 Maybe Colonel you can introduce your staff tonight and I hear we might have a little special treat during a break tonight or something If that's okay This is senior Warden Marcy so everyone mark is the Wells River General region game one. He's been there for about seven years now six years Mark came from the world of media where he was a big time One of our senior senior guys now Mark's got a great canine That'd be great. I just want to say we have to make the opportunity Because Mark came out and did a demo at my place for our employees inside and it just it's amazing Not to build it up too much And a quick advertisement I think you'll find if you have a specific organization that would like to see the dog perform They'll come together, but we'll see that later. Well, thank you He's in my district over there. So we have lots of conversations, which is which is great He's always on top of things Even when I sent him in the wrong direction one time I was shooting no listening to shooting and I called up Said boy, there's someone shooting down the access area. Well, of course He went was sitting at the access area having dinner and said no, that's in New Hampshire. Okay You're close. You're just one state away. So he was very generous about it So commissioner, what's up with the duck stamp program? So we thought might be might be worth a little bit of board's time I think Take about 20 minutes or so To just talk about the Vermont duck stamp program and the kind of milestone we've reached on it and the land we've conserved Through it. So without more ado, I'll turn it over to John Austin and Jane Was orchard to talk a little bit about that Good evening, everybody. My name is John Austin. I'm the land and habitat program manager in the wildlife vision We're pretty closely with director Mark Scott. We're all familiar with And many of you are already familiar with the land and habitat program does dealing with and conservation habitat protection There's things of that nature. Well, one of the things that we do is we help Guide the waterfowl advisory committee. So we have a Vermont duck stamp program was created in 1986 and Jane Lizorchek is going to give you a presentation that goes over the history and the great success of the program Has been over the past 30 years We're celebrating 30 years of successful wetland conservation this year, which is a great milestone for us. We're excited about it celebration event at the mall it's pretty public and an area recently where we Through Jane's efforts added a significant amount of acres to that wetland WMA Yeah, so any of it we we guide the waterfowl advisory committee. That's my committee members by the commissioner It's right now Gary Starr was the chair Bill Sullivan time non-rich representative and That's it In any event, they're wonderful Decisions we've done a lot of good conservation work Through through their efforts in the department center, so I'm going to turn it over to Richard Nelson Oh my goodness So before I turn it over to Jane I just want to offer a few words of introduction on her behalf Jane has been with the department for Over 10 years now and her primary role in the wildlife division These days is to coordinate our real estate work our land acquisition work. It's it's a complicated work Although I would I would dare say she Agree with me. It's also very rewarding work because at the end of the day you see land that's conserved And it's now available to support habitat for fish wildlife and areas for people to go hunt fish Otherwise enjoy wildlife, so Jane does a great job with this She is the driving force behind putting the up-stand monies on the ground to make these projects happen So hi everyone, I'm James Orchek the last time I was here was 10 years ago this month Which was my first month of work actually at the department. It's been a bit of a hiatus. So it's nice to be back John said So As John mentioned this past year was the 30th anniversary of the duck stamp program as such With the help of Tom and others in the outreach division We sort of launched a multi-pronged approach for sort of conveying the success of this program and one of those is sort of to do education and outreach to our Constituents as well as our broader constituents to sort of educate everybody about the work that we do through the ducks camp program Largely wetland conservation. So this is our first presentation on the subject. So you're sort of our test run so hopefully If I didn't form it is and please feel free to ask any questions along the way So as John said I have the privilege of working for fish and wildlife to purchase land for our wildlife management areas and Helping the fish division with their access area program as well as stream bank conservation and so One of the major sources of funding that we use For those acquisitions are the duck stamp program, which we in turn leverage other funds to buy Lanswick so both John and I work very closely with the waterfowl advisory committee and It's been really one of the most fun parts of my job. So as John said that programs 30 years old it was started So it was enacted by Legislature in 1985 and put into effect in 1986 Really it was the foresight and right forward thinking of the early waterfowl advisory committee members and the waterfowl Biologist Tom Myers who really got the program off the ground At the time a lot of people were collecting duck stamps And so another thing that was kind of ingenious in Vermont was that really have we built up the base of the funding in The duck stamp program was by having the first four stamps be a series that were the first Defected the four seasons of Vermont so for collectors at that time seeking to get involved in early state duck stamp prints Instead of just being one in Vermont. We had a series of four that really got our program off to a great start We weren't the first state though obviously there were 36 states before us So we were 37th state and we've really been quite successful with it since then so when you buy your duck stamp and Largely this program has been supported by waterfowl hunters, but in recent years others have contributed to it as well Actually, I should say early years as well I mean for people who are really into burns and ducks also and collectors bought the prints, but also In recent years, we've had people just wanting to give to fish and wildlife And this has been a viable way for them to give to wetland conservation So that money gets deposited into the fish and wildlife funds 100% of it then goes towards wetland acquisition or conservation and enhancement And we don't spend the principal We only spend the interest and that's what the beauty of it was in that we didn't spend it for five years We let the principal build up enough and then now we just primarily spend the interest annually on conservation work As as John mentioned where advised by a waterfowl advisory committee those people are appointed by the commissioner and are there to serve as Advisory and provide guidance for us on decisions that we make on the ground and then also provide guidance to the commissioner Who ultimately makes the final decisions about where we spend the money on the ground? So It's been a lot of fun. Mostly we get together with the committee a few times a year and we talk about projects And in November we all get together for our annual hunt And get out on the ground and actually get into some of the wetlands that we've worked to conserve The first project as I said it took five years for us to build up some money in the fund and then start spending the interest And our first project was a do it pond And just like all of our projects sort of to date since then they're all always have been really partnership efforts It's really only been in the last few years that we started to do some on our own It's really always been projects that we've worked very close with on other conservation partners in the state All of them having the mission of providing sort of Violent conservation and access for waterfowl hunting as well as all other forms of hunting fishing We've been able to raise four and a half million dollars We currently have about two point three million dollars in principle and 2.3 million dollars as well in interest right now Through the money that we put on the ground for projects We've actually been able to leverage almost seven million dollars in other partnership money that's come to the projects Whether it's been from our traditional funding sources like PR funding when we're using state funds to match it We'll use the duck stamp fund or whether we're bringing in money from a not a federal not the grant North American wetland conservation Act which we've been successful in getting a couple of in Vermont Or through our partners with respect to the Vermont Housing Conservation Board or other funding sources We've been able to achieve 93 projects across the state The bulk of those being in the Champlain Valley largely because the bulk of some of the best wetland habitat is in the Champlain Valley And through that we've been able to acquire the center 9,000 acres of wetlands and almost The majority of those are owned by Fish and Wildlife in some instances We've granted out funds to conservation organizations for their acquisitions as well Always asking that those lands also be open for all the kinds of wildlife based recreation that we're interested in providing on our links We've also purchased almost 1,500 acres in conservation easements Those easements are also provide not only protection for wetlands habitat on private land But also a left required a landowner to leave their land open So privately owned but yet still available for wildlife based recreation And then we've also enhanced Just over 1700 acres of wetlands and in that case we're talking about Large-scale wetland restoration projects like that are grand and swamp WMA where we had a very concerted effort to work to plug ditches across the Landscape or smaller acreages such as our beaver enhancement program or beaver backhoe program. We support with duck sand plants as well So as I mentioned, it's not been just us using these funds We've worked in partnership with a whole slew of Organizations and that was one of the things we really wanted to celebrate as part of this anniversary We worked very closely with organizations like the nature Conservancy who do very similar conservation work to us We also work very closely with organizations like the Lake Champlain land trust U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and then more recently we worked very closely with NRCS USDA largely because they do wetland reserve easements on land where they are restoring farmland for wetland protection, but those easements don't require public access And so oftentimes they go in they can conserve the land enhance it for wetlands And then we can come in and buy those lands and manage them into the future for wildlife based recreation It's sort of a win-win for us because those lands are very cheap then once they have the easement on the place People pictured may or may not be actual waterfowl hunters So just to highlight a few of our sort of really special Marquee wildlife management areas that wouldn't have been possible without that stamp plan Sort of starting from the beginning of the program up into more recently For people who may or may not be familiar with it South Bay comes out of Lake Memphis or May God Barton River This was the vision of Paul Hamlin and He really saw the opportunity to piece together a wildlife management area up and down the river and it really took a decade of Work by the Fish and Wildlife Department and really I'd say largely we're done except for three parcels But we keep trying to get but they're small pieces of the puzzle and largely we've done a really successful job of buying land Up and down the Barton River and almost all of it. We've used duck stamp plans to buy So it started back in 1991 and it's really highly productive wetlands. You see the muskrat houses there on the left What a beautiful spot And I thought I would just mention that It's a model that we'd like to employ in other places sort of this piece mail put together Conservation along repair in systems and one of the areas that we're really starting to focus on is the Clyde River And this is a picture by Tom Rogers and I got to actually it actually looked like that It wasn't even just the camera the day that we were out there. It was beautiful and the Clyde River I'm sure many of you are familiar with it But it's a really amazing wetland system and one that's been sort of low hanging through for conservationists because it's not degraded Like so many of our repair in systems It's just really rich in wildlife wetland diversity and really the major threat here right now Besides a little bit of conversion for agriculture is over sort of over loving it It's getting a lot of recreational use and we really like to own land along there I have a seat at the table to talk about management of these significant resources out there So this is a stay tuned. Hopefully in 10 years I can come back and say that we've done a really good job conserving land that belong to the cloudy Keptic swamp a small but really visible wildlife management area I think people can probably picture it's the cover of our wildlife management area guidebook If you're driving along route seven south of Manchester What the new what people still call the new route seven Cut across the wetland on either side and bisected it and we own on the west side of There's always a really beautiful heron recovery that you can see from route seven there And I wanted to highlight it because it's also a place where we have an active project now We own pretty much half of that wetland system and the beef the largest beaver dam That's creating that wetland system is actually off of our WMA and we're under contract to buy that now So hopefully this will be about a hundred and sixty acre WMA in the next few months Another duck stamp project Whitney Creek. I wish I had better pictures, but really I wanted to highlight Pretty much if you think of Lake Champlain influenced wetlands along In the Champlain Valley almost all of them are owned by Fish and Wildlife and a large portion of those have been conserved with duck stamp funds as well as through partnerships and federal funds as well But Whitney Creek is one where we've used almost exclusively duck stamp funds And while it's smaller than places like Little Otter Creek or Dead Creek or lower Otter Creek Some of the other ones you know is these are all sort of destination areas this time of year for waterfowl hunting as well as other types of recreation And Whitney Creek was one of the last parcels that Bill Crenshaw acquired prior to his retirement. So It's just a really great place and the last Lake inch Lake Champlain influenced wetland system that isn't conserved is what's known as Munson Flats or Malibu Creek And that's the one that we held our celebration at this Fall and we're looking to work with NRCS and through our own initiative to start to conserve land pretty much from Route 7 out to Malibu Bay and we've now acquired three parcels there one of which our largest one was just this past spring former Collins farm, which people may know who was the Red Sox player that lives in Colchester That was his farm when he only saved one season in the Red Sox came back and started a farm in Colchester And the large part of it is now a part of our WMA. And so These are our premier wildlife management areas and you know many of them have been conserved with duck stamp funds And with the oversight of the waterfowl advisory One of our newer Projects one that Bill Crenshaw had the vision for and I've had the good fortune to continue to work on is the lemon fair Wildlife management area. This is one of these places that unless you're a waterfowl hunter because John Austin probably just loves it all the time You go down there. It's hard to see the vision for what the lemon fair was. It's been really degraded by agriculture There's ditches everything is been impacted by agriculture But the area pretty much from 125 to 74 is known as the lemon fair Lake Plain That's bloods and it's stuck into dead creek for migratory wild waterfowl. It gets a lot of bird use It gets really fall Migrations and then it's also really popular for grassland birds And just bird watchers and others. So we've been piecing together And WMA there and we currently own just under it just under 800 acres of which we doubled the size pretty much in the last Year and a half. We bought three new parcels that brought up the The acreage there and have provided a lot better access on West Street because for people knew the best access was really from a boat and if you've ever paddled the lemon fair be prepared to portage and get Bit by mosquitoes and so this has been really great that we have really nice access along West Street now for a large portion of the WMA, so this is another one sort of stay tuned We'll definitely be working there in the future Lastly to main bill I just wanted to mention the main bill is you know one that we partnered with ducks unlimited and really the Vision there was waterfowl and waterfowl restoration but really this this WMA highlights the multiple benefits these places have for all sorts of wildlife and Main bill in particular has become sort of a focus area for the Rutland's fisheries Division, there's a lot of great fish happening fish hatcheries natural fish hatcheries and the impoundments there As well as a real destination for Audubon and bird watchers And so while we were drawn there for waterfowl and restoration along Otter Creek There's really multiple benefits that these lands provide and to main bill is really a very popular area along route seven in Pittsburgh So I said we also do enhancement and wetland restoration An ongoing program. I'm not sure actually how much we do this anymore I don't know as much about it, but we used to do this quite a bit Yeah, so clearly cat tails are native vegetation and great wildlife, but they can become invasive and we like to be we have used up stamp funds and other Plannies to create openings and diversity in the wetland for waterfowl and other wildlife to use I Mentioned this earlier, but Brandon swan frustration was a big effort by Dave Sausville and others Really to work to get water back in the wetland that had really been drained It's part of the Otter Creek swamp wetland restoration story that you hear so much about and it's really been a success beaver management program clearly We see it as really important with duck stamp funds by keeping beaver in their habitat and providing the baffles And rather than trapping them out when we can keep them in the right place Enables us to keep really good wetland habitat intact So really for us it's been a really great conservation legacy and For us, but it's been also very successful in that we had the unique opportunity to set it the water the funding aside and not spend it and Really focus on spending the interest and roughly we're generating anywhere from 50 to 150 thousand dollars a year Interest which doesn't seem like a ton of money but when you're paying two to five hundred dollars an acre for wetlands it actually gets you quite a bit of conservation and It's been really a privilege to work on it and really I encourage you even if you're not a duck stamp water fowl hunter to consider contributing to the duck stamp program and Really the way we've been pitching the habitat stamp as I'm sure you guys have talked a little bit about is you know The companion to the wetland