Reform Pennsylvania's Fishing License Validity Period
Currently, Pennsylvania's fishing licenses are valid from January 1st to December 31st of the same year, regardless of when they are purchased. This system is not fair to those who purchase their licenses later in the year, as they do not receive a full year's worth of use. We propose that Pennsylvania change its fishing license validity period to last from the date of purchase until the same date in the following year. This would ensure that everyone gets full value for their license fee.
According to statistics from The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, over a million fishing licenses were sold in 2019 alone. However, there is no data on how many were purchased later in the year and thus did not provide a full year's worth of fishing privileges. By changing this policy, we can ensure fairness for all anglers in our state.
We urge you to support this change and make sure every angler gets what they pay for - a full year’s worth of fishing privileges. Please sign this petition today!
Once infamous as Pennsylvania’s most polluted waterway, the 110-mile Clarion River has been cleaned up and designated the state’s 2019 River of the Year.
In a joint statement Jan. 16, the Pennsylvania Organization for Waterways and Rivers, Allegheny Watershed Improvement Needs Coalition and state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources announced that in a public vote, paddlers, boaters, anglers and other outdoors users chose the Allegheny River tributary over three eastern waterways. The Clarion has attracted federal attention and is part of the National Wild and Scenic River program. The state designation opens some DCNR resources for maintenance of the waterway and is expected to focus public attention on the river and its conservation success story.
“For us the Clarion is the western gateway to the Pennsylvania Wilds, an iconic river flowing through Clear Creek and Cook Forest state parks,” said Cindy Adams Dunn, DCNR secretary. “It has a remarkable story -- the Clarion used to be too polluted for fishing and now the fishing is great, the water is clean. When I paddled it in July there were hemlock trees right down to the clean water and hundreds of people enjoying themselves, then you go around a curve and there’s no one. Solitude. You can have both experiences on the Clarion River.”
From its East and West Branch headwaters in Elk and McKean counties, the Clarion rolls off the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, slowly meandering to the west-southwest forming the Forest-Jefferson county line and across Clarion County to its beautiful confluence with the Allegheny River south of Foxburg.
Mysterious petroglyphs carved into river boulders support
evidence of the river’s use by Native American cultures. European settlers called it Stump Creek. In 1817 a surveyor is said to have commented that the river sounded like a distant clarion, a trumpet used in warfare.
The need for timber and wood chemicals led to massive clearcutting in the region, and in 1859 the world’s first commercially successful oil well in nearby Titusville, Crawford County, turned Pennsylvania’s west central counties into an industrial powerhouse. The Clarion was used to float timber and barges downstream as far as the Mississippi River, and became a receptacle for decades of industrial leakage, sediment, tannery waste and deep-mine acid.
Near the middle of the 20th century the clearcutting had stopped, the tanneries closed and the oil industry moved to other parts of the world. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, waterfowl hunters and anglers noted the river was slowly healing itself, and in the 1980s federal and state resources were used to clean it up.
Hillsides — once deforested and muddy — regenerated, and land wildlife returned. Mines were sealed. Fish returned by natural means and through a state stocking program. With the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers designation in 1996, 52 miles of the Clarion were protected. Today much of the river is an eco-tourism destination well-known for paddling, boating, fishing, wildlife watching and other recreation.
The Pennsylvania Organization for Waterways and Rivers administers the River of the Year program, which has drawn attention to the state’s waterways since 1983. As acting fiscal agent for the Watershed Improvement Needs Coalition, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy will receive a $10,000 Leadership Grant funded by DCNR to help pay for River of the Year activities that will be scheduled throughout the year.
Also nominated for the designation were the Delaware River, Lackawanna River and Conodoguinet Creek. The 2018 River of the Year was Loyalsock Creek in northcentral Pennsylvania.
In a statement, Kylie Maland of the Allegheny Watershed Improvement Needs Coalition noted the recent 50th anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Clarion River’s induction.
“We are elated to continue to honor the Clarion as the 2019 Pennsylvania River of the Year to celebrate its remarkable recovery and pay tribute to it as a treasured resource of the state,” she said.
John Hayes: 412-263-1991, jhayes@post-gazette.com.
