HomeKentucky HuntingSoaking the Non-Residents in Kentucky

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Soaking the Non-Residents in Kentucky — 4 Comments

  1. . . . and while I'm on this rant. . .

    I'm not against soaking the non-residents. I just think y'all are a little nuts if you think you're going to directly benefit from higher non-resident fees. The trick here is to be doing everything you can to personally soak them, have your church soak them, have your school soak them, have the whole town turn out to soak them!

    Years ago, back when I was a kid, the ice cream store across from the town's only movie theatre came under new management. My Grandpa decided to go down and have an ice-cream cone on a hot August night. Just before the movie let out, the owner and her assistant were dashing around.

    "Hurry" cried the owner. "We have to close up before the movie's over. Otherwise we'll never get home!"

    Gramps came home and told that story and said, "They'll be outta business in no time. He was right. They were."

    Moral: This is not the time to be inhospitable.

    Here's something I wrote back in 2008 over here in regards to Telecheck. After I wrote it, I decided to send a letter saying basically the same thing with a little extra polish to the local Chamber of Commerce– never got a reply.

    I remember burning a tank of gas in Ohio trying to get from the hunting grounds to the check station, then having to go to Walmart to get a copy of the rules to find another check station that was over in the next county.

    No thanks. I love tele-check.

    However, the deer processor has replaced the check station for the place to hang out and watch deer come in. The spectacle at Meyer's in Lennoxburg is every bit the way it used to be– crowds of people, lot's of deer. Ditto for the Farm Store in Willow.

    If'n y'all are missing the check station, you ought to figure out some sort of event. Have a big buck contest at the old check station. Have the church bake sale, or the fireman's chili cookoff or something. Y'all have car shows in the summer, right? How 'bout a truck-with-a-dead-deer-in-it-show. All it would take would be:

    1) The local paper donating an ad announcing it
    2) A local park, a local store, or the old check station itself.
    3) A few interested groups that would dovetail their fund raisers to coincide
    4) Lots of trucks with dead deer in 'em
    5) A few prizes to throw at the deer hunters, donated by local businesses.

    I know places where the entire town turns out for Opening Day activities.
    In one place, the town square gets filled. Women spend all morning cooking soup and baking pies for hungry hunters coming in. Rain or shine, warm or cold they do this– the bad weather sort of adds to the occasion.

    As Saint Meatoaf said, "And if the thrill is gone, then it's time to take it back! "

    This isn't exactly deer related, but it just so happens that one of the big old Catholic churches in Cincinnati had their big Italian dinner on the weekend of the KY Rifle Opener. For years, I used to come back from deer hunting, go down with wife #1, and bring home a big sack of Italian food– best I ever ate. Italian food and deer hunting got to be a ritual in our house. I can assure you, that one church, doing its big fund raiser dinner on Opening Weekend WILL draw a tired, cold, wet, deer hunter out of the woods.

    The other big event I can draw your attention to is the annual Turkey Festival in MacArthur, Ohio that coincides with the Ohio Spring Gobbler Season. All the years I hunted turkey in Ohio, it was a not-to-be-missed event. Events included a turkey calling contest and a turkey leg contest. In the latter, all the local politicians and businessmen stood behind a blind, and hiked up their pants so the judges could vote on the best set of turkey legs. There was even a Turkey Queen.

    __________________

  2. Now you got me riled!

    I challenge every one on this forum, if you think likewise, to go and nag your local chamber, your church, your school– everyone you can think of. Get them thinking:

    * What can we do to attract, serve and SOAK the non-resident hunters that come into Kentucky to hunt? How can we fill their trunks with our junk, and their bellies with our food?
    * How can we make them happy so they go back across their state line and tell all their buddies?
    * How can we create a market for our dormant real-estate, and make it appealing to these out-of staters? How can we add them to our local tax rolls and pay for our schools, our roads, and our emergency services. The farmers are leaving. Industry isn't stepping up. Now what?
    * How can we promote KY as the hunter- friendliest commonwealth in the region?
    * They say when it rains lemons, make lemonade. We got an over-abundance of 4-legged lemons running around Zone 1 getting hit on the roads, and eating people's gardens. How do we squeeze them?