program that is the duck stamp funds with the upland portion And that really has been kind of taking the duck stamp idea as our model And you know, we've been very successful in getting funding through those donations That the what part we're working on the part we're struggling on still is You know, it's largely hunters at the trappers and anglers who are paying that money when they buy their license Donating to that habitat preservation So we're still working on getting the word out to others to try to encourage them to Put in too because they benefit from those from those purchases So just in conclusion, we also did these really snazzy posters As part of the celebration and I brought one for everybody. So please take one on your way out this obviously Be a wetland in Vermont in the Champlain Valley and then this features all of the ducks Before we went to a digital image that doesn't change now and then I Brought a summary if you're interested just to see the history of the program Like to be a few dozen questions, I'm hoping Let's go ahead Greg. Yeah Ah No, not really, I mean we've talked about it and and and it doesn't It doesn't work all that well with our current licensing system. I think we don't feel like the payback We're probably be there. I would love to do it just carry the tradition I'm a waterfowl Part of it anymore, but frankly, it was a money loser for us It cost us more to produce it and administer it and we ever got back to the term So it was actually soaking money out of the dump stamp months And we just thought that well frankly the vast majority of interest amongst the people who were the buyers and stamps Mostly waterfowl owners, but we're also collectors That interest really tanked Sort of saturated the market Justin we think Leveraging State money when the state puts money into one of these pieces of land The private people match it the federal government match it What's how's the leveraging work or is there any leveraging? It's very diverse. I mean sometimes we use a hundred percent duck stamps to buy a piece of property sometimes we use One of the more recent lemon fair positions we used to PR funds and the 25 percent match being from Duck stamp funds We've had donations that have leveraged it We've had partners bring money to the table and just asked us for ten percent of the project costs You know, it's very diverse depending on what the project is. We often get Landed a bargain sale. So some people donate part and sell part and the great thing about that is we can use the Donated part to match the federal money as Additional state maps You like this And you saw a lot of ducks a wood ducks in your production there a wood duck box as part of the program too Because I know there's individuals who do a lot of wood duck box work I certainly see more wood ducks when I'm out in the Mars than any other duck this time of year We tend to To do some of the Anything else I guess If you ever get a little go up money, you can sure use that Cactail either up the concrete Totally joked out. I mean you're like No room for water And they don't even know that everything That WMA is a constant challenge You're familiar with it. It sounds like you are We've worked in there for well since we owned it and Despite our best efforts Loading catnail map We'll probably go back in there before too long Done something that way I Think else folks Jumping back to our agenda I was remiss when we do some public comments now folks don't mind. I think we really have a big Sign-up list going but if um, I know sometimes we're limited by too many people in the room tonight We're not limited. So I'd love to hear all the comments that folks might have, you know So is there anyone who'd like to have public comments tonight? Thanks My head and or anyone else might be watching on TV or My company's traffic petition initially was to address the issue of it's mental take of I was caught in your traps and Lock-ups caught As petition reads, you know, it does say that seasons would be extended if Cast as we're in so that's the part that my camp has a problem with we understand the issue It still takes on it's the issue of I'm just going to address the other piece because I think the vodka piece as far as I know So I know at Chris Burner's presentation on September 21st the topic of Shortening the beaver season to come inside with other seasons and and November where I was discussed but there was concern about If the evers weren't trapped in the end of March they might end up being used in speakers throughout the year and since the department doesn't really have any News and statutes in place to kind of regulate that there's a concern about Bevers not being trapped mainly or there's not really any processes around that. So it was interesting with me the presentation on the duck stamp I didn't realize that a portion of that money Was actually allocated towards water flow control devices So I guess I would just maybe ask To put it out there for a future discussion to me now in December or not You know, what would be the real? Problem for lack of our work with just shortening the beaver season to the end of February to come inside with Otter season as it was 10 years ago Even doing it on a trial basis for maybe one or two years and see if there's a huge uptick in Newson's beaver complaint calls that might come through maybe we won't see those calls But you know the beaver season ended at the end of February You know 10 years ago to run concurrent of Otter traffic season. So maybe it's time to try that again My organization would be more than happy to even help with funding For some of the water flow control devices would be happy to get volunteers to help people wrap trees You know, I think it'd be a good opportunity to kind of bridge this chasm You know between the issue of incidental tanks and then the issue of people who don't want to expand the traffic season It just seems to me like it's a very aggressive Physician to expand Otter traffic season by a whole month just to address a handful of orders who are trapped incidental to beaver traps in March just a lot of A lot of upset and a lot of ire And it just seems like a really aggressive approach when you hear the news of another approach That might work for everybody So that's just that is when I'm making that comment until I heard the presentation on it And also, you know, I think as far as finding this concern I can guarantee you that you know non-license holders if they saw some of that funding go towards Water flow control devices being installed more more of those methods I can guarantee you that there'd be a lot more non-license holders interested in funding for that stamp They would feel like okay. Well, wow, this is the stamp that you know, I could really get behind And I know it's it's a huge problem with the nuisance beavers and I get that But I think it's also an opportunity to maybe get the necessary rules in place that is the place to address that Thanks Everybody else underneath comments Great looks like we're ready to move on to some fish work. Yeah, so As you as you guys know the fish fish regulations are not typically up in front of you Softens wildlife isn't and Eric and we thought that it made sense to have a kind of a Pre-breathing I guess I'd say on what the how we've reached the current current status of Regulations and a little preview of what's coming coming to you for your peer consideration So without more than that, I'll turn it over to Eric to introduce the fish folks Thanks I'm Eric Palmer. I'm the director of fisheries for both of you who haven't met me before The fish division includes the fish biologists and the fish atrease and the fishing access area program With the fish regulations Typically we aren't Changing regulations on an annual basis. We try and do it every two years If there's something that comes up in the intervening time that it really requires fast attention We can do an emergency rule, but otherwise we tend to come to the board every two years with what are largely Just biological tweaks to the existing regulations and occasionally Something that anglers have have brought our attention as an opportunity to enhance the recreational fishing This time we have Two parts of the regulation proposal that have a lot more of a social component than in what we are normally presenting So one is the speargun use which Most of you saw the petition that the loop helps presented a while back and and that was at the tail end of our Two-year regulation process. We didn't take action then we said we'll work with you over the next year And we'll bring it back for the 2017 rulemaking process these regulation proposals would be to take effect on January 1st of 2018 and The other one is related to commercial fishing the legislature Clarified the authority of the Fish and Wildlife Board to regulate commercial fishing activities, and so we have a proposal that includes some reporting requirements few minor tweaks to some existing commercial fish buyer requirements and then a possibility of adding Two species to the list of species prohibited for commercial sale that we'd like to discuss with the board and Typically we've come with a proposal in January That it's simple enough that the board can Consider it and usually take an action to do a first boat right in that same meeting There's a little bit more complexity to at least those two pieces of the proposal this year And so we thought it would be good to bring kind of a preview to the board a couple of months ahead of time Let you know what we're thinking show you kind of the concept not the actual language of world changes But the concepts that we're proposing For the simple ones the language is so straightforward. They will just show you What it is but for commercial fishing and for spearguns we want to give you our approach and Get your feedback and everything about it over the next couple of months So when we come back in January with proposed language We've already got your input on whether we're heading in the right direction You're already thinking about it And hopefully the language will make enough sense that we could then move forward into a first boat process So one of the things we're going to do ahead of time and we used to do this every every three or four years Anyways, it's just kind of give an overview of how we use different types of fish regulations What the difference is between? rich current one of our senior biologists fisheries program manager has Given this presentation probably four or five times and so Just really an opportunity to bring the board up to speed on how we use different types of regulations to manage both the biological and the social aspects of fishing and then for the various Regulation proposal parts will have some of our fish biologists stand up and present because either it's in their district Or they've been managing the work group that's been putting together pieces for example for the speargun so Starting off we'll have rich current he works at a bar our rock's very office. He's chair of our truck team as well as working on Passage and stream buffers Everything have a cap related so if you have other questions about Fish habitat Tonight he's primarily going to present Regulation overview and then we'll look into some of the presentation rich as the regulation changes in the district that he manages Eric I know in August we also had like a list of questions that people Kind of circulated just to say we're wondering about some of these things Is that something I'm going to talk about tonight or another night on some of it? And I apologize. I was off on vacation the month of August but rich did come to that meeting like took notes Some of it he's going to address in his presentation some of it was a little bit beyond the scope But yeah, we're going to respond to To go someplace fun in August Yeah Okay, so Just kind of give an overview of fishing regulations and the basis of them and how we use them so certainly there is often a biological component of Fishing regulations, you know, we spend a lot of our time sampling fish populations and anglers and fisheries Better mad at them But there's also a strong social component of our regulate our current regulations and how they've developed over time just just the kind of Reinforce Every ten years or so. We do a statewide angler survey. So this provides us with some really good kind of broad information from anglers on their opinions of Fishing and fishing regulations and other other issues unless one was done in 2010 We surveyed or sent about 5400 surveys. This was contracted through the Cornell University And we're looking at angler activity and their opinions looking at trends over the course of the three statewide surveys that we did in And then we can look at inland waters versus like Champlain issues and peace things out So this is a, you know, an important resource for you folks as you're considering some of these proposals that we have some of this data We stratify this the sampling by region so we can get regional views But you can see that the five regions each one received 900 surveys also surveyed not residents with their opinions and The last survey had a return rate of about 40% It doesn't sound that great, but apparently for mail surveys It's very good So we look at we get information on angler activity, you know what they're fishing for, open ice fishing, Lake Champlain versus inland, their opinions on species preferences, crew limits, you know, the sizes, the quality, the sizes of fish, regulations various issues of Vermont Where they get their information and what some opinions So just so you're aware that that's out there So back to regulations We have what we call general fishing regulations. So these are kind of broad based regulations that are, you know, applied statewide and to address some broad biological protection for social issues and Because they're applied statewide They they are somewhat limited in their effectiveness. You know, we've got quite a range of variation in Climate and the timing of seasons and spawning seasons So it's kind of difficult to protect, you know, fish in a high elevation screen and down in that, you know Connecticut River or Lake Champlain Valley, so it's You know, it's got some some limitations And then we have special regulations and these are tailored to a specific water The biological fishery characteristics of that water and it's intended to to produce a specific response, so it's more, you know oriented to that specific water So within the suite of fishing regulation tools, we have crew limits, length limits Season restrictions and gear restrictions So crew limits, the number of fish you can take per day is generally used to distribute the catch among anglers Or limit the excessive harvest by individual anglers. So more of a social kind of component It may provide a measure of success, you know, folks like to know that they've caught their limit It could also be used on the other side to promote a conservation ethic and try to limit the number of fish people are actually harvesting But in general, it has no effect the number of fish that are taken over the course of the whole season. You know, our fishing seasons, for example, trout season lasts over six months Reduce the limit, you know, it saves it for that individual angler, but over the six-month period we're not affecting total angler effort So the number of those fish saved from one angler and we'll get redistributed to another and we've got an example of this So in 1991 we had a 12-trout limit for brown and rainbow trout and streams and we did an intensive survey of the dog river interviewing anglers over the course of the season Finding out what they catch and caught, and from that we could estimate the number of fish that were harvested over the course of the season You can see there, most people harvested zero fish. They made a pod fish, but there was a lot of folks that released fish And very few kept our cod or kept the full limit of 12 fish. In 96 We had reduced our stream limit to six fish for brown and rainbow trout Which is primarily what's in the dog river in the lower reach. And you can see despite cutting the limit in half We had essentially identical harvest. That just kind of shows we're just really redistributing those fish among anglers and not really making a change without feelings. Now that's not to say you can't, in a very extreme case, affect annual harvest. We had a limit of yellow purge of one, certainly makes a difference, but, you know, if it's not really less than what most anglers are able to catch, or you really not have enough. Rich, that's not a stock river anymore, or a stream, right? That's a naturally occurring fish with those results. So I was thinking this is all about stock fish spreading out the harvest, but No, I mean that's that's also, you know, a consideration. Wow. Interesting. The length limits are another one of our tools, and these can promote changes in the size structure of the population. We're trying to target, you know, either harvest or protecting certain sizes. We can use it to protect migratory species. So, you know, in the northeast kingdom, in the Magog system, we have a 10-inch limit to allow fish that are spawned in the streams to get large enough to then migrate back out to the Lake Mecca Lake as small as possible. We could use it to protect fish until they become the spawning age, to encourage natural reproduction. And again, this is, you know, one of our more effective tools in altering population structure, often used with krill limits, and it includes things like no-kill, minimum length, slot limits, and like that. If you have a question, just, you know, you're free to jump in. Do we do any slot limits? We have a couple on some bass fisheries where we had, you know, real abundant kind of stunning populations. We're trying to, actually, the next slide kind of shows. You know, one of the intents of using a slot limit, so this is just a visual from a bass example. So you've got lots of fish. They're kind of competing amongst themselves. They're small. They're slow-growing, and we can use a slot limit to try to increase harvest on the smaller, over-populated size, protect them as they move into a certain, you know, length slot, and so that they could spill over into a larger fish. So we've done this on a couple of moths. And that's, what do you call my volumetrician? It did? Does it still? Or does that change? Okay, great. So the key is that people are actually going to harvest this year. These smaller fish, and that tends to be kind of the difficulty is they're not willing to do that, and all you've really done is push the length limit over to here, and you really haven't, you know, dealt with the situation. It all depends on, you know, what angle we're going to do. Season limits are another tool, and we can use that to protect concentrations of fish. You know, we have spawning closures where we know a fish are moving into an area and highly vulnerable. Historically, they were used to really allow for shifts in law enforcement. You know, fishing ended when the season began, and it was kind of a clean break. And then there's, you know, this opening day kind of, you know, trying to create some enthusiasm and to get out there and go fishing. You know, some states have gotten away from season closures and had the year-round fishing. We've held on to it. And there are gear restrictions, you know, what you can use, how you can use it. It can control the catch efficiency. We don't allow you to use dynamite to catch fish. It can reduce the risk of undesirable fish species or