oh this land's already been used. And then they're like, then Brian becomes
Casey: I have beef with my landowner renter, who's gonna figure that out?
Brian: Well, that's their deal.
Casey: They gotta figure that out.
Brian: We usually punt on that and give it back to them. And they. Can they figure it out. Yeah. Yeah, you can imagine. You know, there's cases where siblings will numerous siblings will I'll do it this year. I'll do it the next or or spouses will do that too. So you can imagine how that could, could be used over the years. But um, yeah, super excited that some of these are making make it a little bit easier. Um, the big the big home run even years ago, even when we back in the day, when we typed it in, was to carry it forward so that the next year that you came in, you just click the new button. So our goal is to get you in and out as fast as possible and online services and, and kind of help out with, uh, you know, if we've reviewed this before in the past and, and again, it just speeds up the process because there is like there is a lot of nuances for us to, to verify and validate. And as Randy mentioned, that we want to find the fastest way to do that. Our goal is to turn around a deer lottery. And so we got a short amount of time we got by the time that deadline hits. And those those applications come in, which typically come in on the last day.
Casey: If we can speed that up.
Cayla: What was the spike this year?
Brian: I think we had over 10,000 on the last day or something like that.
Casey: But so we've opened now or we'll just stick to deer gratis. Now, um, we've opened that lottery February? Now?
Brian: So,We, we it used to be where that lottery, the gratis, became available at the same time as the deer gun lottery. Right. So we made a change a while back, moving it back to April 1st. So that gives gives folks some more time. Um, yeah.
Casey: They've got like an extra month.
Brian: Right. So that gives them some more time and again, continue to explore things like that to just make it easier for people to apply. Um, we know that we're up against some challenges here with the timing. We do. We want to we want to turn that lottery. Those lottery results around fast. And so our biggest obstacles, we've removed a lot of them with, you know, obviously with pushing, pushing more of them online and getting rid of data entry and things like that. But I still think we do better. I mean, if we can use some other strategies and, and maybe implement some different ways to kind of look at this that, you know, gives us the ability to kind of run the lottery when it's closed, run the lottery, right, and not have to kind of wait and validate and verify and examine and, and kind of, hit, you know, look at some of these last minute records that have come in.
Cayla: It's funny how the public angst moves up like a day each year, though. It's like, yeah, I don't know, man. It should be out now.
Brian: Yeah, yeah, Randy has been breaking some records, I think every year.
Casey: Internal clock is getting some false expectations. Randy. Yeah. Breaking records every year.
Cayla: Just remind them they used to have to go to the fair. So. have gratitude. Right? Yeah.
Brian: The fair and flipping pages.
Casey: July 28th.
Randy: When I started, it was, uh. It wasn't unheard of to have that dear lottery by the end of July. And now we're we're the last several years it's been by the end of June. So we've we've decreased that by about a month. The deadline is always the first Wednesday in June. So I think we're doing pretty good.
Casey: So maybe Randy what does it take with the the checks that we do these gratis landowner licenses come in maybe like I said, let's stick with deer because they're all a little different. But um, what does that take? Number of people glancing through stuff. And I mean, it's pretty automated now with some of the system, but.
Randy: Yeah, we have made some significant improvements. Um, using the county tax parcels, uh, really has been huge. It's it's taken a lot of, um, the, the discrepancies due to human error, like you're typing north northeast quarter versus southwest quarter. You know, just those those small little things that we all make when we're typing something in. So taking it right from the county tax record kind of eliminates that. But um, yeah, I've got a staff of five people. And then we also have our field offices that have, uh, made a lot of help with this as well. So I do have, uh, you know, anywhere from 8 to 10 people looking at these from, you know, to verify ownership and making sure that the same two people haven't applied for the same parcel of land. And, uh, you know, computers can do a certain amount of that checking, but a lot of that has to just verify with, with eyeballs, people looking at it.
Brian: Can be transfer for eligibility too. I mean, there's a lot of that between, you know, you're on the you're on the title, but you're transferring it to a spouse or legal dependent or something like that. So just checking on some of those things and just again, examination.
Casey: Cayla brought up something earlier with the FSA maps. I'm not sure that was necessarily for ownership, but it might be to prove agricultural lessee.
Brian: Yeah, that's for the.