  3. I'm just throwing out an idea here; it's just meant to illustrate what you can do.

    Let's take some numbers from that PDF that was made available earlier with 2007 license sales by state listed. Let's look at 2 states.

    Kentucky vs. Ohio:

    Licensed Hunters: 343456/ 432815
    Resident total tags/stamps/ licenses: 542,084/106374
    Non- Resident tags/stamps/licenses: 57464/43243

    Let me just throw in one extra stat from Wikipedia:

    Total size:
    KY vs. Ohio
    40409/44825 square miles

    Calculated hunter density:
    8.4 /9.6 — Kentucky has about 12% fewer hunters/sq.mi. Comparing a Zone 1 Opener to a SE Ohio Shotgun Opener is like comparing your local rifle range on Saturday Afternoon to the Battle of Verdun.

    Okay. Let's say KY lowers its NR instead of raising it. Let's say they go head to head with Ohio and try to siphon off some of those Shotgun Hunters. They offer a $75 5 day Zone 1 only deer license/tag to NR's for week 2 of the rifle season.

    1) The Buckeyes come over in droves.
    2) The NR's clean out Zone 1 excess deer population
    3) NR's from Ohio get to hunt in a relative peace and quiet, with a rifle.
    4) KY Zone 1 gets its second Opening Day. Residents get to go out first. Come week 2, they're out in the soup lines passing out soup to the Buckeyes — proceeds going to the church, the school, the Kiwanas– who cares.

  4. Even if you doubled the NR fees, I doubt I'd ever see James Beckett, our CO, any more than I currently am. James does a good job, but I don't believe I'd see any more value for the money if the fees went up. The fees went up when Pat Taylor was the CO, and I saw him just about the same. I bet if the fees doubled, I not would even get so much as a free hat, or a calendar or a bumper sticker from the department. That's not a cut at KDWFR. That's just the way it goes.

    I think a lot of this TAX-THE-NR sentiment comes from not fully understanding who these NR fellows are. Probably I appear as the poster-child. I'm a northern-sounding Cincy Krauthead that bought in NKY and goes and hunts y'all's deer and turkeys. However, I'm married to a girl whose family came through the Gap with Boone. In fact one side of the family was already waiting for Boone.

    Resident hunters outnumber licensed non-residents close to 10-1, and I bet a bigger number of them are more like KYHillChick and my son, Angus, than they are like me, the Great German Carpetbagger. Kentucky had a huge diaspora early in the 20th century. Most of 'HillChick's kin came up to Cincinnati to work. Angie was raised on the TN line, but she's got a fair mess of kin still up here. These 1-in-10 hunters we look at as Non-Residents aren't illegal aliens. They didn't land with the saucer. They didn't sneak over the river in the dead of night and they're not fast-talking sausage eating "ferners" like me. Probably most are just folks who want to come back home on the weekend and hunt and fish.

    KY has a huge outreach to those folks. I don't know if you know this but KET has 5 or more channels now of HDTV beaming into the Cincinnati market. A lot of that programming is pro-KY propaganda. You can probably catch shows like Tim Farmer's or Dave Shuffet's every hour of the day and night. It has a huge message: "Come back. We want you to come to KY. Spend money with us! "

    If KY dropped its NR license fees and opened its doors they might double the 57K non-resident hunters, and those people would spend more than any proposed rate increase with KY small business. On the other hand, if you jack the fees up and/or add more limitations to NR hunters, the increase in revenue will not be enough to really affect the # of CO's or the amount of WMA acreage all that much. The number of NR hunters isn't all that high. What you need to do is get those 542,000 resident license holders to kick in a little– $1 extra on any resident license or tag means as much as a $half-million in the KDFWR's coffers.

    If y'all put together a NR Sportsman's Package, I'd be first in line. Right now, I'm being picky about what licenses I buy– I keep my fishing on this side of the Ohio, and I don't buy all the turkey tags and all that. It just isn't worth it to me. On the other hand, if you made the NR Sportsman's Package reasonable, I'd easily plunk down more money than I am and move ALL my sporting activities to KY. I promise to never bother you. The kids and I will stay on our little farm, and when we go fishing, we'll stay on a deserted stretch of the Licking River. You'll never know we're there.

    Just some thoughts from a sausage-eating "ferner."

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