diseases, parasites. So this kind of speak to the baitfish regulation. That's what we're trying to do there. A limit, you know, it's kind of a terminal gear and we're trying to limit those spread of undesirable fish. Some states use it to kind of promote a diversity of angling experiences. So, you know, some states will have fly fishing only, and it's more of a social regulation. We haven't gone there in Vermont. You know, we'll have artificial fly fishing only, but not fly fishing only. And, you know, often used to control hooking mortality and reduce that part of fishing mortality. So that's, you know, hooking mortality has been studied quite a bit. This is a graph of a study in 1992 that's been several since then. This gives you the overall picture of fish that are caught with bait and have much higher mortality after they're released. They tend to be more vulnerable to swallowing the hook and injuring some internal organs, whereas artificial flies and lures are moving. They tend to catch more on the lift and can be released and suffer much lower mortality. So when we're proposing those types of regulation, that's really often what's behind it. Do you see a difference between flies and other kinds of artificial fish? There are very, you know, there are, but they're very minor. So in, you know, really super heavy fish waters, you know, like some of the Yellowstone things like that, where there's so much pressure that even a stick for metal, a very small, you know, may make a difference. We're not in that situation, we're not. So, you know, we kind of, we're not. So that's it with the general regulation, kind of our tools. And we have, you know, special regulations. And again, these are where we're trying to use what we know of the fish population and the fishery to try to change the population structure or density in some way with regulations. So this is an example. We have our 14-inch limit on Lake Moray for large mouth bass. And you can see that was implemented in 1991. And you can see this is a fish over 15 inches. So we did see, you know, we have seen a response over time. So one thing that you kind of have to, you know, we're using regulations to try to influence a fish population is there is, you know, you look at total mortality. So on one side of the, we have natural mortality. So, you know, there's fire metals, there's floods, you know, we're going through droughts. There's temperature issues, water quality issues. There may be some, you know, man-made, you know, event that causes mortality. And then fish have a certain lifespan, you know, they're only going to grow at a certain, you know, at a certain rate. There's predation, there's diseases. So that part of the scale is important to consider. And then you've got fishing mortality. So if, which is angler harvest, you know, they're said to remove from the system or hook in mortality, which I just showed. So for the fishing regulation to really be effective, this has to be, you know, a significant part of the mortality. If this is really driving the system, you know, changing this is really not going to be enough. So that's kind of, you know, some of the considerations we have to make. Think of, like, the deer and the winter severity index on that natural mortality side, versus the hunting mortality in anglers group fishing. So when we're developing regulations, you know, we can use the biological data and kind of get a sense of, you know, how that's going to affect the population. So back in the late 90s, we were looking at some special regulations to try to improve the dog river. And so we had the data that allowed us to kind of estimate what happened, you know, during that year. So this was, you know, that year that I kind of showed before where we had a certain amount of harvest, about 900 fish. And then we could estimate by our anglers survey that was done on the dog river how many were taken by bait, including potential hunting mortality and then flies and roars. And then try to kind of go backwards and say, okay, if we use one of these different types of regulation, what would we expect from mortality? So you could see, in this case, you know, the decline in fish mortality with the most conservative regulation being no-kill artificial flies on the dog river. In this case, we ended up with some sort of slot limit a little larger than this as a regulation proposal. Now, you know, back to our angler survey or statewide angler survey, we kind of have a sense of what people think about the use of special regulations for different fisheries. And in general, folks support the concept, you know, usually less than 10 percent, you know, follows any use of special regulations. And you tease that a little further and ask a little what types of regulations do you support. Tends to be, you know, here's trout streams, length limits are the most supported, lower career limits. And then you have declining support for catch and release and artificial flies and roars. Again, you know, most people tend to support the concept of using these special regulations. So despite all of the, you know, complexity, I guess, within what appears as complexity in our regulations, we don't really have a lot of these special regulations for the purposes I mentioned. These are the ones in rivers and streams, the baton kill, the dogs, the white, the lead, the lead, and the wild and misty applied river. We'll be talking about the dog and the applied river today. Lakes and Fonds. Eric mentioned Lake Parma. I also have a regulation on chitin and reservoir. A few on bass, Baker and Kent Collins are slot limits. Lake trout. Seymour and the labral. That was mentioned at our last meeting. People had some questions about that in a couple of workshop ponds. So really not a lot, you know, that we're actually applying. It's good to see this all laid out like this, Rich. It's really helpful, I think, to identify it's not that many miles of stream. These ponds and lakes appreciate the presentation. So one thing that's also important to kind of, you know, as, you know, when I was here last time and people were on the round table kind of asking me about different regulations is to try to understand, you know, how we got there. Because it's never really as, you know, often a straight line. And there's a lot of things that kind of went into it. So when we, you know, are developing regulations, sometimes it's coming from the biological staff and moving up through the process, you know, through our department and a few folks. Sometimes we have a commissioner comes in and has an interest in moving us in a certain direction and gives us our marching orders and we take it through that process. We've had the board or legislature kind of, you know, have us in a direction. Individual anglers or angler groups. And often, you know, there's a combination of above that influences the final regulation. And then on top of that, we need to work with Jason and his folks to make sure that these are enforceable or there aren't, you know, things that we're really not considering. So just as kind of an example, you know, we have all the drought regulations have evolved over time. Started out in 1866 where, except for June, July and August, the drought were off limits. 88, a six-inch drought limit, six pounds a day was instituted. 57, the free limit went from 20 to 12. 61, the season expanded into late April through September 30th. In 74, we, this was a biologically based, you know, proposal to eliminate the six-inch limit. And that was done in 74. Also, the season was again expanded to a little earlier in April into second Sunday in October. In 78, legislature got involved and reinstated the six-inch drought limit in two counties. So you can understand why we have. And then in 81, after study by our department, they were convinced that it was no longer necessary and rescinded that. So we're back to eliminating statewide. 93, the 12-trout limit per day changed to 12-trout of which only six could be rainbows or ground trout. Now, somewhere along the line, the five-pound limit was eliminated as well. So, you know, things have changed over time, different boards, different discussions. We can't necessarily say where we are today and where we would be if we scratched everything, but, you know, things kind of evolved for different reasons. It's also shown in, if you look at different states, you know, that's something that Anglos always bring up. Well, this state's doing this and that state's doing that. And they've gone through that same evolution, you know, in their history and their boards. And we all know the same science, but, you know, and we have similar resources in some states, but you can see Massachusetts has gone away from a season limit. So they have, you know, year-round fishing. It changed their thrill limit for different seasons for whatever reason. Maine also has a kind of a split season where they go to a low-water limit with artificial only after August 16th. Hampshire goes from January to October, no limit. New York, you know, so everything is a little different even though, you know, we have the same basic understanding of the biology. There's a lot of social factors that are driving things. So another example that someone brought up was the lake trout regulations for, you know, Seymour in April. And how this came about was there were some concerns back in the late 80s on lake trout, you know, fishing quality and regulations. And our commissioner at the time, Tim Van Zandt, decided to address this by creating a citizen advisory board. So there were a group of anglers that were appointed. There was a lake association representative appointed. And the way this process went was that we fed that board information, biological information, fishery information, and kind of stepped back and let them come up with their recommendations, which they did. And that was essentially what led to Seymour in April regulations, those line restrictions. Also wrapped up the work-brown and rainbow career limit into the lake trout limit. So in the lake trout waters, the work-brown and rainbow career limit was reduced to two. You know, it was, you know, people were satisfied with it. It made these regulations. But, you know, looking back on it, you know, 20-something years later doesn't always make sense on Facebook. So they need to kind of know the history of how some of these things came about. So that's what I have on just kind of an overview. Thanks, yes? 1974, we got rid of the 16-inch limit, at least in the fourth place. The reason for that was because we were thrown back a lot of 4-inch fish and they were dying. I remember that. I had done it myself ever since I was a kid and it used to really piss me off that I knew those fish were going to die because I caught them on worms. A trout would immediately suck that worm right down his gut. It just, they could taste it instantly and down it goes, different than a fly or an artificial lure where they don't have that sucky thing that goes on. So, a fish and wildlife board, I guess, smartened up and got rid of it because why let them float on down the stream and just died within 20 minutes to an hour somewhere else. Now, on the Batten Hill, we allowed artificial flies, artificial lures and worms for catching release only. I have had some feedback on that, including people on this board, not a good idea. When we kill an animal in the state of Vermont, it's done because it's a nuisance or it's done for, that we eat it. And sometimes it's nuisance and we eat it. This is one of the places where we have allowed a trout to be caught for fun and a high percentage are going to die and nobody gets to eat it. I don't like that and I think we should revisit that. I'd like to know what other states allow catching release with worms. I don't know about it. I showed on the Dog River the declining mortality with the different regulation options, the lowest being artificial flies and lures only catching release. You can still affect total mortality by going to catch and release. There would be some hooking mortality with bait fishing and recognize that in the Batten Hill. The other thing that kind of goes on behind that is what we know is bait anglers from all of our surveys, both the social surveys as well as on the ground interviewing anglers on what they thought to release, is bait anglers are much more harvest oriented. And if the harvest is no longer available, their participation drops. And that's what we saw in the Batten Hill. Without being able to harvest much fewer bait anglers participate, that essentially reduces that risk. The ones that do are there are ways of fishing with bait more actively that are going to lower hooking mortality. So it was a compromise. As we went through the regulation process, that's what we're doing and that's what you folks end up doing. And in that case, that's where we landed. It doesn't give us a good image. You know, if they're not going to be there, we'll look right at the end. They're not going to be there legally. I didn't mind the circle, but that didn't bother me anything. They can't swallow that thing down too far from bait if they wanted to use that. But there's so many places for bait fishing in Vermont that there's no reason why they should kill these fish for no good reason. And I just grew up on fish hatcheries and I know how little it takes to kill a trout. It doesn't take much. They'll even die on flies, but nowhere near the percentage die on flies is here. It's a death sentence for them to be caught on hook with worms and release for absolutely no consumption, just for fun. That's a bad image for our department. We have comments. Yes, thanks. Eric, did you get a copy that the board got on the Lake Seymour Association? Will that be something you're going to address back to them when we open up the rule? Well, yeah, I got a copy that I think Mary sort of committed it to the board that Ron Frisboy is later. Which, yeah, we were not planning to talk about that tonight. We were planning to talk about that soon, though. And I think a little bit about what Rich just presented in terms of what they're asking for their change, because they're asking for the length limit, the most biological part, to go to similar with General Riggs. They're asking for the bag limit, the less biological part to stay at one. And the number of rods, which is almost entirely social, to change for summer fishing that stay the same for winter fishing. So I think it's got some interesting mix of... Probably 21 people there. Craig and I went. Judge was there. He had a good presentation. The other thing, if you know where Seymour is, it's maybe 1700 acres and 300 yards down the road. You've got Echo, which is 550 acres. So what we see is you've got two rods in Echo and you can keep two lake trout and it's 18 inches. So Seymour, your one rod, 20-inch laker, you get to keep one. So we do see, in the spring, a lot more pressure, a lot more boats put into a 550-acre body of water, which is, if you're heading that way, I'll go fish the air to poles, different thrill limit that you do on the 1700-acre body. Yeah, we do want to talk about it more. Judge is going to be here tonight to talk about the fly. You can come in a little bit later. But if you look at Ron's data, it also shows that the catch rates were much higher for those fish over 20 inches a little while back. We've heard quite a few angler concerns about the smell of population at Seymour. So there's more going on there than just a regulation. But yeah, we'll be prepared to talk about that. Thanks. Any other questions, folks? What's the next step, Commissioner, with us? This is a good background. Yep. So also tonight, we're going to hear a brief presentation on a couple of items that you're going to see coming to you for consideration when we open up the fish roll. And I'll turn that over to Eric. Yeah, so once again, this is kind of a preview of coming attractions. So we wanted to talk. We've got some proposed changes for the Dog River, for the Little River, for a snagging definition that doesn't currently exist. We've got some housekeeping changes. We've got some proposed changes to how we define open water fishing, so that we don't call it angling, because that can cause like a statue. And then the spear gone into commercial fishing. So what I would suggest is that we just start working through those. Rich was going to start out with talking about the dog and the Little River. At some point, pizza is going to arrive and we can take a break and then pick up wherever we'd like to off. Right. If that's okay with you, we'll move in. I guess. That was a great presentation. I was wondering if that's available on an electronic copy that could be emailed to us. Yeah, we'll email it out in a full mark. Yeah. At first, I might just say, I like the copy. Yeah, the charts are good. Yeah. It's gone out. No. I would... Sorry. I was... I would motion that we give the dog presentation now before dinner. Yeah. Yeah. One second. Don't tell me you find out who's in charge around me. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. All right. Moving right along. Thank you, Mary. The dog. The dog. The dog. The dog. The dog. The dog. The dog. The dog. The dog. The dog. Nice presentation there. That was beautiful, huh? Yeah. That's kind of cool to imagine that, you know, that's one of the resources you're paying for when you buy a license. Good for you. Good for us, you know? Yeah. I think we're ready to continue with the fish presentation. Yeah. That'd be great. The other dog demonstration. Yeah. Okay. So, as Eric mentioned, we're going to do some quick reviews of some upcoming proposals that will cover the Little River and the drought regulations, and the commercial fishing, both that and past evening. This is a quick one. The Little River between the Root Two Bridge. This is near, this is the state complex, or it isn't so. Down the Volta Dam is currently as a two-fish regulation. We stock two-year-old atry rear trout in this section, and it's part of, we have total eight of these sections where we limit the harvest of two fish per day. This fish are raised, you know, two-year-old. They're big. They're expensive, so the idea is to distribute the catch and extend the fishery. And there's a little piece of it that runs up the Little River that was kind of added on when the local warden was observing some, you know, these fish moving up into the mouth of the Little River in the summer during the heat. So, as you can see here, the Little River is coming from the outlet of Waterbury Reservoir. So, Waterbury Reservoir is close to a 900-acre apartment. It has a bottom of leaves. So, previous hydro operations, their license requires them to release three to the feet per second. It leaked, the dam leaked about 13, so that's really what we've got. Is it repaired? No, that's just not part of that. And it's a hydro-peaking operation. So, as you can see here, when it's not generating, you get your 13 CFS. And then when they turn on the hydro, you can jump up to anywhere from 450 and actually, more recently, 670 CFS. So, either on or off, you know, ground or no flood state, something between... We had a guy die there a couple of years ago, right? Two years ago. What's the warning system to watch your... Well, since that time, they have signed, and apparently there's some sort of a sign on where it goes off. And again, it's a bottom release. So, what about reservoirs? 