Casey: Leasing the property.
Brian: Yeah we did make that available online just to kind of speed up the process. So if you have those, if you have those documents, you can attach them right there. It just really helps our staff to kind of go through and go, yep, yep this looks good. Approve. Move on. And um, yeah, just kind of kind of help. You can imagine what people are all busy, you know, you try to get get Ahold of someone, leave a voicemail, you're playing phone tag. We're trying to run a lottery. Yeah. Get some more information. Just verify that. But, um, yeah, a lot of different challenges like that behind the scene.
Cayla: And like you just said, because I think we get asked it so you can transfer it to a spouse or a legal dependent.
Randy: Who's customarily residing with the landowner. So it can't be to.
Casey: So a 25 year old working in Bismarck when you're up in Langdon doesn't work.
Randy: That doesn't work. No, you have to. They have to be permanently residing with the landowner, and it has to be a spouse or a dependent child. We can't do any other generations.
Casey: And that is again eligibility in century code.
Randy: That is correct.
Cayla: So I was going to say so like the it's Wednesday the first Wednesday in June. Now kind of how does the lottery go. Yeah. For deer,with the gratis. What happens.
Brian: The way I kind of think of it as is you know we you look we're going to look at all those gratis. Randy you get to correct me here because I mean.
Casey: Well, first of all, gratis gets first choice. Let's put that out there. Like gratis comes in gratis, are pulled off the top.
Brian: Right, Right.
Cayla: That's what I was saying.
Randy: They're there. They're legally entitled to a guaranteed license if there's licenses available.
Brian: So we're going to have our allocations by unit, by species, things like that. Right. So we're going to when that when we are ready to run that we know where those where those licenses have been. You know where those gratis applications have come in, what unit that's come in. And so that's going to be deducted right off the top. So now the remaining licenses are going to be put into the lottery. And so now that we go through that lottery process now this is the part that gets, you know, there's a little little complexity to it. But we're going to also have gratis applicants that apply for the lottery as well. And so when they come when they're in the lottery and they, they submitted an application for gratis and then they get drawn in the lottery. Now that gratis license that was deducted more or less. Randy, maybe I'm, you know, following here, but.
Randy: No. That's right.
Brian: It'll get put back into the lottery as a, you know, another tag for someone to draw. So that's kind of how the whole whole thing works. Kind of the scrape off the top, put back in and then upon success. Yeah. Then we can we can move some of those lottery, those gratis tags over to the lottery for those successful applicants.
Cayla: So
Cayla: Like just to provide an example, if you're a landowner here in 3C is that this unit? But you apply for a muley tag out west in the general lottery and you get it then. Then a, any buck tag from three C goes back in.
Brian: Right.
Randy: That is correct.
Randy: And then somebody who applied in the lottery for that particular unit then now has a chance.
Cayla: Mhm.
Casey: Mhm. So and when did when did we start doing that. Randy. Do you remember allowing approximately allowing folks to apply in both. Essentially put your gratis in and then apply in a unit. And essentially they're using their gratis as a backup. Right. Yeah. You're going to get a tag.
Randy: Yeah, I don't know the specific year, but that would have been the legislative year that, um, restricted landowners to the deer deadline up until that year, they were allowed to apply up through the the deer gun season. So I don't know when year that was, but that was.
Casey: Two thousandseven ish.
Cayla: Well, in in the article in 1975, it said, you're gonna have to go into the lottery with the rest of the people if you want a unit tag.
Casey: Yeah.
Casey: If you want a unit tag.
Cayla: Yeah.
Casey: Which I think was a either or in 1975.
Randy: Yep. You had you had to choose. You couldn’t apply for.
Cayla: Oh you couldn't do both. Okay. Okay. Both.
Randy: When we subjected the landowners to the first Wednesday in June that then that was when we allowed them to apply for both.
Casey: Mhm. Yeah. And so this is deer. So deer gratis. We landowners come off the top. They get first choice if there's tags available. Landowners are guaranteed a license essentially. However, last year you got those. I got em written down right here. We had a few units. If we do not have available licenses to fulfill all gratis. Then we do a lottery.
