Why did you wait until the last day?
Lloyd did not wait until the last day. If you read his original post, he bought licenses over the counter a few days before the deadline, and was attempting to get his and his son's big game tags the evening before the last day.
Not that it matters. It shouldn't matter if he had waited until the last day... if he was using a well designed, tested, and user-friendly computerized license system. We are well into the 21st century, and use computers to file State, Federal, and Local Income taxes, to renew motor vehicle registrations, and to pay utility bills and do online banking. We can now easily trade stocks online without a stockbroker or the high trading commissions. We even easily do a lot of shopping online. So there is no good reason Lloyd should not have been able to complete his application and licensing transaction easier and faster than he did 20 or 30 years ago.
These systems are not being overwhelmed. All we hear from Game Management Departments, in their never-ending desire to raise license fees, is that they have less revenue due to declining numbers of hunters. That was a joke in my state, where in recent years, our Game Commission got a huge windfall from several thousand dollar per acre gas and oil leases and fracking production royalties. That was in addition ongoing timber sales and previous mineral extraction deals on State Game Lands.
When fuel is three dollars a gallon, big game tags over $500 apiece, every state in the country with budget problems, the $93 it takes to have a chance to collect a preference point or a tag for a unit you desire, is a small part of the equation.
I absolutely hate the new pheasant stamp.
I also found your lecture about the $93.00 fees for a "chance to collect a preference point or a tag" amusing. I can just hear you complaining about disenfranchising the poor and minorities if the same system was applied to voting and elections.
I also hate our relatively new pheasant stamp. I hate having to pay more for the right to shoot put-and-take stocked birds, because it was screwed up management by our Game Commission that quickly turned Pennsylvania from a state with a very good native population into one where native ringneck pheasants are all but extinct. Then they messed up deer hunting in much the same manner, and have been playing with things like adding Sunday hunting in an effort to attract some of the hundreds of thousands of hunters they drove away, to return to the sport. Last week, they announced that we shattered the previous record for antlered deer killed in the era of antler restrictions. This was laughable, considering the warm and rainy weather we had during the antlered and antlerless deer season, fewer hunters, and the widespread complaints from hunters about the obviously low deer numbers. They still keep talking about the need to harvest more does to control the population, but I had more full days in the woods without seeing a single deer than any season in my life. Rubs, scrapes, tracks, and Deer shit do not lie. When you aren't seeing much sign, it means there just aren't many deer around that area... no matter what the Game Commission Biologist is telling you.
Yet when hunters and the Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania attempted to sue the Game Commission over poor deer management, the Courts ruled that we had no "standing" to sue. Sounds a lot like the dozens of lawsuits filed concerning 2020 election fraud, where Courts ruled that voters and State Attorney Generals lacked "Standing" to sue. When the game gets stacked against you, being right does not matter.
