 Maybe currently 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 Big time He's come to the Horton World with ease. And he's one of our senior guys now. Mark's got a great canine, good cheer that he's been gracious enough to allow it to show off a little bit. So if we get a chance, he's set up a little bit of a demo outside. And I'll let him tell you about that if we get the opportunity. That'd be great. I just want to say we have to make the opportunity happen. Because Mark came out and did a demo at my place for our employees inside. And 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. We'll see that later. Well, thank you. He's in my district over there. So we have lots of conversations, 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 and said, boy, there's someone shooting down the access area. Well, of course, he was sitting at the access area having dinner and said, no, that's in New Hampshire. You're close to just one state away. So he was very generous about it. So commissioner, what's up with the Duck Stamp program? So we thought it might be might be worth a little bit of the board's time. I think the presentation will 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. Let's go check 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 Division. We're pretty closely with Director Mark Scott and we're all familiar with. And many of you are already familiar with the land and habitat program, and dealing with land conservation, habitat protection, land owners, things of that nature. Well, one of the things that we do is we help guide the Waterfell Advisory Committee. So we have a Vermont Duck Stamp program. It was created in 1986. And Jane Losorchak is going to give you a presentation that goes over the history and the great success that 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. We had a celebration event at the Mallets Creek Wildlife Management Area recently, where we, through Jane's efforts, added a significant amount of acreage to that wetland WMA. Yeah, so in any event, we guide the Waterfell Advisory Committee. That's five committee members appointed by the commissioner. It's right now Gary Starr, who's the chair. Bill Sullivan, Lawrence Pine, Ron Rich. He's the Ducks Unlimited Representative. And I said, they'll sell them. They'll crunch up to somebody else. Oh my goodness. Sausage will function. In any event, they're a wonderful group of people. They make great decisions. We've done a lot of good conservation work through their efforts and the department's efforts. 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, although she does this broadly within the whole department these days, is to coordinate our real estate work, our land acquisition work. It's complicated work, although I would dare say she would tend to agree with me. It's also very rewarding work because at the end of the day, you see land that's conserved and is now available to support habitat for fish and wildlife and areas for people to go hunt and fish and otherwise enjoy wildlife. So Jane does a great job with this. She is the driving force behind putting the dub stamp monies on the ground to make these projects happen. So I'm going to turn it over to Jane. She'll run for the presentation. And then if you have questions afterwards, we'll be happy to answer them. Thanks, John. So hi, everyone. I'm Jane Zarchek. The last time I was here was 10 years ago this month, which was my first month of work actually at the department. So it's been a bit of a hiatus, so it's nice to be back. John said, does that work as a? The remote is not working. I'll have to use the remote. I'm going to run over it. It's a cable wobble. It's kind of like a wobbley shell. So as John mentioned, this past year was the 30th anniversary of the dub 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 dub stamp program, largely wetland conservation. So this is our first presentation on the subject, so you're sort of our test run. So hopefully you'll find it informative 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 dub stamp program, which we in turn leverage other funds to buy land switch. 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, the program's 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 front 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 how we built up the base of the funding in the duck stamp program was by having the first four stamps be a series that depicted 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 37 states and we've really been quite successful with it since then. So when you buy your duck stamp, and largely this program's 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 birds 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 Fund. 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 and up, and then now we just primarily spend the interest annually on conservation work. As John mentioned, we're 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 at Jewitt Pond. And just like all of our projects sort of to date since then, there 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 wetland conservation and access for waterfowl hunting as well as all other forms of hunting and fishing and trafficking. We've been able to raise $4.5 million. We currently have about $2.3 million in principle and $2.3 million as well in interest right now. Through that money that we put on the ground for projects, we've actually been able to leverage almost $7 million 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 federal NACA 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 just under 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 lands. We've also purchased almost 1,500 acres in conservation easements. Those easements also provide not only protection for wetlands habitat on private land, but also require the 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 1,700 acres of wetlands. And in that case, we're talking about large scale wetland restoration projects like at our branded 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, our Beaver Baffle Program. We support with duck stamp funds 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 is one of the things we really wanted to celebrate as part of this anniversary. We've 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 work very closely with NRCS, USDA, largely because they do wetland reserve easements on land where they're restoring farm land 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. And it's sort of a win-win for us because those lands are very cheap then once they have the easement in place. People pictured may or may not be actual waterfowl hunters. And Tom and Mike. The dog is real? Yeah, the dog is real. So just to highlight a few of our sort of really special marquee wildlife management areas that wouldn't have been possible without a sub-stand plan, sort of starting from the beginning of the program up until more recently. For people who may or may not be familiar with it, South Bay comes out of Lake Methromagod, 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 that 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 funds to buy. And 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 riparian 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 fruit for conservationists because it's not degraded like so many of our riparian 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'd really like to own land along there to 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 up along the Clyde. We have a swamp. Yes. Ketic 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 7 south of Manchester, it's what people still call the new Route 7, cut across the wetland on either side and bisected it. And we own on the west side of Route 7, there's always a really beautiful Heron Rookery that you can see from Route 7 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 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 160 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, these are all sort of destination areas this time of year for water fowl hunting as well as other types of recreation. And Whitney Creek was one of the last parcels that Bill Trenshaw acquired prior to his retirement. So it's just a really great place. And the last Lake Champlain influenced wetland system that isn't conserved is what's known as Munson Flats or Mallets 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 Mallets Bay. And we've now acquired three parcels there, one of which our largest one was just this past spring. The former Collins Farm, which people may know, he was the Red Sox player that lived in Colchester. That was his farm when he only stayed one season in the Red Sox, came back and started a farm in Colchester. And the large part of it is now part of our WMA. And so these are our premier wildlife management areas and many of them have been conserved with duck stand funds and with the oversight of the Waterfell Advisory Committee. One of our newer projects, one that Bill Trenshaw 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 waterfell hunter because John Austin probably just loves it all the time, you go down in there and it's hard to see the vision for what the Lemon Fair was. It's been really degraded by agriculture. There's ditches, everything has been impacted by agriculture. But the area pretty much from 125 to 74 is known as the Lemon Fair Lake Plain. That floods and it's second to Dead Creek for migratory waterfell. 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 a WMA there and we currently own 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 acreage there and have provided a lot better access on West Street because if people knew, the best access was really from a boat. And if you've ever paddled the Lemon Fair, you'd be prepared to portage and get bit by mosquitoes. 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, Camainville, I just wanted to mention, Camainville is one that we partnered with Ducks Unlimited and really the vision there was waterfowl and waterfowl restoration. But really this WMA highlights the multiple benefits these places have for all sorts of wildlife. And Camainville 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 birdwatchers. And so while we were drawn there for waterfowl and restoration along Otter Creek, there's really multiple benefits that these lands provide and Camainville is really a very popular area along Route 7 in Pittsburgh. So I said we also do enhancement and wetland restoration and ongoing program. I'm not sure actually how much we do this anymore because I don't know as much about it, but we used to do this quite a bit. It's been probably 10 or 15 years since we've done the cooking cutter. Yeah, so clearly captails are native vegetation and great wildlife, but they can become invasive and we like to, we have used duck stamp funds and other bunnies to create openings and diversity in the wetland for waterfowl and other wildlife to use. I mentioned this earlier, but Brandon Swamp Restoration 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, it's been also very successful in that we had the unique opportunity to set 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 $150,000 a year in interest, which doesn't seem like a ton of money but when you're paying $200 to $500 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 waterfowl 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 the companion to the wetland program that is the duck stamp fund, so the upland portion. That really has been kind of taking the duck stamp idea as our model and we've been very successful in getting funding through those donations. The part we're working on, the part we're struggling on still is it's largely hunters, 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 purchases and those habitat approval. 