Randy: That is correct. For the first year in my 30 years with the department. Um, the first year that I've been involved, we actually had more landowners apply in three units that, uh, that had tags available. And so, like you said, by law, we can't exceed the governor's proclamation of those quotas. And so we have no choice to, uh, issue a lottery for those gratis that applied and then which results in some being unsuccessful. And then zero is available in the actual general lottery.
Casey: Now, to make this a little more complicated, we're still talking about deer, but let's throw in nonresident landowner license is not gratis because they have to pay for them.
Brian: Correct.
Casey: But yeah.
Casey: 1% of the licenses available go to nonresidents, period. Like that's in century code.
Randy: Yep.
Casey: So we can't we can't change that. We can't give that 1% to anybody else unless they're available after the deadline.
Brian: Right.
Casey: Um, but how do those come off the top? I mean, 1% off the side. But landowner, nonresident landowners get first choice, right?
Randy: Yeah. They've actually, um, it's been several years now with, uh, the low deer populations that we've had recently. Uh, they get 1% of the available. So we take those off the top. So those aren't available to residents at all. But the thing with the nonresident landowners, we also have the outfitter licenses. Those get taken off first because we typically have that lottery in March. So the they cannot exceed 100 statewide, and they can't take more than half the antler licenses in any given unit. So under those restrictions, then we have the outfitter lottery. And those get taken out of the nonresident 1%.
Casey: So when you say over half of is that over half of the 1%? Because if they're restricted to 1%, they'd never get half of the.
Randy: The 1% of antlered licenses.
Randy: So if 1% is two antlered licenses, outfitters can't have more than one.
Casey: Right. Okay.
Randy: And so, uh, so those get taken off the top of that nonresident quota. And then we go to the nonresident landowner. So they're again they get 1% whatever's whatever's remaining after the outfitters are deducted and in many cases in many units for the last several years now there's the nonresident landowners have exceeded the that 1%. And so unfortunately the nonresident general lottery then they there's several units now that there's there just isn't any licenses available.
Casey: Mhmm.
Cayla: That's people here know this well, but that's my biggest pet peeve. Like spend some time looking at the table because yeah, it's like I had 12 points and I didn't draw. And it's like because there was not even a tag.
Casey: Yeah you applied in 2E.
Cayla: There was no tag available. So at least I mean, I get that people have places they want to hunt or hunts they want to do, but at least like manage your expectations on it.
Randy: Mhm. Exactly.
Casey: Yeah. It's one of those things where somebody once told me fair is not equal and equal is not fair. Maybe we call it that.
Cayla: That's the name. Yeah.
Casey: But like you know if, if it hits you in the wrong spot, you don't like it, right. And, and realistically and a lot of these things, it's, it's a low population that we're dealing with.
Randy: And fair is relative. It's going to mean different things to different people. It depends on who you are, where you want to hunt and what your what your status is. You know resident non resident landowner non.
Brian: Yeah. You definitely hear those stories of the the non resident that come maybe coming home. But they you know they didn't look like Cayla said. If they didn't look at those those statistics and seeing that hey there was last year there were no, you know no tags available. So you're not you know the chances of drawing are nil.
Casey: Yeah. So we've kind of punched that one quite a bit. Deer. The elk we talked about a little bit 15% preferential landowner license. They have to pay the big game fee to get it. They can hunt the whole unit, but only 15% of those licenses can go to landowners. In most of the units, we have one little special unit, but.
Cayla: So it is a lottery.
Casey: It is a lottery.
Randy: It is a lottery.
Casey: And maybe talk about how like a landowner bonus point, they get bonus points in that system. Talk about that.
Randy: Yeah. The preferential landowners, they, uh, it's not a once in a lifetime like the general lottery and the moose gratis. So they are allowed to receive a license and then apply in successive years. The preferential landowners for elk also establish bonus points. So like like anything else that has bonus points with our lotteries there, once they've drawn they, they, they start off with zero. And then each year they're unsuccessful that they, they continue to apply. They're going to accrue a bonus point until they eventually get drawn.
Cayla: I did want to clarify, did we do that with this year with for the first time when we had to hold a deer gratis lottery?
Randy: Yeah, for both the nonresident, uh, deer gratis as well as the residential deer gratis. Now, anybody who is unsuccessful does it will have a bonus point next year.
Cayla: Sorry. Yeah.
Casey: Essentially, if we run a lottery, if we have to run a lottery, we're going to implement that bonus points.