100 feet deep. So, that's cold water coming out the other end, which is generally a good thing for fish and trout. Does it get to build a thermal client? Yes, but there's limited oxygen below it. So, that's why... There's a lot of those reservoirs won't allow... They won't have a thermal client because of that bottom draw. Right. Moving it too much. Yeah. It does support smell. So, we do have, you know... So, we worked through the first free licensing process. It actually took us about 18 years to get through this project. But have been successful in getting some improved flow requirements, which are starting up. So, currently, we've been able to get an additional 25 CFS. That's just a standard release. There's an 8-inch pipe that they discovered. So, right now, that's open and providing additional flow. So, we've got better conservation flows. And also, they're limited to not going up to 670 CFS, but to 300 now. So, more on the bottom end and less jacking it up on the peaking. And then that means it's a longer duration because there's less flow depending on the time to manage that reservoir. Phase two, which should be hopefully initiated this spring, they're going to be replacing the turbine and automating the valve. A lot of the equipment in this facility is very old and manual. So, they really have a lot of flexibility in how they manage flows which is why it was on or off. And this will give them flexibility of maintaining a run at the river release from zero to 650 CFS. That'll cover the majority of what we see. So, then spring run off and I flood it once. Phase three requires the replacement of the floodgates, which actually the state owns the dam. So, that's on us to replace at the cost of the last I heard is 35 million I'm sure is more than that. Once that's done the winter drawdown will be eliminated and we'll go to full run of the river. So, we've got a lot of improvements right now and to come. So, the proposal was to change the regulation on the Little River. So, one thing we know with this stretch of the Wintersbury River is that it's going to form just a couple of miles from the Little River across the brook and we see on warm years fish congregating at the mouth. This is a common sight I've seen it many times myself and the Little River is going to be a great source of cold water. Bigger river and we expect fish to not just sit at the mouth but to move right up into it. So, the regulation proposal is to extend that kind of proactively as things are kind of changing as we get to evaluate it to improve that all the way up to the Waterbury Dam. So, again, we're expecting more consistent cold water releases to grow fish in but also to improve the wild trout population within the Little River and the Manuski and to protect those fish from excessive harvest by individual anglers. And it also serves to simplify the regulations from the dam down. You've got general regulations and then you've got a short section of the two fish limit and it goes into the Manuski at the two fish limit. So, this will help get rid of one line for any regulation. So, that's kind of the gist of what we'll be coming to you in January. So, there's a whole new question on this one. Move to the Dog River. So, we've been spending a lot of time on the Dog for the past 25 years. Electric fishing in the Mainstown, we've done 134 sites, tributaries and other 80-something. We've got three full-season anglic reel surveys. We've done habitat surveys in some of our electric fishing stations. We've looked at fish passage issues and D.B.C. has conducted a geomorphic survey to kind of look at the river and erosion hazards, things like that. So, it's been spending a lot of time on it. The history of the Dog has been primarily managed as a wild trout fishery. No rain goes to the stock since the early 60s and even prior to that it was very limited and that's really the primary species of trout in the lower eight miles below Northfield Falls Dam. We did stock a limited amount of brown trout which was discontinued based on our surveys in 92 in the lower river. We stocked brook trout in the upper river. Again, just continue that in 94 as well as the tributaries which were all, you know, very good wild trout populations. So, essentially the whole watershed was managed through wild trout since 2001. This was one of those that we had a commissioner who wanted to see us initiate some wild trout management through special regulations and at that time, the Dog River was 105 reaches that were selected to do that. At that time, we had a 10 to 16 inch protected slot limit on four and a half miles below the river, two per day and that didn't have any jurisdiction and it was a public process but since about 2000, we've had a prolonged decline in wild trout and that prompted us to use the Tesla designation in 2010 to go strictly catch and release artificial small mighty on the lower eight miles. Rich, where does that eight miles end up there? Is it in Riverton up there? I know there's like a fall or a pretty swimming hole there but can the fish get above that there? Yes, above that. Is that the eight mile mark though? No, Northfield Falls which is right in the north of the village area, north of the general store and Tots Brook Road comes in and it's just the falls which is downstream of that. So there's no natural declination line, it's not like a sewage treatment plant you know, whatever. Northfield Falls is a with a small dam on top of it and that's an impassable dam. So since 2000 you could see and these are a couple of our stations and this doesn't really fill the decline as well as if we go back to the 90s but we had some with Irene, we lost some of our stations so this is the one continuous graph I could show you but you can see we're dropping down here, we had a little blip in 2005 and then continued with low numbers, another blip and we initiated the catch and release regulation here. So then we had what looked like the potentially response, the best number we had since 2002 and then we had Big Spring Flood in May 2011 and then we had Irene who was really hammered the dog very well and James Holado, Habitat Features some of our stations we could no longer sample because they were too wide indeed and so then we have slowly seen some improvements you know to 2015 I'd like to say that and continue but I have the numbers but this year did not look so great whether it's you know part of that's the drought so I'll be coming to you in January with some more detail on this but our proposal is to be to continue what we have now as a test board which is catch and release artificial flies and lowers only the one little wrinkle on it is when we first did this test board designation we had some anglers a few anglers come with concerns about the bait restriction some were concerned about their own ability to fish the way they wanted to fish but what really came out as their strongest concern was limiting the ability of kids to fish thinking that bait was using the way to fish so I looked at our we had three full season creole surveys where we interviewed thousands of anglers and poured through that data and found that children made up less than 10% of the fishing temper much less of the the cast of fish so their contribution to fishing locality was pretty negligible and through aggressive concerns of this group we put in that exception to allow children under 15 to use natural baits still no harvest so there's no motivation for a dad to throw a line in and snag a fish and take it home and since that time it's kind of collided down people seem to be happy with that compromise and so that's kind of what we're going to be bringing to you can I just give you about that 2001-2002 where you had a huge spike there in the population was that common in other rivers that those same two years around the state I just wonder why it would cause that it's somewhat misleading because if I gave you the scale back to the 90s well these are very good numbers but the stations are a little different but you can see 2002 was very good in this station how far apart are those two stations this is the Riverton Conservation Park right at the bridge there by the firehouse and this one is Grounds Mill Road so it's a couple miles different habitat and that's what we find a lot it's a lot of changing habitats we're stopping at 800 from the section of the stream a couple of trees filled out of that we have to provide more details alright thanks Rich so next for our presentation we're going to get big enough for folks to see yes thanks I'm Judd Crosby I'm one of those fisheries bottles that works up in St. John's Berry and I'm going to give you a preview on regulation we're going to propose for the Clyde River Clyde Pond and the sale of lakes so the lakes are on the Clyde River basically and the Clyde River goes into Lake Memphermake so there are lots of different fish but it's most notable for Landlock Salmon which grow to adulthood in Lake Memphermake and they come up into the Clyde in the spring to eat in the fall to spawn and those are the popular kinds of fish for them there when conditions are right the adults can be in the river the whole summer but the Clyde River has a pretty confusing set of regulations that I'll show that soon most closer related salmon is in the month of October it's catch and release for salmon artificial wars and flies only and that had been only down in the lower part of the river down in Newport City up until I think it was around 2008 right in that time Great Bay Hydro company that operates the dam in Newport there was it started operating an upstream fish passage facility they go up a ladder into a tank, into a truck and they're moved up above the Clyde Palm Dam and release so now we have adult salmon up there so we put a test waters designation in place that basically extended that regulation for the catch and release season in October up to West Charleston which is as far as the salmon could get so I'll just go down here and when you look at the law digest for the Clyde River this is kind of what it looks like except it's much more confusing than that it doesn't have the three colors and there's a lot more text because it has to describe where these different segments are so there's eight different segments if it's the same color it has the same regulation in that location but this as you can imagine even for locals this is intimidating and confusing so in addition to talking about this what we do after this test water expires or before it expires actually we're also going to be proposing that we simplify this quite a bit so this is what it looks like on the map you can see the different color coded segments and I'll just walk through you so this is the downstream end there's a very short little piece here that's in purple that's probably hard for you to see that was there so it's got a different regulation than everything else and it was there because at the time there was a warden who didn't think that the mouth of the river was clear enough where the river ended and where the lake started the wardens that we have working up there today think that's not an issue so they're okay with doing away with that special little segment there all these green segments well from there on up up through there and all this water that October capture release season for salmon is in effect I'll talk more about that later this yellow section here is a spring closure that area doesn't open to fishing until May 11 and that is there because back in the old days snagging of walleye was a problem and that area in particular was a problem because it was kind of in the woods and it was really hard for wardens to patrol that and catch people so they said okay we can't fish there while walleyes are in the river and they set the date of May 11 to start today the walleye run is very small there's still some there but it's a small run there's not a lot of walleye fishing going on and now we have a walleye season back then there was no closed season for a walleye now there's a statewide season that walleyes fishing doesn't open until the first Saturday in May so that's going to it doesn't match May 11 exactly but it's pretty close and we know that when there was a big walleye run most of this fish were there with late people anyway so that's going to protect them and now this gives people an opportunity to fish for salmon in the spring in that stretch which they haven't been able to so it's opening up an opportunity to do that there's two red sections this one is right at the mouth of the fish ladder and that's a 260 foot stretch where we know that fish concentrate when they're waiting to get into the fish ladder so currently that's it's a closure in the spring and in the fall but I'll talk more about that what we want to do there permanently this here is where most of the fish have been released so they said the fish come up in the ladder they go into the tank put them in a truck and then we were trucking the fish up here this is Derby center there's two bridges here and at the time we thought possibly the fish might kind of stay in that area people would be able to just follow the truck and harass the fish hasn't really played out that way fish don't really seem to stick in that area very long plus we're now releasing most of the fish so it's not an issue so we're going to proposing that we deal with that closure when the fish could downstream after all that do they have to go through a turbine or what? yeah I should have mentioned that yes there's a downstream passage facility too but is there a turbine also? yes and the big fish can't get into the turbine because there are racks that keep them from going through smaller fish could put smaller fish into a box a sluice that they can get down a good question and then finally general regulations everything up above the West Charleston Dam so from there on it's just general regularities so what we're going to be proposing is going to look more like this so we went from those eight different segments down to four you can see the map down there so we did away with the purple the yellow we suggest that we get away with this red one here I guess I can use the pointer but so now we've got this green segment which one other change that we're going to be proposing is that we also include September in that catcher release season for the September and October catcher release for salmon artificial boars and flies only and the reason we're suggesting that is that we know now that we've been operating that trap and truck facility we know that salmon are coming in in September there's actually good numbers of fishing coming in September so it makes sense to protect them during that time too and we also know from our Creel Surveys that most of the people that are fishing for salmon that time of year are releasing fish anyway so it's just kind of matching what's already occurring and then we are proposing we keep this red segment and one change there is that we're proposing that we close that fishing year round and the reason I mentioned earlier that salmon can be found in the river all summer long when conditions are right and we know from anglers we know from the wardens as it operates the facility there the hydrocarve facility that fish even in the summer can be concentrated right there on salmon and they're vulnerable to snagging and they observe people doing that at least I can't remember if they've actually made any cases but I know they've had more than just been in there so that's the river and then yeah so this which is currently test waters this would all become permanent rigged which would match this and then we still have our general regulations up above that that's it for the river then finally finally talking about the lake so these lakes when we start moving fish up above we put a test waters designation in place there which was casually for salmon in October but there's no gear restrictions and the lake could be fishing for perch or whatever so we get whenever strictly here but if they did catch a salmon we wouldn't have to release it so similar to the river we're proposing that in the lakes applied this is big salmon, this is little salmon then we have catch and release for salmon September and October with no gear restrictions so people are still able to use anything any questions you had gotten in from Gary Ward or some other restrictions they wanted to look at yeah so there's a group of anglers that we have interacted with we've met with that once they're happy with this to a certain extent they feel like we're moving in the right direction but they want, they would like to see something even more restrictive ideally for those guys they would want this whole area to be with fly fishing only with unweighted flies and unweighted lines so floating fly lines only and in meeting with them they know that that's probably not very realistic that we would do that with the whole this whole stretch so they were trying to concede and say well maybe just a little stretch down here where fish concentrate their current flows and he's saying well can we at least have that kind of regulation in that area so there is a group believe that they're pretty small I think the majority of anglers would be opposed to that there's a lot of fly anglers but a lot of anglers that use flies also want to use weight the main concern with these guys is they feel it's it allows you to be unsporting when you're using weighted flies or weighted lines or weighted bores because they feel like even if the fish aren't biting you can kind of get your line right down either on the fish and kind of either snag them or even basically snag them in the mouth and they're concerned about that I think that would be very difficult to enforce a floating fly only idea because a floating fly is going to become a sinking fly if you don't pay attention to it anyway so some of these guys would say oh I started with a floating fly and now it's underwater they're proposing no added weight to the fly so looking at it you could tell okay how are the numbers this fall that you're trapped with all water flows and so forth is it I think we've only moved seven salmon so far which is I this was more of a Gerardi's thing when he was here and Pete Emerson is actually the guy that's really involved in the trap part of it but last year in total we moved I think close to 200 salmon and by now we're at the end of October we would have moved probably back to those fish by now this is what when they come up by the time Richard Chafee actually worked with the department when they had actually stripped them you can see the size of the salmon his son Ron is probably one of the fish that went on the fly so when you talk to Ron and he's out of the bag here every other music has a bag the water flow should be increasing this week yeah that would be a lot of fish waiting to move in yeah so get up there next week alright thanks so again this is largely a simplification of what has been segmented up quite a bit I'll play that Andrew will like that alright so we're saving the more complicated ones to last and then ask Bernie to go through some of the more mundane regulation changes first and then we'll get into the commercial fishing and the spear guns alright so these are going to be really general for the most part not getting into a lot of the specifics as the background and a bunch of the details so I kind of just set them up where I have basically the issue here in a little brief summary of the problem and what we're proposing to do first one is dealing with this open water fishing in statute the 4001 it defines angling basically really any type of fishing but in 122 we kind of used the term angling to represent only open water fishing so there's kind of a little conflict there between the two regulations in statute between the regulations in statute so we're proposing to basically change 122 for place angling with open water fishing really just a terminology adjustment to make it master the other regulations so I'm going to if you have any questions on each one here because we're going to jump to the next topic and shout them out is the legislature going to do that or does something do with us as a board right? 