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 goes to be a wetland in Vermont in the Champlain Valley and then this features all of the duck stamps 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. So please pass it around. Would there be a few dozen questions? I'm hoping. Go ahead Craig, yeah. Is there any plans to actually have another duck stamp? Is that a duck stamp? No. Not really. I mean we've talked about it and it doesn't work all that well with our current licensing system. I think we don't feel like the payback would probably be there. I mean I would love to do it just to carry the tradition on it but I don't know if John was saying that. I'm a water felon from way back. That's my thing. I love the passion and I love the art associated with it so it's been a bit of a disappointment to not have that as part of it anymore. But frankly it was a money loser for us. It cost us more to produce it and administer it than we ever got back in return. So it was actually soaking money out of the duck stamp funds what it was doing. And we just thought that, well frankly the vast majority of interest amongst the people who were the buyers of the stamps which are mostly water felon owners but were also collectors who were buyers as well. That interest really tanked back in the late 90s and it hasn't come back up. So other states who have similar programs have seen the same phenomenon. We sort of saturated the marketing of the art and as a result the interest hasn't come back up so it just doesn't make sense. I mean sentimentally it would be nice to do it and it just doesn't make a lot of practice to do that. Justin what are you thinking? Leveraging the state money when the state puts money into one of these pieces of land. Do private people match it? Federal government match it? How does a leveraging work or is there any leveraging? It's very diverse. I mean sometimes we use 100% duck stamps to buy a piece of property. Sometimes we use one of the more recent lemon fair acquisitions we used to PR funds and the 25% match came from duck stamp funds. We've had donations that have leveraged it. We've had partners bring money to the table and just ask us for 10% of the project cost. It's very diverse depending on what the project is. We often get the land at a bargain sale so somebody will donate part and sell part and the great thing about that is we can use the donated part to match the federal money as an additional state match. You like those. Jane we saw a lot of ducks, wood ducks in your production there. A wood duck box is part of the program too because I mean 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 marsh than any other duck this time of year. I mean I think we have a task but not... We tend to support that work through the waterfowl grant so we have a whole nother grant that's a PR funded grant and that supports like David Sausville and other staff and partners to do some of the on-the-ground management work. So that's how we take that part. So the duck stamp funds don't typically cover those costs. They have, as Jane mentioned, contributed to enhancement projects where we can leverage other monies to restore free animals. Thanks. Anything else? Greg, yes? Do we have a lot of money? We can sure use that. We can sure use that. Cattail either under one creek or that way. Totally choked out. I mean you don't work for waterfowl. They don't even go there because there's nothing important there. That WMA is a constant challenge. I mean if you're familiar with it, it sounds like you are. I live right there. We've worked in there well since we've owned it and despite our best efforts at Cattail, that floating Cattail mat is incredibly persistent and resilient to our management efforts. So we'll probably go back in there before too long with some sort of a mechanical device and try to open it up again. We're going to have to do that from time to time. That would be good. At this point you probably need to get drained and done something that way. I know that's a monster project. We can go back to the old way of dynamite. Army Corps of Engineers doesn't tend to... Permit that. All the good old days. Tend to have a good impact. Anything else, folks? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Jumping back to our agenda, I was remiss. Why don't we do some public comments now if folks don't mind? I don't think we really have a big sign up list going but 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. So is there anyone who would like to have public comments tonight? Sure, I would. Thanks, yeah. I'm right after the program. And I think the topic that I'll be talking to you tonight is one thing I kind of want to be clear just for myself in my head and for anyone else watching on TV or my cover you strapped in petition initially was to address the issue of incidental tape of otters caught in fever traps. And as petition reads, it does say that the seasons would be extended if the petition is passed as written. So that's the part that my camp has a problem with. We understand the issue of incidental tapes. It's the issue of it. I'm just going to address the otter piece because I think the bot cap piece, as far as I know, is on the table for now. So I know at Chris Bringer's presentation on September 21st the topic of shorting the fever season to coincide with otter season to end in February was discussed. But there was concern about if fevers weren't trapped through the end of March, they might end up being nuisance fevers throughout the year and since the department doesn't really have any nuisance statutes in place to kind of regulate that. There was a concern about fevers not being trapped mainly or there's not really any processes around that. So it was interesting listening to the presentation on a death 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 add to put it out there for a future discussion between now and December or not, what would be the real problem, for lack of a better word, with just shorting the fever season to the end of February to coincide 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 nuisance fever complaint calls that might come through. Maybe we won't see those calls. But the fever season ended at the end of February 10 years ago to run concurrent with otter trapping 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. We'd be happy to get volunteers to help people wrap trees. I think it would be a good opportunity to kind of bridge this chasm between the issue of incidental tanks and the issue of people who don't want to expand to trapping season. It just seems to me like it's a very aggressive position to expand otter trapping season by a whole month just to address a handful of irers who are trapped incidental to fever traps in March. It just seems a lot of upset and a lot of ire and it just seems like a really aggressive approach when we look at this. Another approach that might work for everybody. I didn't plan on making that comment until I heard the presentation on it. And also I think as far as funding is concerned I can guarantee you that 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 will be a lot more non-license holders interested in funding for that stamp. They would feel like okay well wow this is a stamp that I could really get behind. I know it's a huge problem with the nuisance fever and I get that. But I think it's also an opportunity to get the necessary rules in place statutes in place to address that. Thanks. Anybody else have any comments? Great. Looks like we're ready to move on to some fish work. Yeah so as you guys know the fish regulations are not typically up in front of you as often as wildlife is and Eric and we thought that it made sense to have a kind of a pre-briefing 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 for your consideration. So without more than that I'll turn it over to Eric to introduce the fish folks who are here. Thanks. All right. I'm Eric Palmer. I'm the director of fisheries for those of you who haven't met me before. The fish division includes the fish biologist and the fish hatcheries 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 brought to 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 what we are normally presenting. So one is the spear gun views which most of you saw the petition that Lou Belts presented a while back. And that was at the tail end of our two-year regulation process. So 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 activity. And so we have a proposal that includes some reporting requirements, a few minor tweaks to existing commercial fish fire requirements, and then a possibility of adding food species to the list of species for commercial sale that we'd like to discuss with the Board. And typically we 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 vote 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 rule changes, but the concepts that we're proposing. For the simple ones, the language is so straightforward that we'll just show you what it is. But for commercial fishing and for spear guns, we want to give you our approach and get your feedback and have you think about it over the next couple of months. So when we come back in January with proposed language, we've already gotten 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 vote process. So one of the things we're going to do ahead of time, and we usually do this every three or four years anyways, is just kind of give an overview of how we use different types of fish regulation and what the difference is between length limits and bag limits. Rich Kern, 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, we'll 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 the spear event proposal. So starting off, we'll have Rich Kern. He works at our Roxbury office. He's chair of our truck team, as well as working on aquatic organism passage and screen buffers. This is about everything habitat related. So if you have other questions about fish habitat fishing related projects, Rich is a great resource. Tonight he's primarily going to present a regulation overview and then we'll move him to some of the presentation Rich has as to 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 we're going to talk about tonight or another night? Some of it. And I apologize I was off on vacation the month of August, but Rich did come to that meeting, took notes. Some of it he's going to address in his presentation. Some of it was a little bit beyond the scope of what we wanted to address tonight. But yeah, we're going to respond to some of that. Did you go someplace fun in August? I... We don't know what to tell you. When fishing on Lake Superior. There you go. Co-holds. Yep. Got some co-holding, some lakers. Okay, so just kind of give an overview of fishing regulations, kind of the basis of them and how we use them. So certainly there's often a biological component of fishing regulations. You know, we spend a lot of our time sampling fish populations and anglers and fisheries to kind of better manage them. But there's also a strong social component of our current regulations and how they develop over time. Just to kind of reinforce every 10 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 issues. The last one was done in 2010. We surveyed or sent out 5,400 surveys. This was contracted through the Cornell University. And we're looking at angler activity, angler opinions, looking at trends over the course of the three statewide surveys that we did in 2001, 2000 and the end of 2010. And then we can look at inland waters versus Lake Champlain issues and piece things out. So this is an important resource for you folks as you're considering some of these proposals that we have some of this data available. We stratify the sampling by region so we can get regional views. So you can see that the five regions each one received 900 surveys. Also surveyed non-residents for their opinions. And the last survey had a return rate of about 40%. Doesn't sound that great, but apparently for male surveys it's very good. So we look at, we get information on angler activity and what they're fishing for, open ice fishing, Lake Champlain versus inland, their opinions on species preferences, free limits, the sizes, the quality, the size of the fish, regulations, various issues in Vermont, where they get their information and what some opinions access brings. So this is 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 applied statewide and to address some broad biological protections or social issues. And because they're applied statewide they are somewhat limited in their effectiveness. 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 fish in a high elevation stream and down in the Connecticut River or Lake Champlain Valley. So it's got some limitations. And then we have special regulations. These are tailored to a specific water, the biological or fishery characteristics of that water, and it's intended to produce a specific response. So it's more oriented to that specific water and fishery. So within the suite of fishing regulation tools we have krill limits, length limits, season restrictions, and gear restrictions. That's kind of in our tool bag. So krill limits and 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. More of a social panic component. It may provide a measure of success and folks like to know that they've caught their limit. It could also be used on the other side to promote a conservation ethic to try to limit the number of fish people are actually harvesting. But in general it has no effect on the number of fish that are taken over the course of the whole season. Our fishing season, for example, trout season lasts over six months. Reduce the limit. 