Pennsylvania fishing license fees will hold firm for the 2018-19 season after a state House of Representatives committee stopped a Senate bill that would have increased prices.
PennLive reported that at a meeting of the House Game and Fisheries Committee Tuesday, legislators were critical of John Arway, executive director of the Fish and Boat Commission, and refused to advance the bill, which had passed in the Senate by a large majority.
The committee’s refusal to advance the bill to the House floor came as no surprise. Committee chairman Rep. Keith Gillespie, R-York, recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette there was “absolutely no way” a funding bill could proceed with Mr. Arway at the agency’s helm. His committee sent a bill to the House floor that would set an eight-year term limit on the Fish and Boat executive director position that would force Mr. Arway from his position.
Since 2005, a resident adult fishing license has cost $22.90. The Senate bill would have increased next year’s fee to about $28.90, including processing fees, with annual increases of 3 percent during each of the following four years.
Fish and Boat operates on a $52 million budget raised through license sales, federal excise taxes on fishing gear and boating fuel, and resource leases. The agency gets no funding from state taxes, but the legislature sets license fees.
Last year the Board of Fish and Boat Commissioners ordered Mr. Arway to trim $2 million from the budget if he couldn’t get the legislature to increase funding. In testimony yesterday, Mr. Arway twice apologized for briefly posting a map on the Fish and Boat website linking legislative districts with trout streams that would not be stocked if a license-fee increase was not approved.
Like the Game Commission, Fish and Boat holds a reserve of contingency funds used to make scheduled payments and respond quickly to emergencies during seasonal gaps in license sales. Mr. Gillespie challenged Fish and Boat cash reserves of $49.7 million and said the agency should be audited before a license-fee increase is considered.
John Hayes: 412-263-1991, jhayes@post-gazette.com.
In the battle for wildlife agency funding, the hip boot may now be on the other foot.
Fish and Boat Commissioners have given executive director John Arway authority to slash $2 million in services if the state legislature does not act on raising license fees.
Arway is telling his “customers” that if their representatives fail to schedule a vote, he’ll close two warm water fish hatcheries and one trout hatchery and make “severe” cuts in Fish and Boat’s cooperative nur sery program during fiscal year 2018-2019. Waterborne first-responder training could also be in jeopardy, said Arway.
On the homepage of the Fish and Boat website, director Arway explains the agency’s fiscal dilemma and posts a link connecting voters with their state representatives. In effect, the state Fish and Boat Commission, a non-funded agency loosely linked to the executive branch, is suggesting that citizens withhold votes for targeted members of the legislative branch if they don’t hold a vote on increasing funding.
In legislative language those are fighting words -- a threat directed at politicians who bristle at being backed into political corners.
“I think we’re the ones boxed into a corner,” said Arway. “We haven’t had an increase in license fees since 2004. This agency gets no General Fund money from the state. We’ve cut personnel as far as it can be cut. State senators have twice voted to give us authority to control our own license fees, but the House won’t hold a vote on raising license fees and won’t hold a vote on allowing us to do it ourselves. We’re at the brink of reducing services because of that, and I think their constituents should know it.”
Fish and Boat operates on a $60 million budget. The $2 million gambit was raised against a backdrop years in the making. Hunting and fishing license fees are set by the legislature. Lawmakers, particularly in some parts of the state, are traditionally reluctant to face voters after raising license fees. No action is taken for years; agency costs continue to grow. When license fees are finally raised, the jump is so high and abrupt that the agencies independently report losing about 10 percent of license holders.
The last raise in hunting license fees was in 1999. The Game Commission’s $120 million budget is also stressed, but the agency has not joined in the Fish and Boat threat to withhold services.
The state Senate approved measures that would authorize both agencies to control their own license fees with legislative oversight, assuming the fees would increase gradually every year or two. In the state House, similar bills are stuck in committee without a vote scheduled for the fall term. Arway’s ultimatum has ruffled feathers, but the tactic may have backfired.
“It’s resonating with a lot of members. A couple of my colleagues are livid over the matter,” said Rep. Keith Gillespie, R-York, majority chairman of the House Game and Fisheries Committee. “The people who are most upset are very much in favor of authorizing [self-regulation of fees], but they take offense at being pushed into a corner. There has been damage done with the threats or release of information. We would have preferred that it would have been done another way.”