122 is a board regulation that's where most of the fishery regulations are in 122 the statute has a more general term of angling which is fishing hook and line which is what you find in your regular dictionary definition but in 122 when we're trying to combine a bunch of regulations into 122 just for some of this to say at the time we used angling to only refer to open water which is then different from the statute definition so the statute stays the same and angling in the board regulation becomes open water fishing so it'll hopefully be clearer for everyone what the difference is so if all the proposals that were talked about today so far are all in 122 so that we can change it to the dock river or the little river or the Clyde are all part of 122 alright snagging currently there's no rule in Vermont that prohibits the activity of snagging we have a rule that prohibits the taking of a fish that's about hook but nothing that would basically prevent someone from doing an action that would be targeting basically snagging fish so we're proposing to basically add language into 122 that defines the act of snagging and then also prohibits it so I know a lot of people when they're fishing for a long nose gar they'll take clothesline, they'll kind of like spread it up and then they're basically snagging the fish so at that particular time that's going to be an illegal activity that's a different you would if you have a hook in it but a lot of times they don't that's illegal now but again this is this is more of the action of the rod we're still working on that specific definition of that but it would be more of not carrying towards the gear but more of an action targeting the snagging fish excessive jerking of the rod would be a little different thing the gar is more of a catching where they steer teeth right so they're snagging it without a hook now right but again that's that's an activity I know people at the LCI they're doing that and it's not a hook, they're not trying to get the hook, they're just taking the clothesline or whatever and they're just trying to snag it so how is that going to be an enforcement thing well if you're talking I'll elaborate a little bit more on the method for gar, people are targeting hungry fish with this clothesline method the ones that are catching the hook are illegal now they do attach a small hook to it so they can be illegal they're still snagging the fish in the teeth so unfortunately people aren't eating these fish no one catches them instead of holding them to take the picture I assume if they're catching them and releasing them at this point there's not going to be any enforcement issues whatsoever if they're fishing with legal methods targeting fish that they're not going to keep they're doing the harm to some people in any case I don't think this would have any impact on that one way or the other because they would not be doing the rod action to snag fish using that clothesline so what they're doing now is if it's legal if they have a little hook on it it would remain illegal if what they're doing now is illegal and they're not expecting them doing the snagging this definition is about action of the rod intended to hook instead of to take the picture I was going to say a lot of times there's a little hook to the piece of bait to actually attract your cigar to actually want it it's not just like a lot of it just clothesline arbitrarily to flow them out there Crow if you talk about snagging in general like where is this a big issue in Vermont the stuff we hear about right now is is that the hatchery the hatchery where people are snagging fish for both to eat and just to take pictures a lot of people just want to have a big fish on camera so they can say hey look what I caught we're not seeing as much of consumption snagging at least from what I'm hearing from the words we're not seeing people out there at night with trouble hooks and weighted line weighted hooks trying to snag fish for the day and bring them home and you know there's always the possibility that we're not getting getting reports but that's what I'm getting from the reports reports that I get on Mondays anyway is the edweed section closed anyway or is it open for fish? that's right now the brook is closed but the bay is open the hatchery brook maybe it's coming out so it's part of the lake so they're in the lake and they're snagging what is the perception growing up that we heard that someone got one with a Clyde fly and that was weighted and trouble hook that was a trouble hook people call that a Clyde fly you never knew what it was when I was little but then I saw her son in people's tackle boxes and knew what a Clyde fly was have you ever been here? has it been an edweed? to where now? yes so you don't want to be fairly easy they're right over there it's right over there the Sisqoi River Muscle Lounge so going back prior to our current catch and release statewide for Muscle Lounge the Sisqoi River section between Klondand and Highgate had a closed season you couldn't target Muskie you basically had that closed when we came through into the statewide catch and release the language a little bit in that section of the Sisqoi River but basically in a simplification process the same objective is a catch and release fishery it matches the statewide regulation why have that kind of listed there as a separate section when in reality the regular statewide catch and release regulation covers and address all of our concern so in this case we're just proposing to delete that section and catch and release how far is that anyway from Klondand to Highgate Dan 7 miles 7.5 miles so a fish is not going up to the Sisqoi all the way to Canada and back it's nothing to do with Highgate would have been the natural fall basically they would have come from the lakes off if Klondand wasn't there they'd come up to Highgate and that's where the ledges are so in the Sisqoi River we have two sections that are open to year round fishing and year round fishing for trout only there's a section from Highgate Dan to the Sheldon Dan that's open to year round fishing if you're going to target trout you have to use artificial but if you want to fish for suckers you can use a worm then there's another section from the Sheldon Dan to the Eonsburg Dan that's open to year round fishing but only for trout using artificial only so you can't fish for a white sucker you can fish for a smallmouth bass in the winter and again this would be open water fishing this section of the Sisqoi River doesn't really have any major wild trout populations it's kind of a warm water fishery so basically in that simplification kind of attitude we're just looking to merge those sections together and place them under the more liberal regulation basically go Highgate Dan to Eonsburg Dan open year round trout we use artificial simple housekeeping had enough we don't call it a night I'll call you Bernie that's the diversion you wanted there were some handouts here tonight we wanted we didn't bring handouts because a lot of this stuff we wanted to just give the board a preview for it and there is one piece of this that we really want to get the board's input as to whether or not it's the approach we should use so depending on what the board gives us for your input you might want to take those preliminary proposals and shred them so that we don't end up with confusion as to what the actual proposal is coming in January so Bernie take it away and so what's here is slightly different than what you guys have really all I did was kind of like put bullets into sections so it's a little easy to walk through what they are for the most part there really wasn't any text changing or anything like that I was just trying to get things together so this past legislative session there was two modifications to statute which basically clarified the board's authority over the sale of fish in Vermont it was a modification to 4083 and 4611 I believe on the handout you have has the amended version of the language on that back so basically it gives the board the clear authority to establish rules related to the purchase and sale of fish including prohibiting fish species season limits reporting requirements possible permit requirements fundamental changes that would clarify this past spring to basically give the board clear authority so the sale of fish in Vermont has got a long history it's been many many years that people have been selling cook and line caught fish right now currently the only requirement is if you are a fish buyer you need to get a fish buyer exemption permit from the state to basically have over your limit in your business so this whole idea and the concept behind the commercial fishing rule is that there's a lot of unknowns in here we don't have any idea how many people are fishing we don't have is it 20 people doing it out a bunch of times there are a thousand people we have some basic numbers from the fish buyer permit in terms of pounds but not a lot of detail so there's just really some fundamental questions about this activity we know very little about and that's when this kind of idea of introducing this rule comes into play when they sell fish in New York do we know that they came from Vermont anglers or anything? New York has no reporting requirements so I think the only piece of that is you aren't allowed to catch crappy in New York and sell them commercially but if you say you caught them in Vermont then you can sell them in New York it gets the line off. What's the speed for sellers in New York do they have to have some permit? Nothing through Vermont and as far as I know New York doesn't have any requirements so the one other piece of the legislation change is it establishes the potential for commercial fishing license so that anglers who want to sell their fish need to buy a commercial fishing license pending rulemaking by the board so the board doesn't set the license fee but until the board unacts regulations that commercial fishing license doesn't take effect. Do you know how much revenue the businesses are getting already from the purchasing of the fish? I mean that should be pretty easily obtained without the big shots at the buy right? There are buy reports we've got a graph we presented at the board a year ago we have that presentation here and we'd be happy to show it to you tonight it's millions of dollars in revenues we think this might take a little bit of additional time and then this year gone will take more time also so we might want to go through that and then if folks have follow-up questions going back to the day we'd be happy to go back and of course we'll come back to you with the actual proposal You'll see all the details in January and we'd be happy to give an update on the commercial fishing presentation again between now and then So the proposal basically has three parts we were looking at basically making the commercial angling rule it would be established under its own rule number Catherine hasn't given me that yet but she'll probably use one of the numbers that was repealed just there so as I was saying 122 is where most of our fish eggs in this case the commercial angling wouldn't be put into 122 it would appear in its own little entity so we covered three areas a process to sell fish a process to buy fish and potentially some discussion on the fish species not to sell so what we are proposing here for selling fish any angler on anyone that wants to sell fish would have to acquire or purchase a fish seller tag and the fish seller tag would be sold to the point of sales system it would be a fairly set from another process and any angler can sell they can always sell the fish they caught according to mine it was fishing with two grandkids they sell the fish the money goes to the grandkids college education so each of those kids are going to have to get as it's written out yes there's no age exemption under the proposal commercial fishing license but it would be a nominal mostly trying to get information on the activity we're not looking to make a lot of money on the commercial so say there's three or four people ice fishing at the same time they're going to have to have their buckets individually labeled to prove who catches what there's no on anything that had a creole limit they're fishing for perch and you've got three or four or five gallon buckets of fish again and only one guy's got um you know the tag how are you going to prove who actually caught them probably won't be able to prove it why do you feel it's necessary for someone to buy a tag so they can sell it to them the working group that talked about this but threw a lot of it it's trying to understand the activity it's trying to face you I was out on the winter on the creole survey on Northern Champlain past two winters getting information from people whether they're selling the fish doesn't work I mean I have guys that won't even talk to me when I come up with my state codon because they only want to know what they don't want to be looking in their bucket so it's not really a lot of this is in response to sport anglers who are concerned about the impact of commercial fishing and right now we tell them we really don't have that much of an idea it's mostly to fill in the gaps where we don't know about the impact primarily on other anglers this is something that was brought up like ten or twenty years ago I would say I just don't see it and I'll be one of the biggest areas where the most commercial fishing is these days I don't see it like it was back then so to me I don't think you can ever hurt this like hook in the line so I don't really think that's for the sport fishing anglers I don't think that's really an issue I think like Eric said it's a hundred percent social well that may be but we can't even answer the social questions right now for people yeah and this isn't going to solve all of the complexity or controversy of commercial fishing but it'll give us another source of information on the angler side of it right now what we have is both commercial fish bio reports that they submit once a year so this gives us an opportunity to look at participation know who's participating in the activity and then to a point of sale by your license we will have addresses, email addresses and we can reach out to those folks and say what did you do we can send them a survey and the most important piece of this is to pass the bill specifying the authority for regulation of commercial fishing if there is any it's going to be out here but the board the right value to make these decisions rather than trying to do it I'm all about you guys getting an inner bit of information that you can get however this just feels like another episode of Big Brothers thinking we're really doesn't need to be in my opinion I don't think it's an issue so as far as time here majority of it is commercial fishing they have it broken down they broke down my quarter I don't remember off the top of my head the majority of it was commercial fishing but it has been growing a little bit summer fishery there's a lot of this common response to complaints about first fishery we're actually getting more complaints about crappy really? Perch was the big issue back 20 years ago and it was all about the Canadians they're coming and they're catching their fish and they're taking them away by the burlap sack full and the Perch are stunted now because they caught all the big ones so they have Perch boys but we aren't hearing many complaints about Perch we're hearing a lot more it's not just commercial fishing it's crappy so crap is the issue that's an easy fix you can make it as work but you can't sell I'll give you two thumbs up one question on angos will be asked to record that's got to be like a mandatory thing because asking somebody it's like you know so again where's the that really isn't the language as it appears with the regulation that was how I kind of just put it together in there the idea is that by having the tag we have contact information and then follow up and gather some of that information through some surveys how many times do people allow we could develop a bunch of student questions and the board can make it mandatory right now we're suggesting that for the first year or two out of the gate this is brand new anglers haven't you know the requirement to buy a professional license to record anything with their catch that doing an end of the year voluntary survey and seeing what we get will possibly start to get some compliance and put anglers to notice that we'd like to get this information following up with something stronger it's certainly in the board's you know her view if the board feels that they want to be real strong right out of the gates right now that is an option that that's something that again we've been talking about this for years the board's been talking about it for years this is going to be brand new to anglers we didn't want to come right out of the gates hitting them with a lot of additional reporting requirements for this new activity this new requirement but that's part of what we're bringing at you now that's in your hands to put these things on the table and have you guys think about it so this is just kind of the 30,000 foot overview of what we're planning to bring to you as a proposal in January and we'd like to beat one I'm trying to figure out in my selfish if the seller tag is good for a calendar year December 31st why would anybody want to buy more than one seller tag I guess they've got three requirements there that they can only purchase one in one annulation depending again how you could tweak things a little differently with the regulations so if you had that number you had to give it to a fish buyer to sell your fish which you wanted to have in both of your I'll use crappy as an example there's 25 fish limit that number's written down you sold 25 this morning you went back out and you went to that fish buyer again and you have another 25 crappy if you gave them your same fish buyer number it would be potentially could be an attraction now they weren't proposing that to a trader but they're both traceable to you your name aren't they or their license or whatever if you had multiple ones that still goes back to the hangler those times it was just kind of a simple way of putting it in there again if that's something that wanted to change this is just the ideas I don't understand it basically I needed to be there he's just essentially saying that you're not going to be able to buy to see yourself the limits of crappy for them that's all he said you know if you get your sister or your brother to go get a peg and sell it sell it for you still technically illegal but probably wouldn't get caught so we're just trying to head off over limits which is my product for these crappy runs and other people sell just a small portion of the headache and crappy then the moving on to the fish fire requirements for the most part the fish fire department is really what is currently being done in this case it would just be kind of pulling the wording and the conditions out of kind of no man's land out there into this regulation and kind of finding them so the fish fire will basically need a payment permit from the department currently that permit is issued at no cost and then the fish