Soaking the Non-Residents in Kentucky
This is in response to:
Higher Priced Non-Resident License, a thread over on KentuckyHunting.net
I am a resident of Ohio, and hunt exclusively in Zone 1. Kentucky affords me a much better opportunity to hunt deer and turkey. My family owns 200 acres in Bracken County. I’ve written several times here about how much I appreciate the opportunity to come across the river to hunt.
I’ve been watching this thread develop, and I cannot figure out why there is such animosity here to non-resident hunters. Yes, I am from out of state. Yes, we own property here. No, I am not one of the last-minute Johnnies at the Walmart. Yes, since my shoulder went bad, I’ve been gun-only, but I had 25 years in as a bow hunter before I gave up. I have a medical waiver to hunt with a crossbow. I am somewhat of an outdoor writer, and I frequently write to promote NKY and the Ohio Valley as a hunting destination. My family puts a large amount of money into the local economy in the way of taxes, gas, food, and license fees, but we think it’s worth it.
The reality of it is, that in Zone 1 there are simply not enough hunters to hunt all the deer. I’ve seen huge increases in our herd since 2001. EHD was just a blip for us. The deer and turkey both are thriving. More hunters are needed in this zone, and yet nobody seems to like the idea of us carpetbaggers shooting your deer.
When there is unlimited taking of antlerless deer available in a zone, you know there is a problem. The problem is NOT that the non-residents aren’t being soaked enough. The problem is NOT that the non-residents aren’t being kept out. The problem is NOT crossbows. The problem is NOT rifle season during the rut. The problem is that you have too few hunters taking too few deer. Here in Bracken County, the deer probably outnumber the permanent residents.
I will be blunt. I was fairly willing when we first moved out here to give written permission to hunt. However, each and every time I gave out that permission, I ended up getting screwed. I caught one neighbor on his deck in his underwear, shooting at deer on my property. He didn’t hit anything, but he was shooting at 300 yards with his 30-30 and just emptying the magazine at them. He’d go back in the trailer, reload and come back out. The deer didn’t seem to mind, but I thought that was an awful amount of lead going into the woods indiscriminately.
I gave permission for a fellow to ride his ATV through the property to the land-locked parcel that adjoins me and later I found him and his buddies hunting everywhere on my property–and giving me grief to boot. I caught another fellow in the chain over the driveway– he’d gotten his ATV’s handlebars stuck sneeking in. His answer “I didn’t think you were home.”
I’ve been in contact with the CO every year to help take care of the poachers, but they keep coming. My neighbors came and tore down my posted signs. I have to patrol constantly for new tree stands and ground blinds on my property– people from as far away as the TN line. If y’all had just been nice, I would have been nice. Nobody likes to have what’s theirs to give taken without permission.
I am down to 2 active letters this year: 1 for a 79 year old local grouse hunter that is a true gentleman and one for my retired bosses, a KY resident, who wants to come fill his freezer with doe. Between us, my sons and my old boss we should be able to knock over enough deer to do what’s needed on this plot.
Let me give you all some suggestions:
1) Keep KY a good non-resident bargain. You might want to make some WMA’s resident only, but I would not go screwing with much else.
2) Encourage non-residents into Zone 1. You already give them a great chance to come across the river and shoot rifles during the rut. However, you should incentivize antlerless deer. Maybe offer a special $75 non-resident antlerless license/tag for the December rut or something. Let crossbows in on private land in Zone 1 regardless of medical condition. Leverage the out-of-staters to help handle the herd.
3) Put reefer trucks out on the major roads and set up stations for donating whole deer carcasses, and feed the hungry. Anyone can drop off a deer on their way home from the field.
4) Police your own, and be nice. Buckeyes are notorious in SE Indiana and N KY for coming over the state line and being slobs. However, my problem has been with my own neighbors. It does not take much to get private land posted and the landowner permanently peeved. You don’t want more WMA’s, do you? Really? You don’t want more chances to hunt in a crowd. You want to be left alone when you hunt. Taxing non-residents and buying WMA land is not the way to that; honoring your own laws and being nice to landowners is.
5) Encourage local business to make the Rifle Opener a celebration. Roll out the red carpet. Have a Fall Festival. Sell soup, chili, spaghetti, fried chicken in the main square. Bake sales, car shows, craft shows, folk art– get the out of staters in here and soak ’em. You personally won’t see any benefit to additional non-resident fees, but you can walk home with cash in your pockets if you roll out the welcome. Give the wives something to do while the hunters are hunting, and the hunters won’t be as quick to roll back across the line when they’re done hunting. Telecheck probably put a damper on this, but you all can make up for it. Make the Opener your best money-making weekend of the year. If you don’t believe it can happen, go look at what they do in MacArthur OH, for their Turkey Festival in the Spring.
6) Non-resident ownership of KY land is a great thing, not a bad one. Here are all these fallow farms throughout the state. The per-acre price is depressed due to the supply. The more you encourage non-residents, the more that price goes up. All of a sudden what was unused acreage is some out-of-stater’s dream come true. Later, when you want to buy it back, you can let the property values fall back down. This is what Americans did to the Japanese and the Germans back in the 80’s– sold them real estate at inflated prices and then let the bottom fall out of the market.
That’s just my ideas– one old fart Buckeye who loves coming over the bridge every weekend. YMMV
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. . . 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.
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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?
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.
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."