Randy: We’re gonna use bonus points, yes.
Cayla: Sorry. Back to elk.
Casey: So, yeah, I don't know. Um, like you said, it, it they can get it multiple years. Every one of these species has a little different twist to how they work and what can happen. And, uh, you go into moose and. Yeah, it's once in a lifetime, but they can do it twice.
Cayla: What?
Randy: Again. Moose.
Randy: Moose is again, a special set of rules. With elk. You can, like we said, you can apply for the landowner and receive a landowner license in multiple years. You can also apply for the elk lottery and still get that once in a lifetime lottery license. Moose gratis and moose lottery are different. It's once in a lifetime period, so if you've drawn a moose lottery, you can't apply for gratis or otherwise. And likewise, if you get a moose gratis, you can't apply for the the moose general lottery.
Casey: Right.
Randy: And now for moose gratis. We do have the one exception where if a gratis successfully draws a moose gratis license and they fail to harvest a moose during that season, they get a one and only one chance to return their unused tag, and that allows them to apply in the gratis lottery in future years. And they can only do that once. So if they they get it a second time and are still unsuccessful. I'm very sorry.
Cayla: Is that was that a recent legislative change?
Casey: That's been forever.
Cayla: It sounds so nitpicky. Like, let me bring this bill because I didn't get a moose last fall.
Casey: I don't know. I don't know how those some of those, you know, nowadays they have everything recorded. Right. We could go back and listen to all the legislative conversations and committee conversations. I wish for those I could go back and hear exactly what was going on sometimes, because even we look at these and we're confused by how, when and why sometimes, you know.
Cayla: Yeah.
Randy: And it seems like why is that? Only for moose. You know why? Why was that just a thing for moose?
Casey: At that time we probably had a lot less moose licenses than we do.
Randy: True.
Cayla: Yeah.
Casey: Yeah. It's weird, you know.
Brian: You got your lifetime option, and.
Cayla: It's because old Billy missed, that's why.
Casey: Yeah. Oh, Billy missed. Maybe, I don't know.
Casey: But that's there Again. That's the you know. The fair's not equal and equal is not fair. Right.
Brian: Yeah.
Cayla: Must have been a big bull.
Casey: Yeah. Yep.
Cayla: He found his sheds and he's like, I need one more crack at it..
Casey: One more crack at it. Yep. Um.
(Laughter)
Casey: So yeah. That's kind of the and and like we said earlier, the eligibility of who can get one is pretty much the same across these. There's little tweaks.
Brian: Yeah I think that was recently changed. And I want to say 2019 where just to make it all consistent and kind of eligibility.
Cayla: Does the moose have the property component that the elk one does?
Randy: The moose just has to have 150 acres in any given moose unit. The elk is a little special because it has to be.
Casey: Qualified.
Randy: Qualifying elk habitat.
Cayla: Okay.
Randy: It can't just be. Yeah, I've got 150 acres in E1W. Well is it qualifying elk habitat. And so there is, The elk one is a little more special than the other ones.
Brian: Those elk eligibility areas are on our website kind of seeing again when they go apply they can see.
Casey: And we list them. The proclamation,
Brian: Correct.
Casey: Lists every piece of property that's been qualified for elk.
Brian: Yes.
Casey: The moose one is still 15% of the licenses? Not everybody that applies gets one.
Casey: It's still 15%.
Brian: That's the other thing.
Cayla: Is it good for just your land or the unit?
Casey: Your land.
Randy: Stay on your land.
Casey: Stay on your land. Because that one's.
Randy: That one is a gratis.
Casey: Gratis license.
Cayla: French. French.
Casey: As far as you know.
Randy: It's a license without fee. And you have to stay on land described.
Cayla: Okay.
Casey: So yeah that's a that's where they just these little tweaks and twists and pretty soon you. Your head's spinning trying to figure out what's going on with some of these. So now we'll get into pronghorn. Maybe. Um, pronghorn. That's a different ball game. It's the gratis, free. And it just changed. And we'll. I'll just touch on the change a little bit. So it went from 50. The first 50 licenses go to gratis.
Cayla: In a unit.