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 will get redistributed to another. And we've got an example of this. So in 1991 we had a 12-trout limit for frown and rainbow trout in 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 may have caught fish, but there's a lot of folks that release fish. And very few caught or kept the full limit of 12 fish. In 1996 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 could see, despite cutting the limit in half, we had essentially identical harvest. So that just kind of shows we're just really redistributing those fish among anglers and not really making a change with our preliminaries. Now that's not to say you can't, in a very extreme case, affect annual harvest. If we had a limit of the yellow perch of one, it certainly makes a difference. If it's not really less than what most anglers are able to catch, you really not have enough. Rich, could I please, that's not a stocked river anymore, or a stream, right? This is a naturally occurring fish with those results. So I was thinking this is all about stocked fish spreading out the harvest. No, I mean 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. I'm trying to target, you know, either harvest or protecting certain sizes. We can use it to protect migratory species. So, you know, up in the Northeast Kingdom and the Magog system, we have a 10-inch limit to allow fish that are spawn in the streams to get large enough to then migrate back out to the Lake Meppermen, as small as we could use it to protect fish until they become a 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 career limits. And it includes things like no kill, minimum length, slot limits, things like that. If you have questions, just, you know, feel free to jump in. Do we do any slot limits? We have a couple on some bass fisheries. We have, you know, real abundant, kind of stunted populations. We'll try to, actually, the next slide kind of shows. You know, one of the intensive use of 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 overpopulated size, protect them as they move into a certain, you know, length slot and so that they could spill over into the larger fish. So we've done this on a couple of ponds. And that's, Lake Carmine walleye fishing is a slot limit. It did? Does it still? Yeah. Or does that change? Okay. Right. So the key is that people are actually going to harvest this year. At least, be smaller. It's not efficient. That tends to be kind of the difficulty, is if they're not willing to do that, then all you've really done is push the length limit over to here and you really haven't, you know, helped the situation. So that depends on, you know, what angle they're willing 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 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, hunting 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 have 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. Yeah. You can control catch efficiency. We don't allow or use dynamite to catch fish. You can reduce the risk of undesirable fish species or diseases, parasites. So this kind of speaks to bait fish regulation. That's what we're trying to do there. I'll limit, you know, it's kind of a terminal gear and I'm 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. It's more of a social regulation. We haven't gone there. Vermont, you know, will have artificial flies and will not fly fishing only. And, you know, often used to control cooking mortality and reduce, reduce that, that part of cooking mortality. So that's, you know, cooking mortality has been studied quite a bit. This is a graph of a study in 1992 that has 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, fish tend to catch them more on the lip and can be released and suffer much lower mortality. So when we're proposing those types of regulation, this is really often what's behind it. Do you see a difference between flies and other kinds of artificial? 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, you know, the Yellowstone, things like that where there's so much pressure that even a incremental, a very small, you know, may make a difference. We're not in that situation if we're not. So it's, you know, we kind of combine them. So that's it with the general regulations, kind of our tools, and yes, 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 a 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 with that regulation. 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 environmental, there's floods, you know, we've gone 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 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, fish that are removed from the system or hooking mortality, which I just showed. So for the fishing regulations 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 effective. So that's kind of, you know, some of the considerations we have to make. I think of, like, the deer and the winter severity index on that natural mortality side, versus the hunting mortality in the same thing as food for fishing. So when we're developing regulations, 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. 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 lures. 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, the decline in fish mortality with the most conservative regulation being no kill or efficient flies in the 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, our statewide angler survey, we kind of have a sense of what people think about the use of special regulations for different fisheries. In general, folks support the concept. You know, usually less than 10%, you know, oppose any use of special regulations. And then you tease that a little further and ask, well, what types of regulations do you support? It 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 lures. But again, you know, most people 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 bat and kill, the dog, the white, and the lule, the moose, the implied river. We'll be talking about the dog and the implied river today. There are some ponds. Eric mentioned a car mile, so I have a regulation on kitten reservoir, a few on bass, baker and kent pond, or slot limits. Lake trout, Seymour and Little Labral, that was mentioned at our last meeting. People had some questions about that and a couple of brook trout ponds. So really not a lot, you know, that we're actually applying in that way. 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. It's these ponds and lakes. I 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 roundtable kind of asking me about different regulations is just trying to understand, you know, how we got there. Because it's never really as, you know, often a straight line. So that's one of the things that kind of went into it. So when we, you know, we're developing regulations, sometimes it's coming from the biological staff and moving up through the process, you know, through our department and to you 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 on that end. So just as kind of an example, you know, we have our trout regulations have evolved over time, started out in 1866, where except for June, July, and August, trout were off limits. In the 88, six-inch trout limit, six pounds a day was instituted. In 57, the thrill 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 earlier in April, into second Sunday in October. In 78, legislature got involved and reinstated the six-inch trout limit in two counties. So you can understand why we have. And then in 81, after a 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 12th 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. Can't necessarily say where we are today is where we would be if we, you know, 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 Anglos always bring up as 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. 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. They have a career limit for different seasons for whatever reason. Maine also has a, you know, kind of a split season where they go to a lower limit with artificial only after August 16th. Hampshire goes from January to October. No limit. You know, so everything is a little different even though, you know, it's a very basic understanding of the biology. There's a lot of social factors that are driving these. So another example that someone brought up with 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 Banzant, 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 step back and let them come up with their recommendations, which we did, and that was essentially what led to the Seymour in April regulations, those line restrictions. Also wrapped up the Brook Grant and Rainbow career limit into the lake trout limit. So in the lake trout waters, the Brook Grant and Rainbow career limit was reduced to two. You know, it was, it made, you know, people were satisfied with it. These regulations, but, you know, looking back on it, you know, 20-something years later, doesn't always make sense. You know, it takes value. So you need to kind of know the history of how some of these things came about. So that's what I have on this kind of an overview. Thanks, Jess. 1974, the government of the 6-inch limit, at least across places. The reason for that was because we were throwing 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 will immediately suck that worm right down his gullet. They just, they can taste it instantly and down it goes, different than a fly or an artificial lure, where they don't have that sucking thing that goes on. So, official wildlife board, I guess, smartened up and got rid of it, because why let them float on down the stream and just die within 20 minutes to an hour somewhere else? Now, on the Battenkill, we allowed artificial flies, artificial lures, and worms for catch and 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 them. I don't like that, and I think we should revisit that. I'd like to know what other states allow catch and release with worms. I don't know of it. Remember that chart I showed on the Dog River, and the declining mortality with the different regulation options, with the lowest being artificial flies and lures only, catch and release. You can still affect total mortality by going to catch and release. There will be some hooking mortality with bait fishing, and we recognize that in the Battenkill. 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 were released, 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 Battenkill, is that without being able to harvest much fewer bait anglers that participate, so that essentially reduces that risk. And the ones that do are, there are ways of fishing with bait more actively that are going to lower hooking. So it was a compromise. As we went through the regulation process, that's what we're doing, 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. If they're not going to be there, we'll go right at the end. They're not going to be there legally. I didn't mind the circle hook. That didn't bother me any. They can't swallow that thing down too far from bait if they wanted to use that. But there's really 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 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 as if it's a death sentence for them to be caught on hook with worms and released for absolutely no consumption, just for fun. That's a bad image for our department. Any other comments? Yes, thanks. Eric, did you get a copy of the report of the Lake Seymour Association? Will that be something you're going to address back in the end when you're about to rule the law? Well, yeah, I got a copy of it. I think Mary circulated it to the board, Ron Frasboia's letter, 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 the change, because they're asking for the length limit, the most biological part, to go to similar with general regs. 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 but stay the same for winter fishing. So it's got some interesting mix of partly biological and... Probably 21 people there. Craig and I went, the judge was there, he had a good presentation. The other thing of it, if you know where Seymour is, it's made of 17-hundred 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 in its 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 there, two poles, different frill. Then you do on the 17-hundred-acre water. We do want to talk about Seymour. The judge is going to be here tonight to talk about the fly. 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 smelt population at Seymour. So there's more going on there than just a regulation issue. But yeah, we'll be prepared to talk about that. Any other questions, folks? What's the next step, Commissioner, with us? This is a good background. So also tonight we're going to hear a brief presentation on the couple of items that you're going to see coming to you in consideration when we open up the fish roll, and I guess 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 or 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 is in conflict with statute. And then the spear gun and the commercial fishing. So what I would suggest is that we just start working through those. Rich was going to start out 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 left off. Right? Craig, yes. That was a great presentation. I was wondering if that's a little electronic copy that could be emailed to us. Yeah, we'll email it out to the full board. Yeah, my person would have Rich's narrative. I'd like your copy. Yeah, the charts are good. It's gone out. No, I would recommend that we do the dog presentation now before then we're going to start. I'll second. It's about time we find out who's in charge around here, Mary. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Alright, moving right along. Thank you, Mary. The dog. The dog. The dog. We're going to do the dog dog. Nice presentation there. That was beautiful. 