Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission
Regulations Committee Meeting
November 6, 2002
Commission Hearing RoomTexas Parks & Wildlife Department Headquarters Complex
4200 Smith School Road
Austin, TX 78744
7 BE IT REMEMBERED, that heretofore on the 6th day of
8 November, 2002, there came on to be heard matters under the
9 regulatory authority of the Parks and Wildlife Commission
10 of Texas, in the Commission Executive Board Room of the
11 Texas Parks and Wildlife Headquarters Complex, beginning at
12 9:00 a.m. to wit:
13 APPEARANCES:
14 THE PARKS AND WILDLIFE COMMISSION:
15 REGULATIONS COMMITTEE:
16 Katharine Armstrong, Austin, Texas, Chair
17 Joseph B.C. Fitzsimons, San Antonio, Texas
18 Ernest Angelo, Jr., Midland, Texas
19 John Avila, Jr., Fort Worth, Texas
20 Alvin L. Henry, Houston, Texas
21 Philip Montgomery, Dallas, Texas
22 Donato D. Ramos, Laredo, Texas
23 Kelly W. Rising, M.D., Beaumont, Texas
24 Mark W. Watson, Jr., San Antonio, Texas
25 THE TEXAS PARKS AND WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT:
26 Robert L. Cook, Executive Director, and other personnel of
27 the Parks and Wildlife Department
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1 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Good morning. Greetings.
2 The meeting is called to order.
3 Before proceeding with any business, I believe
4 Mr. Cook has a statement to make.
5 MR. COOK: Chairman, a public notice of this
6 meeting containing all items on the proposed agenda has
7 been filed in the Office of the Secretary of State as
8 required by Chapter 551 of the Government Code, referred
9 to as the Open Meeting Law. I would like for this action
10 to be noted in the official record of this meeting.
11 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Thank you, Mr. Cook.
12 Before beginning with our committee meetings,
13 I'd like to introduce Representative Charlie Geren, who's
14 here from Fort Worth. Representative Geren has been very
15 helpful in helping us work through a land situation in
16 Tarrant County, Eagle Mountain Lake. And we're glad to
17 have him here today and the opportunity to give him to
18 make some statements to us or a report to us --
19 And the opportunity we'll have for the
20 Commission to ask you some questions if we have any.
21 Welcome.
22 REPRESENTATIVE GEREN: Thank you, Madam Chair
23 and Commissioners and Bob. I appreciate your time this
24 morning.
25 As the letter that we sent you -- we've put
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1 together a group consisting of the Tarrant Regional Water
2 District. Tarrant County and the city of Saginaw and, I
3 think, the city of Lake Worth has now come in -- as well
4 as some private foundations -- to purchase the Eagle
5 Mountain Park from Parks and Wildlife. We have not,
6 partially because of the elections, been able to get
7 everybody to sit down and work out all the details, but I
8 hope by your January meeting to have something concrete.
9 But we are -- we fully intend to purchase the
10 park from Parks and Wildlife if you all agree to sell it
11 to us. And we're happy to work with you any way we can
12 on this, and, as I said, we -- would agree to the park --
13 to the land being deed restricted to park use only from
14 now on. So if any of you have any questions, I'll be
15 happy to answer them. If not, I'll get out of your hair.
16 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Do we have any questions
17 of Representative Geren?
18 MR. COOK: Just thank you. I'd like to express
19 our appreciation for your assistance and the folks up
20 there that are trying to keep this in park land and make
21 it available to the folks up there. And we appreciate
22 your help, sir.
23 REPRESENTATIVE GEREN: Well, thank you.
24 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Representative Geren, I
25 think the work you've done and the leadership you've
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1 shown us in this matter has maybe and hopefully produced
2 a win/win situation for the residents of Tarrant County
3 and the entire state of Texas, as well. Thank you.
4 REPRESENTATIVE GEREN: Thank you, Madam Chair.
5 Commissioners, thank you.
6 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: We'll begin today with the
7 Regulations Committee.
8 Joseph Fitzsimons?
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you, Madam
10 Chair.
11 Our first item on our agenda is approval of the
12 committee meeting minutes from the previous meeting.