Casey: In a unit, and then half of the remaining licenses go to gratis if they, there's enough of those supply. That's what it was before last legislative session. Last legislative session there. Um, some folks brought it up and they wanted it 50: 50 split. Right. Only 50% could go to landowners. Um, which in a lot of cases isn't a huge change. Um, you know, in some units it's gonna, it's going to hit people. But the other thing it did was so, for example, in the old system, the department could not give somebody in the public who wasn't a landowner a license couldn't guarantee one unless we put out 52 licenses.
Brian: Correct.
Casey: So therefore every unit we would kind of go, well, can we give out 52 licenses, can we give out 52 licenses? And we've got some of these areas that bounce in and out of that. So we'd have a closed unit and an open unit. Closed unit, open unit. Um, we also have areas that we may never be able to give out 52 licenses to even give one to the public who the public hunter is, is paying the bill, essentially because these are gratis licenses for the landowner. So anything we do pronghorn has to be paid for by license sales. And so, you know, we like we couldn't open some of these areas where there maybe was opportunity available because we could only give out maybe ten licenses, seven license, whatever it is. And so, um, you know, the department going into this, we were going into this legislation. We're neutral on these types of legislations because it's going to put us in a bad spot. It's going to, you know, hunters and landowners are going to have to sort this thing out, right? It's more of a social thing. We're only going to give out so many licenses regardless. Right. And so, um, you know, the as the law came out as a 50:50 straight split, we did open a unit this year where we had, what, ten licenses, which we we wouldn't have done that in the past, you know, but we have some of these areas where, you know, pronghorn have been there for a while. And could we harvest some of the older critters? Yeah. Yeah. You know.
Brian: I think another thing looking at that, that you mentioned very few units, even with the old, um, kind of formula, if you want to think of it that way. I mean, there's just very few units that were impacted. Most of the most of the landowner licenses were issued, you know, for all that applied.
Casey: Right, there's just a few units where.
Brian: There were some. Yeah.
Casey: But we had that last year too.
Brian: Right. We did have that last year with the low numbers. But yeah. So even even some of these now are it's just like, yeah, we were able to issue all the landowner tags except one. And so it went into like you said, went into kind of that lottery process. And, and so but let's go make a few more pronghorn. This is, you know.
Casey: Yeah. Yeah. I mean we have we have an increase in pronghorn and and it's not going to take much. And this goes away, you know.
Brian: Right, right.
Casey: So um, but yeah. So those are the changes. Anything Randy, on that whole gratis landowner lottery.
Randy: Up until this year, the pronghorn was was either or. So you had to decide if you were going to apply for a gratis or a lottery.
Brian: Good point.
Randy: With this legislative session, now we allow the gratis to also put in for a lottery application if they're unsuccessful with their pronghorn gratis. So it's kind of the reverse of what we do for deer. And so we with deer we have the lottery first. And then if they're successful, then we, we void out there the deer gratis. But with pronghorn, we essentially run the gratis lottery first. And then for those landowners that also wanted to apply for the, the lottery, then they went into the general lottery for pronghorn for the rest of the licenses that were available in the lottery.
Casey: And that's because there's a defined split. That's why it's run in reverse. There's a defined split between how many one side gets and how many the other side gets. With deer, there isn't. And so that's why it's done in reverse from the deer one.
Brian: But yeah, that's a that's a new opportunity to make available for for lottery applicant. Um.
Cayla: It's a pretty small chance.
Casey: It is.
Brian: Yeah, yeah.
Cayla: Going in with zero. Yeah, but there's a chance.
Casey: Yeah. Even if they had, you know, even if they didn't get drawn for their landowner license for, say, two years, which is going to be probably not very often. I mean like, yeah percentage you're better off. You'd be better off winning the lottery. Like your percentage is probably better that you don't get drawn after a couple of years. Um, but that being said that I can't remember where I was going with this now.
Cayla: Probably that. If so, then you'd have two points if you didn't get drawn in gratis
Casey: And you're going in against all the people that have nine, ten, 12.
Cayla: 14.
Casey: 14, you know, points for these tags. So it's going to be tough. But I guess maybe there's a chance.
Brian: It happens.
Casey: It happens. Yeah.
Cayla: That's not the person that calls Hosek though.
Brian: Yeah it's not.
Randy: We did actually have three that applied in the landowner were unsuccessful. But then they drew a subsequent general lottery unit-wide ticket. So there was three nice.
