"There’s no need to beat our head against a stone wall," said DNR Director Frank Jezioro.
The top man with West Virginia’s fish and game agency expressed frustration at the failure for a second year to get a senior license bill approved in the legislature. The measure, for a second year, received near unanimous support in the Senate, but became bottled up in the House Natural Resources Committee and was never allowed out for debate.
Jezioro has travelled the state for the past two years explaining the idea. The senior license would have been a lifetime license for those 65 and older at a cost of 15-dollars. The parameters met the approval of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to allow West Virginia’s licensed senior citizens to be counted as license-holders for ten-years in the calculation of Pittman-Robertson excise money. The money is collected everytime someone buys guns or ammunition and is distributed back to the states each year out of the pool thruogh the federal government.
"The bad part is to lose the windfall this year that the Pittman-Robertson Act is going to create because of all of the arms and ammunition that have been sold," said Jezioro. "It’s a record year for as long as they’ve been keeping track of this excise money and it’s not going to come back to benefit our citizens. It makes no sense."
Jezioro blames the failure on two members of the House of Delegates, Delegate Sam Argento of Nicholas County who chairs the House Agriculture Committee and Delegate Joe Talbott of Webster County, Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. The Director says he spoke with every sportsman’s organization in West Virginia and a large number of House and Senate members over the last two years. Jezioro says he explained the way the Pittman Robertson Act worked and how the money is already in the pipeline, but is being directed away from West Virginia because senior citizens don’t have any type of license.
"The only two people they ever heard that were against it were Argento and Talbott,” said Jezioro. "I talked to several members of the House of Delegates when this thing first came up and not one of them told me they were against it. That was the baffling thing of why it never gained any traction and never went anywhere."
Other states either already have a senior license structure in place or have rapidly worked to get one to collect on this year’s anticipated flood of cash. West Virginia sportsmen will miss out on that money–estimated in ten-years to be several million dollars. It’s money specifically earmarked for the purchase of public hunting land and management of wildlife resources at the state level.
"I’ve spent two years trying to get this thing sold. There’s nothing else I can add," said Jezioro. "We’ve got other issues we need to work on. For two years Talbott said he’s against it, so if he’s the chairman and he doesn’t let it out of his committee it doesn’t make any difference how many other members or the Speaker or whatever, if he doesn’t let it out, it’s not going anywhere."