fire needs to report quarterly we have a requirement of basically when you get your permit your fish fire permit your fish fire exemptions you have to report your past year's purchases and you have to divide them up by quarter by species and those and again all those details are things now with the regular statute changes the board has authority over the reporting requirements the kind of the one issue would be the fish fire would need to confirm that the angler has a fish cell attack kind of the new thing the reporting requirements we were talking about doing it quarterly and actually having it submitted quarterly because we all kind of know if you submit something in January for the last year's January you may not have everything and then the last part is basically species not fish cell and this is one just kind of bringing up to the board some items to think about so 4611 and again it's listed on that packet has the species currently that you cannot sell and then this is what was added any other fish species specified by rule by the board taken in the state so that was the addition that gave the board the authority so the department is kind of suggesting that the board think about placing black crappy and white crappy on that list for a number of reasons the commercial angling for crappy has contributed to and if not created a lot of the conflicts we see on Northern Champ Plain in particular boarders have multiple documented multiple experiences where it has been looked at conflicts over fishing areas, conflict at spot over limits it's just definitely a challenging species to deal with we kind of think some of the contributing factor crappy is really a much higher value the price per pound is over a dollar more than other species commonly sold so you're looking at over usually over three dollars a pound undressed, this is go out catch the fish, throw it in a bucket, bring it in over three dollars a pound whereas the white perch last year was going for like 35, 40 cents a pound the perch may be two dollars a pound the sunfish are around two so it's a dramatic difference so some of that factor is contributing is that high price that's being paid to there we also have periods in areas that the crappy tend to congregate in the spring and in the fall and that congregation of fish results in a congregation of anglers and we have those things the Ulver Bridge there is one, the North Hill Bridge over there today and they will be there for the month and a half two months fishing off the bridge people on the bridge, people on boats down below, people complaining about people throwing stuff on but I think it's fair to say that this is more on the social land so this is the land we wanted to bring to the board to consider thinking about from the social aspect I don't know if I have a top of my head but how has the crappy numbers been declining over the years the harvest is going it has gone up in terms of numbers we aren't seeing biological indications of decline in any of these species that are currently I've got 220 pounds from maple syrup so I should bring my 13,000 take my trophy out and get crappy and get three bucks a pound we're only 25 the one thing we've seen and we can't contribute directly to commercial fishing but we're seeing crappy being with other waters we're seeing crappy stock in the waters and think that the high price per pound may be one of the factors contributing it so that would have a biological impact on those in the waters that are now having an additional species put into them but again we can't we haven't required anybody to recommend it to say it was motivated by commercial fishing and to kind of you mentioned about the New York component earlier so in New York right now if you went to a fish buyer and brought a bucket of crappy you would have to say I caught it in Vermont waters for that buyer to buy New York does not allow the sale of crappy New Hampshire does not allow the sale of any other fish so we have we are a little different in that sense between these two water bodies particularly on Champlain so if it's not going to be the crappy then once it's going to be next to the competition for those that are fishing for crappy they're obviously going to want to get the money out of something else so what do you think about if we were next well part of it is again with crappy and if Bertie has it there I don't know the question is a crappy congregate they group together in a way that most other fish fishies don't and so part of the conflict with crappy the social conflict is that when they get in those congregations the anglers congregate they group together they get the fights the band be together and so and I do get it but I'm just kind of throwing that out there it's like well I mean if it's not crappy they refer to themselves now there's conflict around commercial fishing statewide it's a values issue there's people who say you shouldn't be doing that you should be reporting for taxes you're commercializing the public resource so there's lots of values conflicts around commercial fishing the bad behavior we see is primarily related to fishing for the company this is exactly why we're you know this is a biological imperative we saw that commercial fishing has had this devastating impact on the family populations with a different pitch than saying you're now in charge of commercial fishing here's the suite of different things and I think the one component is based upon the and we can another time show you the pound sold it's a small percentage crappy in the total pound sold compared to all that but that's the issue that we're hearing the conflicts that are going for a very small percentage of the pounds of fish sold pounds of purge and pounds of sunfish so say if you took crappy out of the picture would you still recommend for someone to have to buy a commercial license do you think that would solve most of the social issue I think it would solve most of the social issue for next year maybe the year after that but these issues keep coming up and for us to be in a position where we say yeah we've got a little bit of data that's going on out there but it's not really that good makes it more difficult for the department and the board to take management action on commercial fishing so we think that having better information and trying to select it in a way that's not really onerous to anglers and then kind of fine-tune white information and we get voluntarily but might we require maybe a point of sale transactions or recording information we'll not just have a better handle on this when we talk to anglers, when we talk to the legislature, when we talk to newspaper reporters etc I just don't believe that if you meet somebody buy a commercial license that's certainly not going to cure the problem that you're having right now with crappy issues there's still a lot of fish up there just going to have a license to do that that's why there's a couple different aspects the license is something that by statute is going to take effect as soon as the board takes up rulemaking that's already in statute the license is going to take effect the dollar amount hasn't been set but that's set in the fee bill through the legislature what kind of reporting we require related to people who now have a license that's up to the board to decide adding additional species to that list of species prohibited to sell that that's the board's authority as well so we're kind of saying here's how this is going to roll out the license is going to take effect we'd like to get some information we're suggesting it being end of the year voluntary reporting request and if that doesn't work we ratchet it up in ways that we think are meaningful we're suggesting that the board consider eliminating sale of crappie black and white crappie the board now has authority to do this stuff and crappie is the species that stands out to the department as being the biggest social issue the biggest enforcement issue none of this is really highlightable this is stuff that the board can wrestle with what you'd like to put out for the public to consider comment on in the public hearing I said well I don't know where this fits in but I kind of want to make a suggestion on the raw I don't know how we can deal with the issue of people leaving small fish and carcasses behind on the ice and at access areas during ice fishing season this is really bad and it's I just don't know littering or whatever but I don't know if people need to be reminded like in the data just or something and like big friends that hey that's littering it's illegal so we are going to talk about that under the spear gun proposal whenever we look at that we're talking about again now we've got a means of taking it's pretty much a lethal take of that and that people shouldn't litter those things you shouldn't throw them in the water but that I'm sure you see it all the time calling and it's a huge problem especially on which that's fine and I just think it really needs to be the best of them so that's something right now we have a fairly narrow proposal related to spear guns used well on just the spear gun and spear guns but it does open the door for the board to say maybe you think that this basically littering prohibition should apply to all fish right we can talk about that the fish there in the river in the litter time are bait for bald eagles people up to see bald eagles all the way along I would argue the only reason they stay there is because the dead fish left in the ice and the dead calves left in the field they like that hydroelectric oh yeah double of that anyway this is already for spear fish is that true? Mark I told you 8 o'clock I don't know it's like 9 let's try it so I think most of you were probably here last June Moose Phelps came to the board with a petition he brought his spear gun and his bow with him so everybody can kind of see and get an idea for how those methods work and his proposal was to allow the use of spear guns wherever a bow, an arrow with a line attached because he used the hardest stitch so that was Moose's part of his proposal he also wanted to clear up some inconsistencies between our regulations and our statutes and expand the species allowed for take by these two methods so in Vermont right now the only legal time you can use a spear is during our pike shooting season Champlain season this is the season in the spring where you're allowed to harvest this list of species so you've got Pickle, Northern Pike, Bowfish Bowfin, Mallet, Shad, Suckers Bullhead and any other cold fish so this is a really important thing here other cold fish which is completely undefined again this is a statute so the board doesn't have any authority to contradict any of this language but you do have some authority to make some improvements and clarifications and to kind of update an out of date regulation if you say the term cold fish to any fisheries biologist they kind of cringe it's not really in our nature to think that any species is worth throwing it in the trash every species, especially native species and their function in the ecosystem so we don't really like to see that so we've got some proposals to it or we've got some things we're proposing to kind of address this while also allowing use of spear guns outside of this lake Champlain season so you can use this credit if you want to talk about it so a few things we're looking to do is first there's also this term spearing in here shooting and spearing, I don't know about you but I was always taught not to shoot a rifle into the water but it's a traditional method for some people in Vermont and that's sort of how this came about so shooting and spearing is allowed but spearing is undefined so right now spear guns would be allowed during the season along with a bow you could harvest any of these species because we don't have an actual definition for what spearing is so that's sort of the first thing we want to do and we propose to sort of separate this out between defining spearing as a handheld spear use above the water surface this is more going along the lines of a traditional method that people would do the past where they take up a handheld spear and they spear mostly pipe but they were also allowed to spear other species we'd also like to define a spear gun as a pneumatic or rubber band powered device and line up to exceed 20 feet this is a pretty standard language for spear guns in different states around the country a majority of states do allow some form of spear gun use and so we looked through all the different states and decided that this was appropriate language to define spear a spear gun we'd also like to define this term called fish because it makes sense before you jump over it and the spear gun is used below the water surface so that was another designation used only below the water surface which as Lewis said when he was here he used a spear gun from above the water surface anyway because they're not designed to do that but this made some people feel more comfortable as far as the safety issue you shouldn't load it or discharge it if you're above the water surface whereas this handheld spear would be only above the water surface you wouldn't want to use it from below the water surface anyway so this term called fish because it's such a negative term we thought maybe embrace it and actually define it as a list of species that are non-native potentially harmful to our environment so here we have carp, tench, rud, shad which we define as ale, white, and gizzard shad because up here it's undefined along with mullet which we'll get to a little bit later so goldfish and we put in this that any additional invasive or exotic species could be designated by the commissioner as one of these called fish snake head or Asian carp into our waters we can put that on the list and you'd be allowed to harvest them with a bow or a spear and that sort of helps to get across the point that native species do have the value they're important and shouldn't be seen as just species that you kill we also propose to extend the harvest opportunity for tench right now you are not allowed to harvest tench with a bow and an arrow and under this you'd be allowed to harvest tench with both the bow and a spear gun and we propose to allow spear gun harvest for a limited number of species and for another number of species putting a daily bag of them in on so there's some species that are native that we feel are a little more vulnerable to this method so those are the three species we propose are bowfin, longnose guard, red horse sucker bowfin, longnose guard, slow growing predators and this would be across all methods so we're actually proposing that we didn't want to single out spear anglers and say you can only take a certain number during the day we think that it's a valuable teaching tool and gives a value for these native species by putting a limit on these species the red horse sucker bowfin is actually classified as a species of greatest conservation needs so we've determined that the population levels are low and put it in that class so it was thought that that should also have a limit on it which right now it does not and that's going to be something that you guys will be able to discuss right now we decided on five fish daily bag of them you know you really not most people don't eat these species so there's really not a reason that you would keep more but that's up for discussion as well something else we would like to do is to add some sort of language that would address the responsible disposal of these harvested fish because both these means of harvest are lethal means you're going to have a lot of dead fish so there should be ways that people dispose of them that does not letting them float so some sort of language just to address that kind of like you were talking about leading fish on the ice but right now it would just relate to these lethal means of take we're also going to clarify some inconsistencies on bull head right now it's the only species left that's still listed up here in 4606 but we don't address that and our digest are in the 122 right now so just pretty much clear that up so that's the gist of it we'll get a lot more detail on January that's a pretty big seller in spring sell a lot of bull head questions by the definition of spear gun if somebody is caught firing one from above the water you'd be in violation by that definition it doesn't say designed to be used below the surface it says used below the surface right so it would be it's away from this definition so it has to be used underwater but you could still use bow and arrow as line attached right I'd like to add the word crossbow to that also okay I'd like people to use crossbows for culling cart can you attach a line to a hand held as well hand held crossbows wouldn't that already be a bow or a bow it's not stated that's if a crossbow is considered a bow we've separated it from the game we'll make it clear if a bow is attached to a crossbow as well you don't want 300 feet for a second one believe me slow it down right which is the hand held spear so that would be what the spearing is so you can still spear a pipe from above the water surface during that season in the spring you just couldn't use a spear gun anymore does the member Kevin have a photograph of himself or the child that's okay so just to clarify shooting the hole into the water is by statute is that right I don't want to go there but I'm just curious and the term cullfish is in statute so we can't change that but it's not defined anywhere in statute so the board can define what cullfish means in regulation and it would vary weight because it would be quicker any questions on spear guns spear guns thank you this should be a great hearing when we get to it like that I just think this would be a very dynamic hearing I mean next question Brad for taking what was kind of a messy set of regulations which I think Lewis Belts kind of pointed out to us the statutes and the various board regulations bringing something together that I think is fairly simple fairly common sense we talked with Lewis Belts he would have liked to be able to shoot more things but he liked it overall so I think that this is a pretty common sense approach that I think again the board can talk about whether they'd like to expand the language on the responsible disposal species and part of it also was if we're going to have a bag limit for some of these species now that people are taking their spear guns not just throwing them overboard having to take those back and dispose of them somewhere that makes sense for grabbing a bag of them I just want to throw in that there are a lot of people that it's not that bad tickle I don't want people thinking that people don't eat those fish one of the hatchery guys swears by a guard and Judd said he'd eat a guard he thought like I'll try and that's coming from you Eric I will eat lots of anything but yeah you should try it what have you got it's the pickled fall fish it's really good but both in it become a real sport in it people are driving up from other states and I'm telling the fish for both and it's really good to take note alright well thank you sorry that took a bit of time but we figured it would be better to upload it now and give you an idea of what we're thinking and certainly the commercial fishing regulation the board has new authority and there's some interesting possibilities there don't say we never gave you anything so again the piece of paper that we set out here on commercial fishing includes the language about potentially eliminating crappy the board you know that's why we're looking for feedback