Casey: Well they still had the advantage. Cause I didn't get drawn.
Cayla: And they called Hosek just to say like, thanks so much, Guy. We love we love what you're doing over there. I get to go hunting.
Brian: Yeah. They got to hunt the, the unit so.
Casey: Mhm.
Cayla: Yeah. Because pronghorn you have to stay on your own land because it's gratis right?.
Casey: Yep. And obviously that you know some people are looking at that and going well I'd rather have a unit tag. It's kind of like, well if you'd rather have a unit tag than just put in for the unit.
Randy: Yep. Get your bonus points and.
Casey: Get your bonus points. You know, if you don't apply as a landowner and there isn't a landowner lottery, that tag will be eligible in that lottery system anyway. So.
Cayla: Got all that?
Casey: Got all that. So, like all of this stuff that we've laid out really, there's very little that the department controls in, in all of this stuff that we laid out, its all century code based legislative. We have to figure out how it works.
Brian: We just got to find an online tool on how to execute it, deliver it.
Casey: And yeah, Randy. Randy can control. What? No. I don't even know if we can do that. What? Lottery's what lottery program we use?
Cayla: He gets to pick what color the balls are.
Casey: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Cayla: I'm kidding. If that wasn't clear.
Randy: I wish we had a system like that. That would be kind of fun just to have a have a.
Casey: Yeah, we could have a big.
Randy: Game and fish lottery day!
Casey: People would watch that sucker. Just the boring ball rolling. Did my number get pulled?
Cayla: Casey Anderson. I repeat, Casey Anderson.
Casey: That one doesn't happen.
Cayla: Okay.
Randy: Must be present to win.
Cayla: Yeah. Right.
Casey: Fill the room.
Brian: I still think we need that sympathy tag that, uh.
Cayla: I like it.
Brian: It's just, you know, this person has.
Cayla: The person with the most.
Casey: Unlucky.
Brian: The most unlucky, and it's just. Yeah, I think I think there could be some agreement on that.
Cayla: I think so. I like it.
Casey: If some if some of the people saw how many points some of those people have. They'd probably be like, geez. I'm all right with it. I'm all right with it.
Randy: Please send an envelope.
Casey: I’d give them mine! I didn't get one either though, so.
Casey: Doe only.
Brian: I think I have nine, Yeah. Or more. I think I had more. Yeah.
Casey: Yeah. All right. Anything else you want to touch on in this whole landowner license gratis thing?
Randy: Well, we always encourage as much as possible to apply early. You know, human beings, we're all natural procrastinators. We throw a deadline out there, and it's like, that's the day we apply. Mhm. The earlier you apply, the more chance you have to resolve any issues that might happen. You know if you wait til the last minute you're kind of throwing yourself to the technology, downtime. My Wi-Fi doesn't work. I'm in a non coverage area. You know whatever. All these random things that tend to happen at the last minute. And so uh, and then by all means give us a call and ask questions. We we'd much rather talk to people and answer questions with consistent, accurate information rather than coffee table discussions. And well, I heard this person said this, this, that, and the other thing may or may not be true and may or may not be factual or contain all the details. And so we we encourage people to please, you know, at any time, please call our office, ask for the licensing section. Any of my staff will be happy to help you and resolve any questions or anything that difficulties problems with the application. What qualifies? What doesn't qualify? We're happy to help anybody who calls.
Casey: And we do have quite an extensive Q&A thing online, don't we?
Brian: We do.
Casey: Questions with answers, frequently asked questions.FAQs.
Cayla: I feel like it's a more pleasant experience for both sides. If it's not under the pressure of like, this needs to happen in the next
Casey: And realize our our deadline, our deadline ends at midnight. Yeah. And for the most part, we're gone at five.
Randy: We're done at five.
Casey: So. So from five to midnight, it's gonna be tough.
Brian: We've talked about a number of strategies like that. I mean, from kind of almost like what you touched on earlier with, could it be moved back further for, you know, we talked we hear, you know, some landowners are busy at this time of year, maybe maybe kicking it back to February. Um, you know, opening up a little bit longer, ideally, you know, we we talk about these the demand on systems and services and things like that in the last hours is pretty incredible. I think we can we can beat most, uh, kind of concert tickets. I think like that with the. Yeah.