Gillespie said he strongly supports the self-regulation of fees, but can’t generate enough votes to move the bills beyond his committee.
“A bunch of my colleagues are not willing to give up that authority,” he said, and some don’t want the vote to be held months before an election year. Gillespie said he has heard of no linkage to other issues, such as horse-trading over support for a shale gas severance tax.
Arway said the service-reduction plan was based on recommendations of the Pennsylvania State University Ecosystem Science and Management College of Agricultural Sciences, which this year conducted an 85-page business analysis of the Fish and Boat Commission. If enacted the plan would, among other things, reduce the number of trout stocked by 7.5 percent -- 240,000 adult trout stocked in 61 streams and four lakes -- and affect the production and stocking of walleye, muskellunge, northern pike and channel catfish.
“It’s not like John’s being capricious,” said Gillespie. “He has mentioned the problem on numerous occasions. He’s saying Rome is burning and this is necessary.”
Gill lice have made an appearance in Pennsylvania.
The parasite – which attaches to the gills of brook trout – was discovered recently in Wolfe Run in Centre County. A subsequent investigation found evidence of them in nine other waters, too.
All had been stocked by the same cooperative nursery, said Brian Wisner, director of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission’s bureau of hatcheries.
The commission euthanized all of the brookies the nursery had left and replaced them with rainbow trout, which seem resistant to the bugs.
What will become of those streams in the future is harder to say, though, apparently.
Jason Detar, chief of the commission’s division of fisheries management, said there’s been limited research done on gill lice. What is known, he said, is that they’re resistant to chemical treatments and hard to control.
“We’re concerned about this,” he added.
The parasites attach to the gills of individual fish, impacting their ability to process oxygen and causing stress. Some Wisconsin research suggests they show up most often in dry summers in warm water, and can impact survival of young of the year fish, thereby hurting populations, he added.
No one can say what the long-term implications of their presence might mean, though, he added.
Commissioner Bill Sabatose of Elk County said fish with the lice pose no threat to people, however.
“They are safe for human consumption. That’s a fact,” Sabatose said.
A decision made this past week may change the future of Pennsylvania fishing.
Next spring, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission is going to allow the state's organized bass anglers to hold a tournament or two on an inland lake during the bass spawn. If all goes well, the commission indicated, such events could become a regular part of the state's fishing scene.
That's a departure from existing rules.
Right now, springtime bass fishing — from April 16 through June 17 this year — is OK only on a catch-and-immediate-release basis, with no tournaments permitted.
That's meant to protect fish guarding eggs.
Andy Shiels, chief of the commission's bureau of fisheries, said some research shows that removing bass from nests on northern lakes leads to almost immediate predation by bluegills, rock bass and the like.
“I think our biggest concern as biologists, on the science side, would be removing those fish from their nests,” Shiels said.
Pennsylvania's ban on spring tournaments long has existed, with one notable exception. They are allowed on Pymatuning Lake, which straddles the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. No one with the Fish and Boat Commission or Ohio Division of Wildlife, which co-manage the lake, has suggested the fishery is suffering as a result.
Bass anglers have noticed.
“It gets hammered with fishing pressure, and still it just keeps getting better as a bass fishery,” said Ben Bilott of North Huntingdon, president of PA BASS Nation. “We're not sure how well a fishery is doing is really related to when fishing is occurring.”
Ohio fisheries officials agree.
Matt Wolfe, a biologist with the Division of Wildlife, said that agency allows bass tournaments during the spawn — on Pymatuning and all of its inland lakes — because they seem to cause no ill effects to bass on a population-level scale.
“It might seem like a lot of fish when you have a 100-boat field and each of them brings in six bass. OK, that's 600 bass,” Wolfe said. “But that's a drop in the bucket compared to how many spawning bass there might be in a population.
“From our standpoint, we don't see any implications.”
There's an economic side, too, said Josh Giran, vice president of PA BASS Nation. Right now, that organization travels out of state to hold springtime tournaments. Giran said competitors spend about $560 each, not counting fuel. Given the size of the typical field, he said that's putting $40,000 per event into the hands of others.
“I'd really like to keep it here in the state of Pennsylvania,” Giran said.
