Game Commission member, sportsmen rep clash over Saturday start to deer season

Three months after deer hunters took to the woods on the Saturday after Thanksgiving for the first time in decades, many are still taking aim at a plan to make the change permanent.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission on April 7 is expected to vote on finalizing the proposal. The public can weigh in on the matter until then — as 80-some people this week at the sole hearing on the subject, held by the state House Game and Fisheries Committee at Mon Valley Career and Technology Center in Speers, Washington County.

The House committee is pressuring the Game Commission to reconsider the proposed change.

Only a handful of people who attended Thursday’s hearing raised their hands when asked if they support the proposal. A clear majority raised their hands in opposition.

Game Commission member Dennis Fredericks of Amity, Washington County, pointed to an increase in hunting license sales since July 1 — when the 2019 rifle deer season opened on Nov. 30. Until then, rifle deer season had started on the Monday after Thanksgiving since 1963.

Through December, hunters bought 3,351 more licenses — a 0.4% increase. A total of 849,575 hunting licenses were sold last year. Sales in 2018 dropped 3.4%, or more than 30,000 hunters, the state has reported.

“The way we see it, it’s a positive step,” Fredericks said, noting that it reversed a downward trend in license sales in Pennsylvania, a trend that is continuing in many other states.

Based on his own informal polling, Fredericks said he’s found about 75% of people are apathetic about the Saturday season opener. While he said older hunters are opposed to the move, “the younger people that we need to recruit and retain (as hunters), college students and high school students, are all in favor. That’s the way it’s looking to me at this point.”

The cost for the few thousand new hunters who bought licenses last year is too great, said Randy Santucci, southwest regional director of the Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania. The gains, he argued, can’t be attributed specifically to the Saturday start. He pointed out other changes, including an expansion of the state’s bear season, may have been a factor.

Changing the deer season opener last year flew in the face of many traditions, Santucci said. That included rushing hunters who normally would use the weekend after Thanksgiving to travel to their camp, causing the loss of a popular day of small game and turkey hunting and competing with potential shopping on Small Business Saturday.

He said he contacted sporting goods stores that sell hunting licenses and goods, with 10 reporting a combined loss of more than $360,000 in sales that weekend.

“The windfall of sales, from hunter impulse buying or otherwise, that came in this weekend, particularly in small rural businesses, helps carry them through the winter until spring and trout season,” Santucci testified. “The Saturday opener will be the last nail in the coffin to some businesses and damaging to our still popular Pennsylvania camp tradition.”

Santucci charged that the Game Commission ignored results of a 2017 statewide hunter survey, which showed that 65% of respondents opposed changing the traditional opening day from the Monday after Thanksgiving. He said the opposition continued, with 81% of some 1,300 hunters who contacted the Game Commission taking a stance against the change.

He suggested the Game Commission restore the traditional Monday opener and consider using one the three tentatively approved Sunday hunting days on that following weekend, “creating a 13-day run of rifle deer season.”

The Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen and Conservationists hasn’t taken a stance on the Saturday opening date, said Harold Daub, the group’s executive director. In a survey the group completed when the Saturday opener was first proposed, 61% of clubs that responded opposed the change — though 70% of individual members who responded supported the move, Daub said.

Results from an updated poll of the group’s members should be available by the Game Commission’s April meeting, Daub said.

He acknowledged that the earlier season start last year created challenges for hunters who travel to a camp. But, he said there were also members of the federation who “were excited to be able to hunt with their school- and college-aged kids and some who, because of work priorities, were ecstatic to be able to hunt on opening day for the first time in many years.”

Evidence at the hearing included a letter from Emma Olney, president of the Governor’s Youth Council for Hunting, Fishing and Conservation, who supported the Saturday opener as an added opportunity for younger hunters.

“I want more youth in hunting also, but I don’t think we did it in the right way,” said Rep. Bill Kortz, D-Dravosburg, minority chair of the committee.

Addressing Fredericks about the Saturday opener, Kortz said, “You took feedback last year and you had 80% who said, ‘Don’t do it,’ but you did it anyway. If 80% of the people say they want this moved back, we need to consider that.”