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. So I guess we're ready to continue with the fish presentation. Yeah. 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 dog river trout regulations that will cover the slides to commercial fishing and we will cover most of that in the past evening. This is a quick one, the Little River in the water already between the Roofton Bridge. This is near the Pacific Island state complex or I guess it's still around. Now the bulk dam is currently as a two fish regulation. We stopped two year old atree 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. These 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 of 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 comes from the outlet of the Waterbury River. So Waterbury Reservoir is close to a 900 acre and it has a bottom leak. 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, it's and it's a hydro peaking operation. So as you can see here when it's not generating you get your 15 CFS and then when they turn on the Dibro it jumps up to anywhere from 450 and actually more recently 670 CFS. So either on or off ground or in a flood state there's nothing in between. We had a guy die there a couple years ago right? What's the warning system? Does what you're seeing at that time they have signs and apparently there's some sort of a sign and it goes off. And again it's a bottom release of Waterbury Reservoirs 100 feet deep, so that's cold water coming out the other end which is generally a good thing for the fish and trout. Does it get to build a thermal client? Yes, but there's limited oxygen below. Because a lot of those Waterbury Reservoirs won't allow they won't have a thermal client because of that bottom draw. Moving it too much. It does support smell. So we worked through the first three 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 just a standard release. There's an 8 inch type 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. So more on the bottom end and less jacking it up on the peaking end. And then that means it's a longer duration because there's less flow and we'll keep going all the time to manage that reservoir. Phase 2 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 the flexibility of maintaining a run at a river release from 0 to 650 CFS to cover the majority of what we see. So then spring runoff and I flood it once. Phase 3 requires 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. And once that's done the winter drawdown will be eliminated and we'll go 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 at this stretch of the Wintersbury River it's very warm just a couple of miles from the Little River is Crosshead Brook and we see on warm here is fish congregating at the mouth of it. 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 proposal is to extend that to fish regulation just kind of proactively as things you know 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 Manuski and to protect those fish from harvest by individual anglers and it also serves to simplify the regulations because right now 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 Manuski at the two fish limit so this will help get rid of one line in Bernie's regulation book So that's kind of the gist of what will be coming to you in January. Okay Move to the Dog River So So we've been spending a lot of time on the dog for the past 25 years um electrofishing the main stem We've done 134 sites tributaries another 80 something We've got three full season anglic reel surveys We've done habitat surveys for electrofishing stations we've looked at fish passage issues and D.B.C. has conducted a geomorphic survey to kind of look at the river 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 in the lower 8 miles of Northfield fall stand 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 on the upper river again just continue that in 94 as well as the tributaries which were all very good wild trout populations So essentially the whole watershed was managed for wild trout since in 2001 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 4.5 miles below the river and that didn't have any year restriction at the end it was a public process and it was kind of compromised But since about 2000 we've had a prolonged decline in wild trout and that prompted us to use the test word designation in 2010 to go strictly catch and release artificials only on the lower 8 miles Which where does that 8 miles end up there in Riverton up there I know there's like a fall or a great swimming hole there but can the fish get above that or yes above that Is that the 8 mile mark though or is it Northfield Falls which is right in north of the Vulletary and Northfield Falls the general store and Tops Brook Road So it goes from there to now So there's no natural declination line to a treatment plan Well Northfield Falls is a vertical, oh is it pretty steep with a small dam on top Okay 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 could see we were we're dropping down there we had a little blip in 2005 and continued low numbers another blip and we initiated the catching release regulation here so then we had what looked like potentially a response the best numbers we had since 2002 and then we had Big Spring Flood in May 2011 and then we had Irene the dog group and James a lot of you know habitat features you know some of our stations we could no longer sample because they were too wide and deep and so then we have slowly seen some improvements you know to 2015 I'd like to say that and continue but you know 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 catch and release artificial flies and lures only the one little wrinkle on it is when we first did this test water designation we had some anglers you know a few anglers come with concerns about the date restriction some were concerned about their own ability to fish the way they wanted to fish but what really came out you know as their strongest concern was limiting the ability of kids to fish thinking that date was an easy way to fish So I looked at our you know we had three full season pre-off surveys where we interviewed you know thousands of anglers and poured through that data and found that children made up you know less than 10% of the fishing pepper and much less of the fishing fish so their contribution to fishing mortality was pretty negligible and you know to address the concerns of this group we put in that exception to allow children over 15 to use natural baits still no harvest so there's no motivation you know for dad to throw a line in and snag a fish and take it home and since that time you know 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 as a proposal Can I ask you about that 2001-2002 where you had that huge spike there in the population was that common in other rivers that those same two years around the state or I just want to why would cause that It's somewhat misleading because if I gave you the scale back to the 90's those wouldn't even well these are very good numbers but the stations are a little different but you can see 2002 was very good in this station Yeah How far apart are those two stations? This is the River Tin Conservation Park or the bridge there and this one is Grounds Mill Road So it's a couple miles different habitats and that's what we find a lot is a lot of changing habitats we're stopping for 800 from the section of the stream a couple of trees flowed out of that we have to provide more details Alright Thanks Rich So just up next for our presentation Do you have enough for folks to see? Yes, thanks I'm Judd Crosby I'm one of the 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 sail of the lake so that they get a little sail and so the lakes aren't on the Clyde River basically and the Clyde River goes into Lake Memphermare So there are lots of different fish you can fish for in the Clyde River but it's most notable for Landlock Salmon which grow to adulthood in Lake Memphermare 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 but most closely related salmon is in the month of October it's catch and release for salmon artificial boars 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 who's the company that operates the dam in Newport there it started operating an upstream fish passage facility so they go up a ladder into a tank into a truck and they're moved up above the Clyde Salmon dam and release so now we have adults salmon up there so we put a test waters designation in place that basically extended that regulation for the catch release season in October up to West Charleston which is as far as the salmon could get so we'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 what we do after this test water expired or before it expired 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 so you can see the different color coded segments and I'll just walk through you so this is the downstream end this is the Lake Mount from Agog down here 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 it was clear enough to tell where the river ended and where the lake started the wards that we have working up there today I 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 through there in all this water that October catcher release season for Santa was 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 the 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 control that and catch people so they said okay you just can't fish there while walleyes are in the river and they set the date of the mail on the 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 walleye now there's a statewide season that walleye fishing doesn't open until the first Saturday 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 most of this fish were in there and lay 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 get to the 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 currently this here is where most of the fish have been released so as I 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 wouldn't be able to just follow the truck and harass the fish and stick in that area very long plus we're now releasing most of the fish in Clyde pond so it's not an issue so we're proposing that we do a win at that closure when the fish go downstream after all that do they have to go through a turbine oh 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 and keep going through smaller fish could but we're trying to steer even the smaller fish into a box of the best clues that they can get down we'll see good question and then finally general regulations everything up above the West Charleston from there on it's just general so what we're going to be proposing is going to look more like this so we went from those 8 different segments down to 4 and you can see the map down there so we did away with the purple the yellow so guessing we get away with this red one here I guess I can use it for you 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 catch release season so the September and October catch release for salmon artificial boars and flies only and the reason we're suggesting that is that now that we've been operating that trap and truck facility we know that salmon are coming in September there's actually good numbers of fish that come 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 their 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 the fishing year round and the reason I mentioned earlier that salmon can be found in the river all summer long and the conditions are right and we know from anglers we know from the wardens and we know from the guys that operate the facility there the hydropower 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 in the words of at least I can't remember if they've actually made any cases but I know they've done these pet wardens in there so that's the river and then yes 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 lakes so these lakes when we start moving fish up above we put a test waters designation in place there for salmon in October but there was no gear restrictions because people fishing the lake could be fishing for furniture or whatever but if they did catch a salmon we wanted them to release it so similar to the river we're proposing that in the lakes this big salmon, this little salmon then we have catching a lease for salmon September and October with no gear restrictions so people are still going to use my thing so you had gotten in from hearing more in the group on 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 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 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 I believe they're pretty small I think the majority of anglers would be opposed to that there's a lot of fly anglers that use flies also when you use weight the main concern with these guys is they feel it allows you to be unsporting when you're using weighted flies or unweighted lines and weighted moors 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 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 how are the numbers this fall are trapped with all water moors and so forth that's way down I think we've only moved