Fish and Boat Commissioners apparently agree. They directed agency staff to develop rules allowing springtime tournaments next year.
What form they'll take, where they might be held and how many would be allowed have yet to be determined.
Anglers may have to make concessions early on, however.
Shiels said staff is leaning toward requiring anglers to make any spawn season tournaments catch, photo and release events. That means competitors would have to weigh or measure fish right where they were caught, then immediately release them into the water rather than run them to a weigh-in station.
That's how most kayak bass tournaments are run these days, he said.
“I think that's the way of the future anyway,” Shiels said.
Such a rule probably would force a group like PA BASS Nation to run a springtime tournament as a benefit event rather than a qualifier, Bilott said.
“When there's money on the line, you can't allow for the chance of someone cheating, or even the perception that someone might be able to cheat,” he said.
But the group might be willing to start out that way to get this idea rolling, he added.
The commission's intent is not to allow unlimited bass fishing by all anglers during the spawn, board president Glade Squires said. It's looking to try this with just a few registered tournaments on some of the state's bigger lakes, like perhaps Raystown, as an experiment in cooperation with competitive anglers.
“I think there are ways we can work with them,” he said.
By Bob Frye HARRISBURG — One Western Pennsylvania lake is about to come back online, albeit with temporary special regulations, and a few others might be inching closer to repairs.
Glade Run Lake in Butler County was drained in 2011 after its dam developed a leak. Work to rebuild it is underway — at a cost of $2.8 million — and should be completed by September, said Paul Urbanik, chief of engineering for Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.
The intent, he said, is to allow it to refill over the winter.
If all goes well, the commission will stock the lake with adult-sized, catchable trout in time for next April's opening day, said Jason Detar, chief of the commission's division of fish management. Anglers will be allowed to harvest those fish just as at any other water, he said.
What they won't be allowed to keep are the assorted minnows and gamefish — namely largemouth bass, white crappie, bluegill, and channel cat fingerlings — that also will be stocked as fingerlings starting next spring.
Commissioners on Tuesday gave preliminary approval to a proposal putting them off limits, likely for a period of years, so they can grow and repopulate the lake.
“We want to give them some extra protection and time to develop,” said Andy Shiels, chief of the commission's bureau of fisheries.
That is standard procedure with newly refilled lakes, Detar said. How long the rule stays in place depends on how the fish respond, Detar said. The commission will monitor growth rates and make changes when the populations can handle them, he said.
The commission also is finalizing repair plans and seeking construction permits for several other “high-hazard” dams, including Somerset Lake in Somerset County and Donegal Lake in Westmoreland.
Somerset is partially drawn down. Donegal is not. But both were identified as lakes where dams must be replaced.
The cost of repairing Somerset Lake is estimated at $7.4 million and Donegal at $4.5 million, said Michelle Jacoby, chief of its bureau of engineering.
The commission doesn't have all of that money yet. It is expecting some state funding via Act 89, which directs a portion of wholesale taxes collected on gasoline to the commission for dam repairs, said Tim Schaeffer, director of policy and planning for the commission. It also is working to get capital budget money, he added.
If and when all that comes through — and the agency is hopeful it will be soon — it will decide which of its 10 remaining high-hazard dam projects to tackle first, Schaeffer said. It will then meet with anglers, boaters and others around them to explain the time frame from draining the lakes to refilling them.
If there's one day a year that's likely to put even the most casual anglers on the water, it's opening day of trout season.
So how many women did you see casting a line Saturday?
Not many, probably, proportionately speaking.
Women have been one of the fastest-growing components of the outdoors — fishing, shooting and hunting — in recent years but still represent a fraction of the people on the water and in the woods.
That seems especially true in Pennsylvania.
A 2011 report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revealed that about 27 percent of anglers nationally are female.
However, Carl Richardson, education section manager for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, said that while women make up 56 percent of Pennsylvania's population, just 6.6 percent of them buy a fishing license in a given year.
Richardson said some survey work determined that three times as many women call themselves anglers as actually buy a license from year to year.
“So we have a big audience that's dropping out,” he said.
The commission wants to address that by year's end.
An internal commission work group of female employees has met twice to figure out how to keep women fishing. Members include women who are avid anglers, as well as those who occasionally fish and some who don't fish at all, Richardson said.