on if the board thinks that that makes sense that'll be prior to proposal in January but that's certainly one of the bigger and more contentious pieces of commercial fishing proposal in the December meeting will we go on for some of this again the board doesn't meet in November in December if the board would like us to come back and talk more about commercial fishing show the power point again with the pounds of fish taking the various prices some of the sort of dynamic we'd be happy to do that and perhaps we devote some or all the round table in December to getting feedback from you guys about what you'd like to see or not in terms of the proposal but you can always of course email me or Eric or any of these guys and we're happy to provide all of these attachments to the board to look over but they don't have this specific language for most of mother than like the dog river can you just include the one with the other commercial fishing tables in it yeah I'll show you very quickly so with the power point presentation we made to the board a year ago before going to the legislature and you know it looks and you know over the span of years how different species record since again based on the commercial fish fire reports so it's information that's provided at the end of the year and again if you look at on an annual basis it's around half a million to a million dollars over the course of those years it's 12 million dollars worth of and then we also got invoices for trucks pulling across to any board or you know with $14,000 worth of fish and they say those trucks are running in terms of the year we'll we'll send you this great thank you we got a couple of things in there so we thought it was made sense to give you a little bit of a preview it was awesome move along with number five I just wanted to just kind of clarify where we were and so I wanted to ask the commissioner Mark's not here obviously to decide what's the process where we're going around the trapping petition so our plan is to return to you in December with with language for first vote based on based on our discussions the last meeting and then we'll go into the first into the first vote process and take that to public hearings and comment period and to second vote El Carver and third vote on this first vote idea our staff will turn down the bobcat will that be brought back correct we do not plan on bringing you a proposal on the bobcat season expansion based on that based on that guidance from the board I guess I'll bring that up this up now if you don't mind my life's changed a little bit and I'm not as flexible as I'd like to be not that this is all about me however getting to Montpelier that time of year would be a lot easier in my situations and you know about my family issues as well it gets dark at 430 and I'm not sure a gun shoot which was my big objective was to beat your pants off on the gun range it's really going to be possible anyway so I would like to go to Kehoe I apologize for making this complicated and making you jump around and thinking the county guys are like yeah I could be home by night but I'd like to come back to the Pavilion in Montpelier for the December meeting and rent it out Fisher tells me it cost $50 reserve it that makes a lot of sense for what we do and I'm sorry for the inconvenience and we'll either be at the Pavilion or Montpelier high school and we'll get out of the December meeting plus we want to get one more chance to get Justin up from Robert County to Washington while he's starting that was going to be a nasty boat that the Robert County guys are going to lynch me on I was down at Kehoe so you're averaging we'll see if the Jeep will make it one more trip yes thank you I was just going to comment on playing ahead before December 21st and have a shoot so it's the shortest day of the year for a car and it is a long way for you but for me I think it's 178 miles I'll take every advantage I can when it comes to shooting the dark glasses on the chair is going to paste out so he can shoot I was going to bring laser sights to get you down there sometime not too long Bill yes because the purpose of the Strava from our perspective was to get guidance from the board on what you wanted to see in language for a first boat it's not binding that's true of course none of your votes are really binding you can change as you go through the process as you've done before you can change after first boat you can change after second boat sometimes that might trigger going backwards in the process to make sure we have a full public process but yes none of your votes are binding on future votes but it was our purpose to get at that last meeting some guidance from the board to see us draft and come forward with I voted Bill on the first part of that petition because I wanted a three year survey that failed miserably so I'd like to make a motion and then we bring back the bobcat petition as it's written to be able to move it forward so we voted in December but at least it gets up all the way here I think it deserves it we've been dragging it on for almost a year now that's my motion is there a second? I'll second it so Cheryl seconds it no actually that's Tracy oh shoot sorry thank you I used to sit there all the time so let's have a discussion thank you so Bill's proposal is that we pick up the bobcat rule again as it was introduced which was to extend it for the month of December I think that there are a lot of issues around the bobcat extension that need to be discussed that need to be researched that we don't have answers on if it doesn't move forward we won't get any of those answers at least that was the feeling that I got from after the straw hole that it was dead in the water we wouldn't get answers to any of the questions that we'd ask the department didn't answer and I think it's really important that we gather all of that information what I can tell you is that we won't have much more information for you than we had at the last meeting we have cranked through between Chris and Dave Persons with some help from Scott and Mark we've cranked through what we have for data analyzed it to its full extent and we will not have a lot more information for you than provided at the last meeting I guess what I was thinking of is information moving forward there's information that we recognize that has not been gathered at least I personally would like to see to see a plan for gathering that information so what's the best way to move for us to be assured that that information will be gathered and this discussion will continue so we know that we'll get answers to the unanswered questions our proposal to you for a first vote in December will include proposals maybe a couple of different ways to require trapper surveys and a couple of possibilities I think we haven't drafted them yet but I suspect a couple of possibilities for how we get at Hunter effort that will help us going forward and answer the question of are the changes we're seeing in Bobcat Harvest driven by effort or are they driven by population that's one of our fundamental things we're trying to answer at the request of VTA from our Trappers Association the options for requiring survey responses to try to get answers to some of those going forward that answers your question Kevin I gave you a question obviously this is your background one criticism I hear is that the department did not support this going forward to an extension of the season based on a pretty narrow set of parameters kind of thing let's say this is group here votes in favor of having the hearing going forward what would the department say at hearing in terms of their level of support for this I would assume it would be a similar presentation to the one we gave to the board I think we would probably give the information that we had about the season we'd probably talk about the information that we didn't have about the season it would probably be very similar to what we heard but I do not expect that we would support the extension just as we did just thanks for that part we managed to vote for the manager of the board and give them some data and only we have open up a rulemaking specifically because we said that was something there we wanted to make sure they were all there as a group so we should give us the data sets going forward no data on any wild system is perfect they all have problems we've all looked through the AGR discussions enough to know that but it will be similar to the ear tooth collection it will give us more better data to see whether those increased harvests are due to population trends or some combination of those and how much of them are driven by things like health prices and how much are driven by weather we will get better data for you on that going forward so our curiosity is how can this proposal be brought up again in two or three years will you say that we want to look at this again in a certain timeframe it can be brought up whenever the board votes to bring it up I mean I wish Catherine was here my understanding and expectation is if you wanted to change it even after or during the first vote you could also so whenever you wanted to look at a guess it could be brought up in a year or two it could be brought up earlier than that you could bring it up in February you could bring it up in February in February 2025 yes there's one thing that seemed like everybody that emailed us wanted to know why we voted yes so I'm going to explain to you why I voted yes one thing I wanted to clarify was through one of the emails from Lisa Jebel and I quote by your vote last week you demonstrated you have little at any concern for the actual welfare of Vermont's wildlife well for me personally that couldn't be further from the truth my ideologies might be a little different from hers but I have utmost respect for the wildlife so this is why I voted yes and this is from all departments own data so first of all most of data when I had to break this down because there was a lot of I saw through the department's presentation was that even through the bounty years through the 1930s and the 1970s the bobcat was never at any risk of becoming in danger at the peak of the trapping in 1980 where there were 3,090 licenses sold to trappers never at any risk of becoming in danger and this is from your background on the bobcats despite the lack of any careful consideration intentional management strategy Vermont's bobcat population persevered throughout the bounty era while sustaining high annual harvest thereby demonstrating the species incredible resiliency, adaptability and abundance this is from like 1994 this is a review of all of that and reveals a remarkable stable population structure throughout this time period indicated a widespread abundant population that is conservatively harvest at levels well below which occurred during the bounty years and this I was questioning about this when I brought this up at the last board meeting this is what you said so now in 2015 there was 876 trapping licenses were sold the survey that the department did in 2006 showed that on average only about 54% actually trapped in a given year so that's roughly the benefit of the doubt 476 people that are trapping 6.15 million acres which is not very many the department also showed data that the catch of bobcats drops off about 40% after the first 15 days due to weather conditions weariness of trap awareness and lack of trap for effort after my interpretation of the data the extension of the trapping season for two weeks would be very minimal and then I came from with all the data that I read and that's why I voted yes the problem with not voting yes it's never going to get out to the real public you're going to have you know fractions that don't want it for sure but the majority of the public is never going to hear that and that's like I said that's why I voted yes it's never going to get out so we can talk about it more and it can be brought to the public just missed I'm going to simplify the line a little bit more I actually grew up in the woods only been lost three quarters of an hour in my entire life the reason is because I learned how to see the forest through the trees I can see the forest through the trees here we're going to get our thoughts back if we're taking out by extra trapping animals that are not overpopulated the department said on both otters and bobcats that we're not looking to take out anymore the legislature that's behind the trees people aren't seeing and I will not vote for any extra traffic unless we're trying to get a nuisance out of the way do it I mean our national politics everybody's getting polarized there are people running for office that can just they're going to lose because they cannot see the forest that's where I say no way am I going to clobber this department if I do a yes vote on either one of those that will clobber this department a lot of people do not see that we are so polarized as a nation right now it's stunned that the day lights up we've got a guy running for president right now doesn't stand for snowballs chance of hell because he is on his principles and forget the forest just the trees that's all he's looking at I think people have to understand the first vote is not authorizing the extension of bobcat traffic all it is is bringing it up for a discussion a few years ago we had a first vote on an early muzzle of this season it was unanimous the second vote it got defeated 13 to 1 so all it is is to bring it up for a discussion so everybody has their day in court so it's not like we're saying yeah we're going to extend bobcat season we're going to talk about it is what it says I think there was a lot of misunderstanding in the last month's meeting about our meeting versus public hearing and a one minute time limit is not enough for anyone to voice their opinion and I think if it does get brought up for discussion then everyone has an opportunity to really voice their opinion and say what they need to say and be heard thanks I'm still really caught up on a little incidental issue I mean there's really no any incidentals for any season and I just think I really need to talk about that more perspective somehow I don't know how that would be addressed like if incidentals are happening I mean it's a very small number of whole percent of the cash from what I read in the documents but yeah I know incidentals for otters occur in the summer when people are trying to kill the beavers that are plugging their culverts and that's when the majority of them happen but it's not what we want of course at the risk of being redundant I just briefly summarized how the department came to its recommendation we wanted to give you a recommendation based on the science which is what we did we know from the bobcat harvest is that the trend is increasing still a small number of animals relative to the population but the trend is increasing both for hunting and trapping we know that the amount of effort is variable based on a number of factors including health price weather effort can change from year to year and we know that really our main tool for setting harvest is life of the season so we don't limit the number of trappers we don't limit the number we educate you about per total across the city so our main ability to regulate that harvest is by the life of the season and as always we take the most conservative incautious approach we can take you can rightfully point it out that we have never come to anywhere close to threatening this species in the state I would be horrified if we ever did because that's we have an extremely good and proud record in the US and Canada and including in Vermont of not putting any species in jeopardy by regulated hunting and trapping so we never want to even get close to that not that I'm not suggesting you would anymore than we would because you agree with us on this now we take the cautious and cautionary approach always particularly when there's things that we don't know that we like to know that's how we came to our recommendation I don't disagree with anything that was said around the table here about other considerations other things the way or balance but that's not how we came to our recommendations we looked at it from the from the harvest numbers anything you want to add to that I think I'd only say that if I recall and I could spend maybe two or three weeks if I looked at it I think that the reason one of the concerns we had was really specific to certain WMUs or certain biophysical regions that there's not a statewide concern that there's some some questions that remain in certain regions of the state that we'd like to resolve for me personally as the process went through one of the biggest complaints I had was the processing of emails from other states I just made a quick list of this I bought one that was just a cut and paste one that you all received over and over again from Jane O. from Colorado Springs Valerie G. from New York Peter M. from North Royalton, Ohio Michelle from Brisbane the same thing to say Mike F. from Geneseo, New York Eric H. from Battle Creek, Michigan Tara C. from Santa Clara, California Elle Melville from Guelph, Vermont which I thought was a very clever description of where they were from I mean obviously it was fake E&MY from Linwood, Washington it was on and on and frankly that made me feel quite spiteful going towards my email to open it up and say okay sure we represent people of Vermont very well but when this is the approach that folks use to try to communicate with me I find that it's breaking down the system and therefore what do I have to go on if the out of state emails are sort of like intending to influence the process which is fine but they start to overwhelm the system we have for processing information then it becomes less valuable as a whole and I tell you what I want to take ownership of this fish wallet board personally for myself and I want you to have ownership of it yourself but if it's infiltrated like this and that continues it makes it a less honest system it makes it so that we really can't communicate as well and that's a problem and it's not necessarily a problem because you folks can all fix but I will throw that out there so if this continues I would argue that emails suddenly become less effective for all of us and that's a bad thing we want to be transparent we want to be communicating but when you see 40, 50 of those lined up one on top of another that's a huge frustration for me and I don't want to take away all of this but I think we need to know who our audience is and we darn well I better be able to say ah okay, Louisville, Vermont I know where that is it does make a difference here's my rant any other comments on this yes, thanks last month the board and the straw boat were unanimously to make the traffic surveys mandatory is that going to help get better data absolutely is that a small piece of it or is that a major piece I think it's a major piece you know when you're talking about the small number of animals taken that we're talking about and then you add to that the relatively small percentage about a third of the trapper surveys that are responding you get to a very small sample size especially if you're trying to do so I think it will make a huge difference and we'll have a much better handle on what's effort related harvest and what's population related harvest would that take two or three years I expect so I expect two or three years I think that's a reasonable guess for you I think also the fact that this BTA supports this should mean that the returns we get will go up regardless I think the mandatory clearly is going to