seven salmon so far which is this was more like Gerardi's thing when he was here and Pete Emerson was 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 middle of October we would have moved probably half of those fish by now this is what when they come up by the triangle Richard Chaffey actually worked with the department when they had actually stripped them and you can see the size of this little flylock salmon his son Ron is probably one of those other fish people on the fly when they talk to Ron and he's out of the bag here everyone's using out of the bag the water flow should be increasing this week it finally gives some rain there'll be a lot of fish waiting to move in so get up there next week alright thanks so again this is largely a simplification of what has been done quite a bit I'll click that changes 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 had 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 replace angling with open water fishing really just a terminology adjustment to make it master the other regulations so if you have any questions on each one here because we're going to kind of jump to the next topic go ahead and jump them out will the legislature do that or does something do with us as a board right 122 is a board regulation that's where most of the fishing 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 different regulations into 122 just for simplicity's sake at the time we use angling to only refer open water which is then different from the statute's definition so the statute stays the same and angling in the board regulation becomes open water fishing so it'll hopefully be clearer for every one way like the difference is so if all the proposals that were talked about today so far are all in 122 so that you 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 to a fish it'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 that particular time that's going to be an illegal activity that's a different 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 it would be more of not hearing and hearing towards the gear but more of an action targeting to snag a fish that's a jerking of a rod it would be a little different because the gar is more of a catching where they their teeth are coming off the boat right so they're snagging it which without a hook now right but again 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 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 specifically about gar 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 legal they're still snagging the fish in teeth so unfortunately people aren't eating these fish no one catches them I assume so if they're catching them and releasing 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 illegal if they have a little hook on it it would remain illegal what they're doing now is illegal it would remain illegal irrespective of doing the snagging this definition is about actually the rod intended to hook instead of the big bait I was going to say a lot of times there's a little hook to the piece of bait to make it actually attractive because you actually want it so I'm just like Carl, can 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 that would be hatchery where people are snagging fish for both to eat and just to take them because a lot of people just want to have a big fish on camera so they can say they look what they caught on we're not seeing as much of consumption snagging at least from what I'm hearing from the word we're not seeing people out there with treble hooks and weighted lines weighted hooks, trying to snag fish they can bring home the there's always the possibility that we're not getting reports but that's what I'm getting from the reports that I get on Mondays in a way is the edweed section closed anyway or is it open for sure? that's right now the brook is closed but the bay is open is the hatchery the bay that I can't play so it's part of the relation when it's open so they're in the lake and they're snagging what is the perception? growing up someone got one with a Clyde fly you think that was weighted in treble? that was in treble people call it a Clyde fly never knew what it was when I was little but then I'm sorry some people's tadpoles know what a Clyde fly was have you ever been there Kevin? to where now? to the edge of the hatchery? yes so you know it would be fairly easy where that whole trip of water can be done 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 and the Highgate Muscle basically had that closed when we came through into the statewide catch and release we tweaked 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 covered that's all of our concern so in this case we're just proposing to delete that section which would then put it right in the statewide catch and release how far is that anyway from Klondand to Highgate Dan? 7 miles 7.5 so fish is not going up the Sisqoi all the way to Canada and back it's not going to do it Highgate would have been the natural fall line basically they would have come from the lakes off and the dam wasn't there they'd come up to Highgate and that's where the ledges would have naturally been 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 soccer you can fish for a smallmouth bass in the winter component to it 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 together and place them under the more liberal regulation basically go Highgate Dan to Eonsburg Dan open year-round trout we use artificial and that's simple house keeping had enough, no color tonight that's how you burn it that's the version you wanted yes there were some handouts here tonight actually we didn't bring handouts there's a lot of this stuff we wanted to just get the board to review 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 appropriate we should use so depending on what the board gets us for 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 these ideas was kind of like put bullets into sections so it's a little easier to walk through what they are for the most part there really wasn't any text changing or anything like that we were just trying to get things together so in the 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 404083 and 4611 I believe on the handouts you have has the amended version of the language on that back so basically it gives the board the clear authority to establish rules on sale of fish including prohibiting fish species season limits, reporting requirements possible permit requirements so those were fundamental changes that would clarify this past spring on basically give the board clear authority so the sale of fish in Vermont it's 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 limits 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 a bunch of times there are a thousand people we have some basic numbers from the fish buyer requirement 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 did we know that they came from from on anglers or anything? New York has no reporting requirements so I think the only piece of that 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 fish interview looks to speak 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 enacts 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 available throughout the fish shops at the buy right? their buy reports yeah we've got a graph we presented that to the board a year ago we had that presentation here and we'd be happy to show it it's millions of dollars in revenues we think this might take a little bit of additional time and then this year gone we'll take more time also so we might want to go through that and if folks have follow up questions going back to the table we'd be happy to go back and of course we'll come back to you in the actual proposal right 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 I'll probably use one of the numbers that was repealed just there so as I was saying 122 is where most of our fish regs in this case the commercial angling wouldn't be put into 122 it would appear in its own little entity and basically 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, anyone that wants to sell fish would have to acquire or purchase a seller tag and the fish seller tag would be sold to the point of sale system it would be a fairly relatively low cost again the costs would have to be set to another process and any angler can sell they can only sell the fish they caught a friend of mine who was fishing with two grandkids they sell the fish the money goes to the grandkids college education those kids are going to have to get as it's written out yes right there's no there's no age exemption under the proposal for the commercial fishing license but it would be anomalous mostly trying to get information on the activity we're not looking to make a lot of money on 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 yeah there's one now on anything kind of creole limit or right but if you're up there fishing for perch and you've got three or four five gallon buckets of fish again and only one guy has got you know the tag how are you going to prove who actually caught why do you feel it's necessary the working group that talked about this and went through a lot of it it's trying to understand the activity it's trying to base you I was out on the winter on the creole survey on Northern Champlain the past two winters getting information from people whether they're selling the fish doesn't work they won't, 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 me looking in their bucket they don't want to do anything 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 we tell right now we tell them we really don't have that much of an idea so 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 10 or 20 years ago I would say yeah you definitely you can get on the bucket and just don't see it and I'll be one of the biggest area where the most commercial fishing is these days I don't see it like it was back then so we I don't think you can ever hurt this lake so I don't really think that's for the sport fishing I don't think that's really an issue I think like Eric said this is all 100% 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 about 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 fighter reports that they submit once a year so this this gives us an opportunity to look at participation now who's participating in the activity and then to the point of sale like you buy your license we will have addresses, email addresses and say what did you do we can send him a survey we can gather more information because we know who's participating 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 right we'll of course the right value to make these decisions rather than trying to do it through for like a second I'm all about you guys getting information that you can get however this just feels like another episode of Big Brothers thinking we're really not going to need to meet in my opinion I don't think it's an issue so as far as time here the majority is hunting for my fishing right as far as like they ever broken down they broke down my quarter I don't remember I mean off the top of my head so the majority of it was fishing but it has been growing a little bit summer fishery there's a lot of this kind of response to complaints about perch fishery we're actually getting more complaints about trappy really? oh yeah well yeah perch was the big issue back 20 years ago and it was all about the Canadians that are coming and the kitchenary fish and they're taken away by the burlap sack full and the perch are stunted now because they caught all the big ones so they have perch boys they're going to grow and plant for the big ones but we aren't hearing anything about perch we're hearing a lot more it's not just some of the issues it's the other out of the year so properties is the issue and that's an easy fix if you can make it a sport for this if you can't sell we're going to hope for that I'll give you $2,000 one question on angos will be asked to record that's got to be like a mandatory thing because asking somebody I mean it's like can you do the dishes and no I'm not you know so again where's the that really isn't the language that would appear 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 follow up and gather some of that information and there's some surveys how many times do you go out and we can 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 year this is brand new anglers having the the requirement to buy a tuition license to record anything with their catch that 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 if it's unsuccessful 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 why we're bringing it to you now 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 be I'm just trying to figure out if the seller tag is good for a calendar year on December 31st why would anybody want to buy more than one seller tag I guess we've got the requirement there that they could only buy purchase one one annually 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 but you wanted to have 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 went to that fish buyer again and you