FRANKFORT, Ky. — The reciprocal agreement on fishing and hunting license between the state of West Virginia and the state of Kentucky for the Tug Fork and Big Sandy Rivers will be reinstated no later than the end of this year.
That’s the word from Dave Dreves, Fisheries Division Director for the Kentucky Division of Fish and Wildlife.
“All of the necessary documents were filed with our Legislative Resources Committee in June and it’s now going through the normal process for a regulation,” said Dreves speaking in an interview for West Virginia Outdoors.
The agreement, when in place, allows anyone with a fishing or hunting license from the other state to fish and hunt in the Tug Fork River or the Big Sandy River from either shore, without buying a license from both states. It’s a normal arrangement which states often enter who share a waterway as a common border. However, it has expired and since the wheels of government are often slow moving it has taken a while to put it back into place.
The issue isn’t West Virginia. Such arrangements for the Mountain State require only the signature of the Division of Natural Resources Director and they are done. But Kentucky has a more involved process. Along with the Legislative Resources Committee, such a proposal must first go through a public comment period and after clearing the L-R-C it can be subject to a second review by the Kentucky Legislature’s Natural Resources Committee.
“It’s exceedingly rare to have anything rejected. Sometimes there might be an adjustment and that’s why the Legislature is part of the process,” Dreves explained. “In any of our administrative regulations, the Legislature has ultimate authority, but especially this because it doesn’t do anything but benefit everybody. It would be unheard of for this to have a hiccup. I think it’s pretty safe that it will sail through the Legislative review process.”
Kentucky is actually having to put all of the states reciprocal agreements through the process. They have fishing agreements with Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia. They also have three states which have a reciprocal agreement for hunting license, including West Virginia. Those are in place generally for hunting waterfowl.
But the real story here is how they expired in the first place. Kentucky has a sunset provision for all administrative regulations.
“We had a written agreement with each state and that didn’t expire, but the legislation which made those valid did expire. Kentucky passed a sunset law for administrative regulations. If you’re notified of the regs being sunsetted you have to take some action or it does sunset,” he explained.
The problem was, nobody notified Kentucky Fish and Wildlife of the pending expiration date. Well, at least not in a loud enough fashion. The sunset of those agreements was noticed late last year. It turned out, they had sunsetted in 2022 and nobody realized it.
“Unfortunately, people make mistakes and somebody didn’t realize that this wasn’t addressed and it sunsetted. We went through a transition of people working on regs during this period and we didn’t take the action to keep it in place. It had been sunsetted for a couple of years and we did not know it,” said Dreves.
He admitted it was embarrassing, especially when he was the one who got the privilege of calling each state’s fisheries director to explain what happened.
The alert for the regulation was buried at the bottom of a website and unless you were expressly looking for it, it’s unlikely you would have noticed. The alert has since changed. Software upgrades now have alerts in bold lettering which is unmistakable at the top of the page when the expiration of a regulation nears. It’s doubtful it will happen again.
The matter created a prickly situation for the Kentucky Fish and Game law enforcement officers.
“Our law enforcement Colonel was in touch with all adjoining states. He can’t tell officers we’re not enforcing laws as they’re written, but what they did is use discretion to ‘inform and educate’. That’s the kind of approach they took,” he explained.
The discretion was important however, since every adjoining state’s printed regulations for 2025 were already out when the situation came to light. All of them noted a reciprocal agreement in the waters each state shared with Kentucky.
According to Dreves the process is rolling forward and the maximum time it would take for the process to be complete would be in December. However, he doubted it would take that long and more than likely will be back in place as it was previously sooner than the end of the year.