13 A motion?
14 COMMISSIONER WATSON: So move.
15 COMMISSIONER AVILA: Second.
16 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: All in favor, say
17 aye.
18 (A chorus of ayes.)
19 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: All opposed, same
20 sign.
21 (No response.)
22 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Motion carries.
23 And our first item is Item 1, Chairman's
24 Charges.
25 Bob?
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1 MR. COOK: Mr. Chairman, the charges to the
2 staff and the Agency applicable to the regulations
3 committee primarily revolve around the implementation
4 provisions of the sunset bill, Senate Bill 305. The
5 Department's sunset implementation report was submitted
6 to the Sunset Commission on November 1. We expect an on-
7 site audit from Sunset staff in December. The Agency has
8 initiated and/or will have implemented every
9 recommendation of the sunset report.
10 The shrimp report being presented to you today
11 by Hal Osburn addresses several other requirements of
12 Senate Bill 305, also, to implement authority and
13 direction given by the 77th Legislature. The crab trap
14 season agenda item being presented by Robin Reichers is
15 the implementation of Senate Bill 1410; this is the
16 second year of this action, and I think that you will see
17 that it is beginning to pay dividends.
18 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you, Bob.
19 And moving right along with the Senate Bill 305
20 matter and the shrimp report, Hal Osburn has a briefing
21 for us.
22 MR. OSBURN: Mr. Chairman and Commissioners,
23 I'm Hal Osburn, Coastal Fisheries Division Director. I'd
24 like to brief you today on the recently completed study
25 of the Texas shrimp fishery; the study request was part
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1 of the sunset legislation in 2001. Eight teams composed
2 of staff scientists were created to address the numerous
3 issues associated with this diverse and complex fishery.
4 The study was essentially an update of the
5 shrimp fishery management plan that the Commission
6 adopted in 1989, as well as the data analyses that were
7 used in the 2000 rulemaking process. Additionally
8 included were new analyses on marine bio-diversity and
9 the economic health of the fishery. Researchers at Texas
10 A&M university were also contracted to conduct a human
11 dimensions survey of every shrimper and every shrimp
12 dealer in the state.
13 To gather even more input from the industry,
14 five scoping meetings were held on the coast, the shrimp
15 advisory Committee was convened twice to discuss what
16 should be in the study, and draft sections of the report
17 were sent to 18 non-Department scientists for peer
18 review. In addition, staff from the comptroller of
19 public accounts were involved in the analyses and review.
20 The study was completed by the deadline of
21 September of this year, and you should have received a
22 copy of the executive summary; there's also an appendix
23 for each of the scientific team's section.
24 Highlighting some of the results, we found that
25 conservation of wetlands critical to shrimp and shrimp
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1 life history is actually improving; there remain
2 concerns, however, about the quality and quantity of
3 fresh water reaching our bays and estuaries. There also
4 are a host of man-made threats to the environment that
5 need to be monitored, including dredging and bottom-
6 trawling itself.
7 Analyses of bio-diversity indices from our
8 sampling data confirm that we have a complex and dynamic
9 food web in our coastal environment. Each coastal area
10 displayed its own unique pattern of diversity, and we
11 actually encountered over 600 species of fin fish and
12 macro-invertebrates coast wide.
13 And we found that shrimp were generally
14 associated with those areas that had the highest bio-
15 diversity. And that, of course, explains why bi-catching
16 shrimp trawls has been such a concern for these number of
17 years.
18 We believe that the use of the bi-catch
19 reduction devices mandated by the Commission in 2000 is
20 already having a positive effect. We plan to continue
21 working with industry to find ways to increase the BIRD
22 effectiveness, new designs and new ways to attach it to
23 the trawl.
24 We're also seeing positive results of the new
25 shrimping rules for sea turtles; this year, there was a
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1 40 percent decline in strandings, and that was during the
2 spring nesting season most critical to their life
3 history. In addition, the previous record number of
4 turtle nests found in Texas in any year was eclipsed by
5 nearly 100 percent this year, which is very exciting
6 news.