have another 25 crappy and you're saying fish buyer number it would be potentially could be an attractive now but we weren't proposing that type right but you could basically have so if you had a second tag but they're both traceable to you your name aren't they or your license or whatever if you had multiple ones it still goes back to the calendar those times it was just kind of a simple way of putting it in there you want to change this is just the ideas I understand that 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 if you get your sister or your brother to go get a tag and sell them for you still technically illegal but probably wouldn't kick off just trying to head off over limits which is a byproduct of these crappy runs where people are catching consumers on this day and other people sell just a small portion of the headache and crappy deliverance then moving on to the fish buyer requirements for the most part the fish buyer is really what is currently being done in this case it would just be kind of pulling the working and the conditions out of no man's land out there into this regulation and kind of buying them so the fish buyer will basically need a payment permit from the department currently that permit is issued at no cost and then the fish buyer needs to report quarterly we have a requirement of basically when you get your permit your fish buyer permit your fish buyer exemptions you have to report your past year's purchases and you have to divide them up by quarter by species and again all those details are things now with the regular statute change the board has authority over the kind of the wanted issue would be that the fish buyer would need to confirm that the tanker has a fish selling pack 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 last year's January you may not have everything and then the last part is basically species not to sell and this is one that's 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 annually for crappy has contributed to and if not created a lot of the conflicts we see on Northern Champlain 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 thirty five forty cents a pound and yellow perch may be two dollars a pound some fish are around two so it's a dramatic difference so some of that factors contributing is that high price that's being paid for 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 congregation of anglers and we have those things the Alder Bridge there isn't one, the North Hill Bridge is right 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 playing about people throwing stuff on but I think it's great to say that this is more on the social end right so this is something we wanted to bring to the board to consider thinking that from the social aspect I'm not going to top my head but how the crappy number has been has it been declining over the years? the hardest season is going up it has gone up in terms of numbers we aren't seeing biological indications of decline in any of these species that are currently so we're getting 220 pounds from maple syrup so I should get rid of my 13,000 pounds and 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 are seeing crappy being moved out of the waters we're seeing crappy stock in the waters and think that the high price per pound may be one of the factors so that would have a wildlife building impact on those in the waters that are now having an additional species put into them but again we can't be having to fight anybody that can in this way it's 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 fire and brought a bucket of crappy you would have to say I caught it in Vermont waters for that fire to fight and New York does not allow the sale of crappy New Hampshire does not allow the sale of any of their fish so we have we are a little different in that sense between these two water bodies particularly on Champlain it's 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 actually going to want to get the money off something else so what do you think would happen if we were next well part of it is again with crappy and it's working out there I don't know if you really touch on it is it crappy congregate they group together in a way that most other fish species 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 to get the fights the ban on stuff like perch and everything else too but I could get it but I'm just kind of throwing that out there and it's like we're going to find ourselves now there is certainly there's conflicts around commercial fishing statewide it's a values issue people say you shouldn't be doing that you're working with the 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 this is exactly why we're if this is a biological imperative that we saw was having this devastating impact on the crappy populations of the different fish then saying you're now in charge of commercial fishing here's the suite of different things you can say and I think the one component is based upon the another time I'll show you the pound sold it's a small percentage crappy in the total pound sold each year 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 so if you took crappy out of the fiction and made it a sport fish would you still recommend you know for someone to have to buy a commercial license do you think that would solve most of the social issue um 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 on what'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 find to white information fairly but might we require maybe a point of sale, transaction for recording information well we'll have this 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 the crappy issue we're just going to have a license to do it that's why there's a couple different aspects to this, the license is something that by statute is going to take effect as soon as the board takes up roaming 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 belt through the legislature what kind of reporting we require the 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 there 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 of course suggesting that the board consider eliminating sale of property black and white property the board now has authority to do this stuff and crappy as the species that stands out to the department is being the biggest social issue the biggest enforcement issue none of this is really highlightable this is stuff that the board can wrestle with is what you'd like to put out for the public to consider and comment on in the public hearing I said well since you're talking about bad behavior I don't know where this fits in but I kind of want to make a suggestion over all I don't know how we can deal with the issue of people leaving small fish and cartons behind on the ice and at access areas during ice fishing season this is really bad I just don't know if we have littering or whatever but I don't know if people need to be reminded like in a digest or something and like big crunch that hey that's littering it's illegal so we are going to talk about that actually under the spear gun proposal whenever we move to that and we were talking about again now we've got a a means of taking it's pretty much a lethal take of fish and that people shouldn't litter those fish you shouldn't throw them in the water I'm sure you see it all the time it's appalling and it's a huge problem especially on where you don't find and I just think it really needs to be addressed so that's something right now we have a fairly narrow proposal related to spear gun use well from the spear gun on arrow and spear guns but it does open the door for the board to say we think that this is basically littering prohibition to fight all fish but we can talk about that I don't understand that the fish that are left in Newbury among the Connecticut river in the wintertime are bait for bald eagles people love 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 they are ready for spear fish is that true Mark I told you eight o'clock I don't know it's like nine let's try it so I think most of you were probably here last June Bruce Phelps came to the board of the petition he brought his spear gun and his bow with him so everybody could kind of see and get an idea of how those methods work and his proposal was to allow the use of spear guns wherever a bow an arrow with a line attached could be used to harvest fish so that was most 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 Chad playing season this is the season in the spring where you're allowed to harvest this list of species so you got pickle northern pike, bowfish bowfin, mullet, shad, suckers bullhead and any other cold fish so this isn't a really important thing here this is 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 that any species is worth rolling it in the trash every species, especially native species have their role 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 worth proposing to kind of address this while also allowing the use of spear guns outside of this Lake Champlain season so you can use this credit if you want to cover it so one of the things we're looking to do is first there's also this term spearing in here so 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 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 to use above the water surface this is more going along the lines of a traditional method that people would do in the past where they take up a long 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 automatic 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 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 right so that was another designation used only below the water surface which as Luke said when he was here you wouldn't really want to use 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 a 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 aile 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 species could be designated by the commissioner as one of these goldfish so if down the line we get 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 you know get across the point that native species do have a 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 the speargun and we propose to allow speargun harvest for a limited number of species and for another another number of species putting a daily bag of it 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 bofin, longnose gar, red horse sucker bofin, longnose gar, slow growing creditors and this would be across all methods so we're actually proposing that you know 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 it is a value for these native species by putting a limit on these species to be the red horse sucker which is currently has no limit 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 I mean and that's going to be something that you guys will be able to discuss right now we decided on five fish 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 you know not letting them flow not leaving them on the shoreline so some sort of language just to address that kind of like you were talking about leaving 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 we don't address that in our digest or anyone 22 right now so just pretty much clear that up because it wasn't so that's the gist of it you'll get a lot more detail in January bull head that's a pretty big seller in spring so bull head in spring any questions by the definition of speargun if somebody is caught firing one from above the water he'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 either it's out of away from its 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 to use crossbows for called and you attach a line to a hand held as well hand held crossbows wouldn't that already be a bow anywhere where a bow is maybe it's not stated if a crossbow is considered a bow we've separated it from the game we'll make it clear okay bow and arrow you don't want 300 feet per 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 speargun anymore the member Kevin had a photograph of himself and the child so just to clarify shooting with a rifle into the water is by statute is that right I don't want to go there but I'm just curious and the term polefish is in statute so we can't change that but it's not defined anywhere in statute so the board can define what polefish means in regulation and very way any questions speargun thank you this should be a great theory and when we get to it I just think this would be a very dynamic hearing I mean the plan to Brad for taking what was kind of a messy set of regulations which I think Lewis felt pointed out to us that you know the statutes and the various board regulations and bringing something together that I think is fairly simple fairly common sense we talked with Lewis Bell he liked it 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 part of it also is if we're going to have a bad limit for some of these species now that people are taking their speargun not just throwing them overboard having to take those back and dispose of them somewhere which honestly makes sense for grabbing a bad limit I just want to throw in that there are a lot of people who believe both that it's not that bad so I just want people thinking that people don't eat those fish because people do one of the hatchery guys swears by Gar and Judd said he'd eat the gar and 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 ball fish but both in it become a real sport people are driving up from other states to like champagne if it's for both 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 under authority and there's some possibilities there don't say we never gave you anything so again the piece of news that was 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 front of proposal in January but that's certainly one of the commercial fishing proposals in the December meeting will we go on for some discussion? 