help but the fact that there's a lot of recognition now in the part of the BTA that this is kind of critical information I think that will help together response that we're looking for I wanted to clarify I voted yes on straw vote on that proposal mainly to continue the discussion but the fact that there was a close vote and was voted down to see revisited in two or three years when there is more complete data I would say one more thing which is this is a little bit of an unusual process because of the amount of interest about it in it because of the complexity of some of the questions we're trying to answer I think we did more analysis on the front end than we normally would do before our first vote I don't know that there's a lot more that Chris can do in terms of analysis on his end of what the daddy's got I think what he can do is like you suggest he can come to the next meeting with a plan for how we'll get that data collected and we're still not sure exactly how we're going to go 100 seconds no worries I had a comment regarding all the emails prior to the opening discussion that we had and I'm actually saddened by it because I think it cheapened and changed the democratic process of this board I think a lot of people we were inundated by dozens and dozens if not hundreds of emails before we even as a board had a chance to discuss it and how it's always worked in the past we bring up a petition, we discuss it we bat it amongst ourselves whether we table it for another month so we can think about it and make a decision that night for a first vote that process was completely lost and I'm really saddened by that because I think a lot of us were either intimidated by the public input positive or negative depending on which side you want to go on but I think it changed the board and how it was handled and again I'm really saddened by that not that I don't want the public to do but it has a time and place for it not hundreds and hundreds of emails and phone calls before it starts because again that's basically we had a public hearing for days and days and days and that's not how it's always worked and again the process changed when we had the meeting and we had our presentation and we basically had a public hearing and again I'm glad for the participation from the public but it changed the environment of the meeting and I don't know if it was received really positively on all of our cards because again it just changed the meeting and I'm just saddened by that and again I want the public's input but again when it's due and that's one of the reasons I wanted and I voted yes just so the people who were upset that they had one minute you're done and they had another 30 seconds or another minute or five I don't know we could have finished that conversation and again like Bill said we could have the first vote public hearing and then the department said you know what we decided it's not publicly supported or so we'll end it right then and there so again that's just an input on that Ken there's a couple areas like I don't know if it was a Piedmont or where it was where there was some question about the females and the movement of them and their ratio in the population or whatever which was an in question like why is there a lot of movement there could that be separated by wildlife management units or whatever to limit a bobcat season so that we were not encroaching on those ones where we had questions for the 30 days we just had a 15 day season and gather that data still so you're asking if the hardest could be managed by WMU so you would close some WMUs and open other WMUs or how ever you do it I mean it would be something that I would think you should ask for us and something that the person could talk about because if there's four million acres without encroaching on or hurting the population and one million acres where it's a problem that would seem to be an easy solution the only thing I wonder about is the law I mean there's always been a law enforcement issue we do it with other species but for some reason with fur bears we've had concerns of crossing and we've had issues with New York and Vermont I assume there might be some concerns from law enforcement Bill, yes? On that question about females in certain areas I think Chris mentioned that in his report it was some of that information was doomed to a very low tank of females in a disc of water in the tank of males which might have been coming across from the land capture That was one of the regions that was the Connecticut River Valley I think and the other was I think the Champlain Valley of these two conics which was a separate issue I think the Champlain Valley situation has been to more hunters than the traffic Depends a lot of the year of course because it depends a lot on the year but also the way out which one are to run dogs and who may it be to run they don't go off or go off and it's also hard to track into that Any other comments? Chris, you ready for a vote? So a yes vote would be to move forward with a full month of December or two more weeks What was that petition written? I'm sorry It's the full month of August it's to the end of the month of December What was it from the 60 in just for clarification, we're not making a first vote here, we're doing another straw vote otherwise we're going to get locked into language that we're really not in a position to support If you're doing a straw vote, you're already on my motion to move forward In my mind I see what you mean and let's clarify this is not right In my mind you're doing another straw vote in the department to return to you with for a first vote in December So a yes vote will be to support that month of December season for Bobcat and Novo will be to maintain it as it is now with a two week season 16 day season I hate it for the longest anymore because I know you only get home to listen to the drum No thank you I don't think we're going to approve the Bobcat extension We're voting to bring it forward for discussion over the season decision Is everybody know what a yes vote means then we're all set All right So a yes vote would put in the same status as the order and the 72 hour check time and the required survey return and Novo will deny it for the Bobcat extension Are we ready for the question? Thank you Bill would you start please let's go around the room Yes Yes No No So I don't have a passing vote then We have a 6-6 in one extension 6 Just a straw vote Sorry I really feel sorry for folks at the end It's not fair I'm not sure if I'll do that better You should call it out I feel like I'll do it by age next time Peace Just go every other one Thank you for that We have some business to do with the Bear Youth Collection rule And that's a big one We're going to wait for this one Thank you This is your third vote on mandatory Bear Youth Collection It's in the same form as you approved it in the second vote and before you for the final vote Venture L car Everybody's happy Everybody's happy L car took about 7 minutes Any questions on this? For what I've been told we're going to be discussing the Bear Rule in the future So this is just for the amendment Yeah, this is just for the bear two is only 8.0 Now it's probably as good a time as any if I might Mr. Chairman give you a brief update on where we are in that process We've been in very productive conversations with a group from the Bear Housesmen We have agreed on a lot of the issues so we'll answer both some of their concerns and some of our concerns We are hung up a little bit on the question of limiting number of dogs and how that's done and what the number is So we're still talking with them about that They will then go back to their may have already done this go back to their full board to discuss where they are We will come forward with a proposal from the department for changes and we will clearly outline for you the points that we agree on and if there's any that we support then they don't and vice-versa and that will I think result in a much better Bear Rule than we have currently on the board Anything you want to add to that currently you've been more deeply involved in that than I have Just has been a really interesting project to watch on hold The Housesmen and Women are very both with their column We need three to four times a week to make sure that they're getting the correct side of it The wardens are very closely involved which is something that I'm really, really happy about because they're much closer to the actual value than I am What they're seeing out of the process is something that the current group of hounds folks are actively thinking about their problem The problems that we are seeing are also being integrated into this new rule So I think the finished product can be a very, very simplified rule In addition to thinking about what you said I did have a couple of great conversations about the limited dogs that we're going to allow on a hunt this week Everyone seems to be coming around to the initial idea There was some confusion about people hunting together not being able to use more than the allowed number of dogs that they've always used They've all been living under the six dogs on the ground since its inception And they've all agreed that most people if they're riding with a friend are going to be amenable to having six dogs in a box, most boxes don't fit more than six or seven dogs anyway The social issues are going to come to the forefront Whoever's going to have the best dogs is going to get to bring them that day But they're all agreeing that if they can't tree a bear with six dogs then they shouldn't be in the woods anyway So these problems are solving themselves and they see that the problems they've brought to us is a little number of dogs Just a touch on that Other than that, it's been a really interesting process Markets all the credit and a couple of the game words to get the rest and then the folks that are filling in the spaces from the hounds perspective get a lot of credit too So I haven't done much tuitionary except for a few of the sidebar calls from the concerned hounds people So thanks When should we expect that? February? I think January, February I'm not sure what Mark has in which we expect to be wrapping up our process with them Well, hunting season always plays things a little bit By the end of the year I'd say we'd be done our process with them and have come to a agreement on it Thanks, you can't agree on it Come to you pretty shortly Mary, just for the minutes That butch spear was talking to me and he was saying how happy he was to hear he got support from the director of the POW group who said that they weren't having any troubles with dog hunting and I was thinking well, compared to what happened in Massachusetts, Connecticut and other places it's nice that that can come out in the public arena that butch could say that occurred actually right here, so that's good information Is there a motion to open this up? I'm sorry, yes I think there was a range of 99 to 160 bucks last time that was solidified I think that actually is a fine that's set through a judicial process so we won't set that ourselves it'll be set through the judicial fine setting of the judicial I can recommend though that Halton I'm going to recommend a lot of fine massive little fine that we have or I don't know if they'll go any lower than that So 8.0 is biological collection, I guess I could read it and then you folks could motion this forward 8.1, any person who harvests a bear shall collect a premolar tooth and submit the tooth through a game warden official fish and wildlife department reporting station or to a person designated by the commissioner to receive the biological collection within 48 hours of taking the bear specified by statute, the failure to collect and submit the bear tooth shall not result in license suspension points and shall be considered a minor violation subject to a civil fine Is there a motion to move this forward so Craig and Grant, thank you second Any discussion? Yes, thanks I would consider a nominal fine less than $99 but we have too many bears out there I mean I'll walk to them and the social problem when bears get too plentiful and this they become very antisocial important to humanity and this lasts for generations you can't pull it back we need to get this bear population down and we're going to suffer and we're going to regret If I could just respond to that briefly Mr. Chairman I don't disagree with you about the fine, you know $99 truly nominal or not I would just point out that we changed under statute our enforcement regulations to allow us to do any penalty that didn't include penalty points so that was one way of decreasing the penalty that was inherent in this and we have a very limited ability to set what a fine is and once you add on the various pieces that come with every fine that go towards victims rights and other funds of its kind it's pretty darned hard to set a fine that's less than that but I do take your point Folks ready for the question? So yes vote will support 8.0812 No vote will will not Let's start with the bill please, are you worried around? Yes Yes Yes No Yes And yes I'm just going to come up here now and submit it to you I've already marked it down to $14 That's only $13 I know I get to vote close I'll make it quick Turkey shotgun season starts Saturday of course I gave you the little brief update on our habitat step earlier 9 moves have been taken in archery archery season looks like rifle success is a little higher than last year but we're still of course don't have those final numbers and I already gave you the Bearhounds update so the only last thing is I don't know how many meetings it's been since Mark missed the meeting so nobody tell him anything because as soon as you get out you're going to text him you're going to be a bastard Oh yes We are in the process of sending up emails Gmail account emails for those who want them if you would like one of those and I would encourage you to do it to move in that direction but if you would like one of those and you just put your hand up and hold it up for a minute we can note down and make sure we get so Mary will make you a separate account what this is about and you can then just turn that account over to your successor if I ever go off so that's it nobody else oh no I got one oh you got one already great alright so if you don't see it for the next couple of weeks let us know if you do want one somebody want to start a round table yeah thank you talking about the Mississippi River is there any new info on the dam and so on do you need to take that down yeah but nothing positive so we would like as you know to remove that dam and open that additional seven miles as fine to have it set up there have been no major updates or changes in that situation although the town has gotten in touch with and I guess contracted with a guy who does this work who will look at that dam and determine whether there is a potential for hydroelectric power there I actually think that may move our conversation, our process work has done that but anything you want to add, Leonard? we take the dam as uneconomical uneconomical just based on power generation but the fellow who's taken over the birth license rights is looking at is basically green energy credits whether they can make enough kind of renewable energy credits to make it a viable project he's a pretty smart guy he's developed hydroelectric power so we expect that he'll be able to turn the camera fairly quickly and either move forward or not so the fact that he's taken it over on behalf of the building is actually a good thing for getting answers more quickly on whether they've been trying to develop that kind of I just want to add can you be anything greener than allowing the fish initially to spawn there you don't get a lot of tax credits for that but our department is in a strong position for every year since we moved to dam Grant, yes we were talking about the drive and we were talking about the dust dam so the Trout Unlimited played a big part after the 11th Dam it reached and it was that group in the department and it set precedent and the feds denied a owner of the dam wanted to be billed after a catastrophe of what they were saying was a man of flight so it was those groups working together that kept that from getting people and Gary Orton himself yep, yep and for those who know Dave Smith and Francis Smith were very involved in that we were actually going to dedicate Max's area to Francis Smith nice could I think we'll keep going, yep two things Turkey's building a new seed in the fall I've had some questions on what it is you would see when it will open up I want a farmer that says he raised a couple hundred over every year so I won't pretend to be a Turkey expert but I will say that in our conversations about whether to move to maybe two birds in the fall or length in the season in the fall there is some concern across the eastern states about places that are seeing some pretty precipitous declines in Turkey numbers and so we've been kind of cautious and they're looking at those expansions because we're not seeing that per month, we don't want it so that's sort of what's informed our cautious approach on that but I'll ask Mark or Amy to give us an update for the next meeting on the seeds specifically this gentleman's problem is Unity is on one side of the road and it is far from the other side of the road and the Turkey is walking the other side of the road and will it be true? wait until they go back to the road my Turkey cross the road we're going to talk about the second question do you want to deal with the Green River Reservoir situation? so I can only say a very limited amount about that because we're in an appeal right now of that of that permit in fact we're in two competing appeals I will say that I think that the agency natural resources has moved as far in the direction of the utility as it can move and have a defensible funding so that's about all I can say being in New York in a case like that any other ideas? keep going okay on that note if anybody's going to do that you can have a look in the A2 I've already had several conversations about this in the last 10 years part of this has dropped at least 60% in A in A I think it's a big issue because of access or what? I think it's a combination of a few bad springs and easy access basically so I've had this conversation with her I really think that it should really be down to one one one spring so you want more burn shot you want less burn shot God we'll just move the hey okay David we want a big report we want a big report you don't just miss a meaning I've got me and Fraser my friends got more we're losing any reports David? I'm sorry I didn't mean to lead you okay coming from me this is going to sound good I'm very satisfied with our issue of your range up in the Northeast Kingdom on the on the road do you have any more minutes? I've got a good one I'll pass I'll pass I'll pass I'll pass I'll pass I'll pass okay I've been in September with awesome the next two months there other women had a great time I've got heat in the freezer life's good good campus I did a transplant ID and did a basket making class which is a good gift I got my blaze orange on just want to remind everybody to have a good safe fall that kind of thing not that I want you guys regulating what I wear but I'm going to go you're hunting on Sunday I can't wait in New Hampshire so me and my boy will wear a kid I'm bringing will wear orange but it's just because it's you who came out there have fun with it this fall come to New York if you work there thank you well thank you yeah