Casey: Right.
Brian: The volume in traffic. And we have to kind of we kind of have to get the, uh, all the state technology resources in place, the departments to kind of monitor and watch and make sure these things stay up and running.
Casey: Even then they still don't.
Brian: Even then. Yeah. Even then it's, it's a yeah, it's a pretty high demand. But you know, just other strategies with that, you know, looking at maybe different hours of, of a deadline or maybe looking at a different time frame and, you know, maybe an end date for this. But again, it's all change. And that's difficult when people have this stuff memorized and they just know this is the time of year I go do it. Others, you know. So yeah, we're always we're always interested in that discussion. You know, if there's if there's some opportunities that ease the pain on kind of again, speed up that lottery. I mean, we'd love to have that lottery be done in the next couple days or whatever to press the button. And it's doable, but not, you know, take some change to go do that. So, yeah, a lot of good, a lot of good, you know, discussion points on that stuff.
Cayla: So I feel like we could use it as a personality test, because I cannot relate to the person that sees the deadline and says, I got time. I'm like applying the moment the text comes. So there's like, there's got to be two flashes. Type As. Yeah.
Brian: It’s pretty embarrassing when you work here.
Randy: yeah we see two groups of people, you see, uh, you will see the surge right away when applications are available and then it tapers down and then. Yeah. Deadline. Bam bam bam.
Cayla: Yeah, yeah. I cannot relate like I got time. No, I don’tI gotta do it right now. Plus then I end up my ball ends up on the top.
Casey: Yeah, right. Yeah. You gotta get in early to get it. On top, right? Some people I've had people tell me. They wait till the end so it's sitting on top. It's like it just goes into a computer and you go hit the button and it.
Brian: It makes the sound through. It even makes that sound. I know.
Casey: I can hear it from my office. I'm right above it.
Brian: The dial up connection. Yeah.
Cayla: It does like the shuffling cards.
Casey: Yeah. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Yeah, yeah.
Casey: So we should have on their lottery's being run when people go and check and it sounds like card shuffling.
Brian: So did you draw a deer tag?
Cayla: I did draw a deer tag.
Cayla: And you put in early. Okay.
Casey: Yeah, yeah, let's let's figure this out.
Brian: I applied late, and I did not, so maybe there's something to that.
Cayla: I drew a second choice non coveted deer tag, but yeah.
Brian: Blanked blanked. So yeah.
Randy: It's interesting. You get uh, the, the different superstitions that people tend to have. And that's that's not the first time I've heard that if you wait till the very last minute, they tend to think that, oh, I waited till the last minute. So I'm going to be the first in or last in first out type of.
Casey: They don't realize it's like one of those bank things that sucks it up into the bottom so it's actually in the bottom. You gotta go first.
Cayla: I really want to do like a social media reel next year of Randy, just like spinning a big thing and then just be like, we're running the lottery today.
Casey: Yeah.
Cayla: Just to see. Oh my gosh.
Casey: Yeah.
(Laughter)
Brian: Maybe we could do that for like, yeah, maybe another critter like a sheep draw or something like that just done in the parking lot.
Casey: We didn't talk about bighorn sheep, but that's because they don't have a landowner license.
Randy: It's not a gratis for those.
Casey: Yeah. All right.
Cayla: All right.
Casey: Sounds pretty good.
Cayla: Yeah. Thanks for being on.
Brian: Thanks for having us.
Randy: Thank you.
Brian: Is that a good information? A lot of great information.
Cayla: We'll get into the department. Droppings. Not a lot on today's list, but, uh, advisory board meetings coming up. Start late October, so find your local one and and get engaged.
Casey: And we have the hunt for tomorrow campaign going on. Be mindful of conditions. Uh, pay attention to what's going on out there. If it tends to get dry on us sometimes in the fall. Um, and then just be aware that landowners are out and about trying to harvest, move cows, those types of things. And so be cognizant of what's going on so you don't park in the way or or things like that.
Cayla: Uh, and then please, as our upland seasons open, uh, submit wing envelopes, those are really helpful. You can listen to a long ago podcast about how those help us determine what's happening with our upland game populations but sure appreciate those.
Casey: And if you need some more, request them. We've got some more. All right. Now that we've dropped the droppings, you can get off the pot and get outdoors.
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