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 PowerPoint again with the pounds of fish taken the various prices some of the sort of dynamic we'd be happy to do and perhaps we devote to getting feedback from you guys about what you'd like to see or not in that in terms of responsiveness in the proposal but you can always 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 they don't have this specific language most of them other than like the dog river fly river can you just include the one with the commercial fishing tables in it without the scoop? yeah I'll show you very quickly so it was a PowerPoint presentation we made to the board a year ago the board was going to the legislature and it looks over the span of years how different species reports since again they're all based on the commercial fish fire reports so it's the 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 a million dollars over the course of those years it's about a million dollars and then we've also got invoices for trucks going across to any board with 14 dollars worth of fish and they say those trucks are running you know by the end of the year we'll provide we'll send you this as well we're done 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 where we're going that kind of thing and so I wanted to ask the commissioner or you know Mark's not here obviously to decide what was the process where we're going around the trapping petition so our plan is to return to you in December with language for first vote based on and then we'll go into the first into the first vote process and take that to the public hearings and comment period and to second vote El Carver and third vote Justice on this first vote idea our star vote turned down the Bobcat with that we brought back correct we do not plan on bringing you a proposal on the Bobcat season expansion based on that guidance from the board I guess I'll bring this up now 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 but my big objective is 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 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 the commissioner tells me it costs $50 reserve it makes a lot of sense for what we do I'm sorry for the inconvenience and we'll either be the Pavilion or Montpelier High School one or the other for the December meeting plus we want to get one more chance to get Justin up from Robert County to Washington while he's talking I was going to do a nasty vote that the Robert County guys are going to lynch me on we'll see if the Jeep will make it one more trip I'm just going to comment on what you had before it would be to keel December 21st and have a shooting so it's the shortest day of the year it's four or five it's a couple of yards and it is a long way for you but for me I think it's $175,000 $180,000 I'll take every advantage I can when it comes to shooting the chair is going to case it I was going to bring laser sights we'll get you down there sometime that would be great it's better weather than all your daylight Bill, yes because the purpose of the straw vote from our perspective was to get guidance from the board on what you wanted to see in language for a first vote it's not binding that's true of course none of your votes are really binding you can change as we go through the processes that you've done before you can change after first vote, you can change after second vote 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 it was our purpose to get at that last meeting some guidance from the board on what they wanted to see us draft and come forward with okay I voted no on the first part of the petition because I wanted a three year survey that failed miserably so I'd like to make a motion that would bring back the bobcat petition as it's written to be able to move it forward so that we voted in December I think it deserves a public hearing we've been dragging it on for almost a year that's my motion is there a second I'll second it okay so Cheryl seconds it no actually it's Tracy oh shoot sorry maybe we'll so let's have 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'd like to make a comment I think that there are a lot of issues around the bobcat extension that need to be discussed we don't have answers on and that 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 and 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 all what we have for data, analyzed it to full extent and we will not have a lot more information for you than provided at the last meeting now I understand I was thinking of this information moving forward there's information that we recognize that has not been gathered that needs to be gathered and that I personally would like 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 so we will have for you at the request of ETA from our trappers association options for requiring survey responses to try to get answers to some of those going forward that answer your question Kim 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 and going forward what would the department say at a 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 and it would probably be very similar to what we've heard but I do not expect that we would support the extension just as we did on the federal last meeting just thanks for that part where we managed to be devoted to the mandatory reporting and give them some data and I don't think we have over enough of rulemaking specifically that was something there sure that would be part of what we wanted to do so we should give us the data sets going forward correct no data on any wild system is perfect they've all got problems we've all lived through the APR discussions we don't have to know that but it should be similar to the hearing we'll give us more to go forward really essentially whether those increased harvests of bots that are due to population trends or they due to effort 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'll get better better data for you on that going forward I have a curiosity can this proposal be brought up again in two or three years can we 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 wish Catherine was here my understanding and expectation is that 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 if you could bring it up in February if you could bring it up 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 I'm going to explain why I voted yes one thing I wanted to clarify was through one of the emails that Lisa said Jebal 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 in this state so this is why I voted yes and this is from all the department's own data so first of all the most conclusive data and I had to break this down because there's a lot of it I saw through the department's presentation was that even through the down 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 potential 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 what 1994 this is a review of all the data that 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 arms question 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 trapped in 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 or effort after my interpretation of the data the extension of the trapping season for two weeks was very minimal that's a conclusion that 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 this like I said I voted yes I wanted to bring it out so we can talk about it more and it could be brought to the public just miss I'm going to simplify mine a little bit more I actually grew up in the woods only been lost 3 quarters 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 plants spanked taking out by extra trapping animals that are not overpopulated the department said on both otters and bobcats they were not looking to take out anymore the legislature that's behind the trees that we people aren't seeing and I will not vote for any extra trapping unless we're trying to get a nuisance out of the way do it I'll give you that our national politics everybody is getting polarized there are people running for office that can just they're going to lose because they cannot see the forest through the trees that's where I say no way am I going to clobber this department if I'm doing 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 I mean we got a guy run for president right now doesn't stand for snowballs chance of health because he is on his principles and forget the forest just the trees that's all he's looking at yes thanks Pete I think people have to understand that the first vote is not authorizing the extension of bobcat trapping all it is is bringing that for a discussion a few years ago we had a first vote on an early muzzle of the season it was unanimous the second vote it got defeated 13-1 so all it is is to bring it up for 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 what it says thank you I think there was a lot of misunderstanding in the last month's meeting about our moving reverses of 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 I'm still really caught up on a little incidental issue there's really no ceasefire any incidentals for any season I think that really needs to be looked at from a more perspective somehow I don't know how that would be addressed if incidentals are happening I mean it's a very small number a 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 floating in culverts and that's when the majority of them happen so at the risk of being redundant I just briefly summarize 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 and you know 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 of trappers that are taking per total across the city so our main ability to regulate that harvest is by the length of the season and as always we take the most conservative incautious approach we can take you've rightfully pointed out Craig that we have never come to anywhere close to threatening this species in the state that 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 that you would it would be any more than we would because you agree with us on this we take the cautious and cautionary approach always and particularly when there's things that we don't know that we like to know about 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 to weigh or balance but that's not how we came to our recommendation we looked at it from the from the harvest numbers and the harvest data anything you want to ask about? I think I'd only say that if I recall and I could spend maybe two or three weeks if I looked at it 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 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 kind of a bot 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, New York Peter M. from North Royalton, Ohio Michelle from Brisbane, they all had 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 so it was fake E&M Y. from Linwood, Washington it goes on and on and frankly that made me feel quite spiteful towards going towards my email to open it up and say okay, you know, 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 and Wildlife 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 so that we really can't communicate as well and that's a problem it's not necessarily a problem that 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 responsive, 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 the possibility of folks to communicate with us but I think we need to know who our audience is and we darn well have better be able to say ah, ok Bloomfield, 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 in the Strava told the Juneans to make the chapter 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 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 any analysis occasionally instead of statewide so I think it will make a huge difference we'll have a much better handle on what's effort related harvest and what's population related would that take two or three years? I expect two or three years I think that's a reasonable guess I think also the fact that this DTA 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 on the part of DTA that this is kind of critical information I think that will help to get a response that we're looking for I want to clarify I voted yes on straw vote I'll continue the discussion but the fact that there was a close vote and was voted down rather 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 this for 