One thing that's clear is women — unlike men — don't necessarily fish to catch fish, Richardson said. They talk about wanting to spend time with family, to be outdoors and relax, he said.
The work group's task is to figure out how to take that information and craft a female-angler recruitment, retention and reactivation plan by this fall. Richardson hopes to present a strategy to commissioners at their September meeting and initiate it in time for 2017 licenses to go on sale Dec. 1.
Commissioners had suggestions for the plan.
Norm Gavlick of Luzerne County runs a combination gun and bait shop and said the key to success is showing customers “added value.” The commission needs to do the same with women who might fish.
“You buy a fishing license, it allows you to fish. But what else do you get?” Gavlick said.
He also suggested the commission do a better job making women, especially single moms, aware they can borrow fishing equipment for a day from commission and many state park offices.
Commissioner Glade Squires of Chester County agreed, suggesting the agency market itself to women by creating learn-to-fish seminars for them.
The potential payoff is huge, commission president Ed Mascharka of Erie County said. He said women account for only about 64,000 of the 800,000 licenses being sold.
“That's nothing compared to the millions of women who are possible license buyers,” he said.
There's trying to build a better mousetrap, and then there's trying to build the first-ever mousetrap.
That's what this might be.
Jeff and Jack Danos, a father and son from Mandeville, La., are marketing “the fish call,” a floating, fish-attracting speaker roughly the size and shape of a Nerf football. It reportedly works by sending sound through the water via vibration — much like a crankbait with an internal rattle might — but on a much larger scale.
They claim anglers who toss it out with its attached anchor or tether it to a boat can call in fish just like a turkey hunter or deer hunter might use a box call or grunt tube to call in gobblers or bucks.
“There's no hole in it where the sound has to come out,” said Jack Danos, a 16-year-old homeschooler. “The whole thing vibrates and produces sound. It uses the water around it to amplify itself and turns the water into the speaker.”
The secret is the tactile transducer or sound exciter inside, he said.
A number of companies make those. Dayton Audio, for example, markets transducers it says can turn anything from a filing cabinet to paper plate into a speaker “by vibrating it at up to speeds of 20,000 cycles per second.”
The Danos use that technology to catch fish, Jack said. They've landed everything from largemouth bass and northern pike in freshwater to saltwater species like flounder and black tip shark.
“We think it might work best with predatory species because they hear the sound and feel the vibration and have to come in and check it out,” he added.
Could it really work?
Fish do indeed “hear,” though the way in which they gather sound is different from humans, said, David Argent, professor of wildlife and fisheries science at California University of Pennsylvania.
“They do possess a highly developed sensory network called a lateral line that interprets vibrations (sound) in the water and transmits such information to the brain. Part of this sensory network also includes a series of small bones in the head called otoliths that function like the inner ear network found in mammals,” Argent said.
They definitely use that sense to find food, he said. But it's somewhat limited; Argent said how well and far sound carries in water is a variable, based on temperature, depth, and density.
“The lateral line and inner ear function largely as distance receptors, but this distance may be relatively short, only effective for a few body lengths of the sound's source,” he said.
Other senses, like sight, are equally important, and perhaps in some cases more so when it comes to initially detecting potential prey, Argent added.
But, a fish call could conceivably have some value, or perhaps at least be the final piece that ultimately convinces a fish attracted by the size, shape and color of a bait or lure to strike, he said.
There are no regulations prohibiting their use, said Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission spokesman Rick Levis.
Anglers, including some in Pennsylvania, are intrigued. Jeff and Jack Danos set out to raise $10,000 via a Kickstarter campaign to produce their first calls. They got that in one night. To date, having done no advertising other than their own website, they've raised more than $112,000, with buyers coming from every state except Hawaii and Alaska, as well as 50 countries, Jack said.
They'll be shipping their first 1,000 calls in November or December. They hope to sell another 2,000 by Christmas.
“After that, we'll really get a better sense of where all it works,” he said. “But it's blown us away every time we've used it.”
More info
Visitors to the Tactibite website — that's the name of the fish call company — can get a look at this device by checking outthefishcall.com.
There are instructional and testimonial videos there, as well as a frequently asked questions section.
The call sells for $99.99 plus $9 shipping and handling.