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 we're still not sure exactly how we're going to go on the hunters side 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 or actually 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 input because I do but it has a time and place for it you know not hundreds and hundreds of emails and phone calls before it starts because again 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 we had 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 parts because again it just changed the meeting and I'm just saddened by that and again I want the public input but again when it's due 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 did you know what we decided it's not publicly supported or so we'll end it right then and there again that's just my 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 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 approaching on those ones where you had questions about the 30 days and just had a 15 day season and gather that data still so you're asking if the if the harvest could be managed by WMU so you would close some WMUs and open other WMUs or water shed unit or however you do it yeah I mean it's something that I would think you should ask for us and something that the person could talk about there's a million acres where we could do this without encroaching on or hurting the population and one million acres where it's a problem that would seem to be like 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 over crossing we've had issues with New York and Vermont I assume there might be some concerns about that too Bill, yes because 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 take of females and a disc of working to take of males who might have come across to the New Hampshire that was one of the regions was the Connecticut River Valley and the other was I think the Champlain Valley or these two conics which was a separate issue I think the Champlain Valley situates more hundreds than traveling it depends a lot on the year of course because it depends a lot on the year and also the way out which one we have the comments here's your ready for a vote so 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 yes full month full month full month full month until the end of the month of December extended from the 60 to the 31 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 bring it forward you're right in my mind I see what you mean in my mind you're doing another straw vote on what you're directing the department to return to you with for our first vote in December right so 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 how long it's anymore because I know you're going to get home to listen to the drone no thank you don't think we're voting to approve the Bobcat extension we're voting to bring it forward for the special over the season decision thank you bill yeah does everybody know what a yes vote means then we're all set well yes vote 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 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 it's not bad we have a 6-6 in one extension yeah it's a straw vote anyway yep sorry it's the end you know it's like it's not fair I'm not sure can we go I feel like we'll do by age next time age just go every other one alright well thank you for that we have some business to do with the bear truth collection rule and that's a big one huh forgot about that thank you this is your third vote on mandatory bear truth collection it's in the same form as you approved in the second vote before you for the final vote then derail car everybody's happy everybody's happy I'll talk about 7 minutes any questions on this just thanks for what I've been told we're going to be discussing this bear rule in the future yeah so this is just for the amendment yeah this is just for the bear truth 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 housing we have agreed on a lot of issues I think 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 what the number is so we're still talking to 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 I'm sure they will for you the points that we agree on and if there's any that we support and they don't and vice versa and that will I think result in a much better bear rule than we have currently on the most anything you want to add to that you've been more deeply involved in that than I am so just has been a really interesting process to watch on full the houndsmen and women we can make sure that they're getting the correct side of it the wardens are very closely involved it's something that I'm really, really happy about because they're much closer to the actual violence 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 and in addition to think about what you said to me turn out to go on too far but I did have a couple great conversations about the limited dogs that we're going to allow on a hunt this week and 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 well they've all been living under the six dogs on the ground since it's inception and they've all agreed that most people are 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 dog is going to get to bring them that day but they're all agreeing that they can't tree a bear with six dogs and they shouldn't be in the woods anyway so these problems are solving themselves and more that they see that the problems are being solved by just a little number of dogs so just a touch on that but other than that it's been a really interesting process markets all the credit and a couple of the game boards 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 commissioner except for a couple of sidebar calls from the concerned hounds people so when should we expect that she's I think yeah I think January, February I'm not sure what mark has but we expect to be wrapping up our process with them within that well hunting season always 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 agreeing on it I think we can agree on it come to you pretty shortly Mary just for the minutes I was also pointing out that Bush Spiro 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 and Connecticut and other places it's nice that that can come out in the public arena that Bush could say that that occurred actually right here so that's good information is there a motion to open this up I'm sorry yes I have a simple question have you figured out what the plan would be on the American's then there was a range of 99 to 160 bucks last time at least so where to put it you know I think that actually is a plan 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 helps and I'm going to recommend the maximum load of fine that we have 99 dollars I don't know so 8.0 is biological collect 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 8.2 unless otherwise specified by statute the failure to collect and submit a bear tooth shall not result in license suspension points and shall be considered a minor violation subject to a civil fine their 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 dollars but we have too many bears out there I mean we walk too many there's a social problem bears get too plentiful per acre and this they become very anti-social important humanities 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 it if I could just respond to that I don't disagree with you about the fine 99 is that real truly nominal 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 services and rights and other funds of its kind it's pretty darn hard to set a fine that's less than that but I think you take your point folks ready for the question so yes vote will support 8.0812 no vote will we'll start with the bill please we're going around yes yes yes yes yes yes I'll make it quick turkey shotgun season start Saturday of course we gave you the little brief update on our habitat stamp earlier nine moose have been taken in archery archery of the season looks like rifle success is a little higher than last year but we're still of course we 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 a meeting so nobody tell him anything as soon as you're going to text him oh yeah 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 you just put your hand up and hold it up for a minute we can note down and make sure we get those of you who definitely want them your separate account is what this is about okay 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 it was the best move of the year oh you got one already alright so if you don't see it in the next couple of weeks let us get in touch with you about it if you do want one somebody want to start a round table thank you talking about the Miscordia River is there any new rental on the dam in Swanton do you need to take that down yeah but nothing nothing positive so we would like to as you know to remove that dam and open that additional 7 miles is fine 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's a potential for hydroelectric power there and so forth I actually think that may move our conversation our process work but anything you want to add letter we take the dam as uneconomical uneconomical just based on power generation what the fellow who has taken over the birth license rights is looking at is basically green energy credits whether they can make enough kind of renewable energy credits tax credits and they get a viable project he's a pretty smart guy he's developed hydro projects elsewhere so we expect that he'll be able to try to be on this fairly quickly and either move forward or not the fact that he's taken it over on behalf of the village is actually a good thing for getting answers more quickly on whether we're going to try and move out of that for hydro just thanks can you read it in reader that allows the fish that spawn there you don't get a lot of tax credits for that that's been our department strong position for the years that we moved to dam we talked about it live and we talked about the dust dam the Trout Unlimited played a big part after the London Dam that reached it was that group with the department and it set precedent it was one of the first times that feds denied an owner of a dam line to be built after a catastrophe of what they were saying was a flood so it was those groups working together and just kept that from getting people and Gary Ward so yeah and for those who know Dave Smith and Francis Smith were very involved in that we're actually going to dedicate Max's area to Francis Smith and he gives our answer nice do you think we'll keep going, yeah two things Turkey winning the unicycle in the fall I've had some questions on when the unicycle went old enough by one farmer that said he raised a couple hundred of them 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 if they liked 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 in looking at those expansions because we're not seeing that per month, we don't want it so I did that's sort of what's informed our cautious approach on that or any to give us an update for the next meeting on the sea specifically this gentleman's problem is the UND is on one side of the road and his farm is on the other side of the road and there's a lot from the UNC and I couldn't be sure wait till they go back go like a turkey crosser we're going to talk about UNC alright I'm especially want to like dealing 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 of it 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 and have a defensible climate so about all I can say being in New York in a case of any other ideas, keep going we'll pass in that note I think we're just going to do that you can have a look into A2 I've already had several conversations about this in the last 10 years part of this has dropped like in A really 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 could really be down to one territory so you want more bird shots you want less bird shots we'll just move the time hey okay David we want a big report we want a big report you don't just miss a meaning and not tell us about it I've got meat in the freezer my friends got more we're loosing we're loosing awesome any reports David I'm sorry you mean the lead job okay okay coming from me this is going to sound good I'm very satisfied with our two year range up in the Northeast Kingdom on the solid rock get that note get that note get that note get that note get that note get that note get that note okay I've been in September with awesome they're two months later all of them had a great time to go fishing got meat in the freezer life's good still with us good campus great time I did the tree and plant ID and did a basket making class for people to get super favorite I got my blaze orange on just want to remind everybody to have a good safe fall not that I want you guys regulating what I wear but I'm glad we'll grab your proposal for you I'm going to go you punning on Sunday I can't wait in New Hampshire so me and my boy will wear we'll get him bringing a little wear orange but it's just because it's you thinking what the heck have fun with this fall what do you think thank you cheers cheers cheers oh thank you cheers cheers cheers