7 Shrimp stocks themselves are also showing
8 recent increases in abundance on average. This is, of
9 course, good news for the fishery, although there remain
10 concerns about excessive growth over-fishing as the mean
11 length of the shrimp that we're detecting in our samples
12 is -- continues to decline.
13 Partly as a result of our bay license buy-
14 backs, we see bay landings declining while more Gulf boat
15 building along the Gulf and folks coming this way with
16 their vessels has actually sent our Gulf landings higher.
17 Shrimp aquaculture in Texas continues to lead the nation.
18 We've got over 7 million pounds harvested annually. But
19 shrimp aquaculture around the world is also booming,
20 which has resulted in a tremendous influx of cheaper
21 imports.
22 In 2000, for example, foreign shrimp imports to
23 the United States were nine times higher than the total
24 Texas harvest of shrimp. This increasing foreign
25 competition has seriously reduced the profitability of
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1 all U.S. shrimpers even as consumers enjoy lower-priced
2 shrimp. This translates into fewer shrimp industry-
3 related jobs in Texas, which stand now at about 5,800.
4 The Texas A&M mail survey found that half of
5 all shrimpers earn less than $40,000 a year while the
6 number of -- for the dealers is 60,000. Shrimpers are
7 also more likely than dealers to not have health
8 insurance or insurance on their boat or businesses.
9 Industry members in the survey noted numerous
10 factors that negatively impacted their livelihoods, and
11 the vast majority of shrimpers indicated they would not
12 encourage young people to enter the business. Overall,
13 the study concluded that shrimp stocks off Texas are
14 fully exploited and, based on that, it is advisable to
15 maintain the current management strategy, including
16 continuation of the bay and bait license buy-back and the
17 development of a similar program for the Gulf fleet.
18 The economic viability of our Texas shrimp
19 industry is threatened by global market variations of
20 supply, demand and pricing. In response, staff has
21 already begun coordination with industry members and the
22 marketing division of the Texas Department of Agriculture
23 to find ways to improve the competitiveness and
24 profitability of our Texas shrimpers.
25 That concludes my briefing. I'd be happy to
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1 answer any questions.
2 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Does anybody have any
3 questions for Hal? I have one.
4 Hal, could you briefly review the status of the
5 buy-back -- license buy-back?
6 MR. OSBURN: Yes. We're just now concluding, I
7 believe, our 11th round. We will have -- we're
8 estimating that at the end of this round, we will have
9 bought back about 900 licenses and that will have been an
10 expenditure of -- I think it was about $4-1/2 million.
11 We continue to get a good number of folks offering their
12 licenses; I think the average value is about $7,000 now.
13 But this round being completed will probably
14 have allowed us to buy back about 27 or 28 percent of all
15 the licenses that were originally put into the fishery.
16 And from our original -- when you all passed the fee
17 increase in 2000 for the surcharge on the saltwater
18 stamp, we had had a target of trying to buy back 50
19 percent of the licenses and we'd be over half-way there.
20 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Commission Fitzsimons, I
21 have a question.
22 Mr. Osburn, in terms of percentages of licenses
23 bought back, at what point can you start reporting to us
24 on the actual effects that the buy-back program is having
25 on the resource?
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1 MR. OSBURN: Well, we are convinced that the
2 buy-back program has already stabilized the -- what was
3 an increasing amount of effort in the bay fishery. We've
4 stabilized that.
5 We think that our monitoring of the catch rates
6 of the shrimpers themselves -- which we get a measure of
7 how many pounds they catch per day -- that value should
8 go up when the numbers of shrimpers gets back down to a
9 sustainable level, and, as well, as -- the sampling that
10 we do independently should indicate that the resource is
11 not being exploited to the same rate as it was before.
12 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Are you able at this point
13 to distinguish between the effects of license buy-back
14 and the general economic climate?
15 MR. OSBURN: That's tough. The economics has,
16 we know, had a lot of folks tying their boats up at the
17 docks during times that they would have gone shrimping.
18 So we're very cautious about claiming too much credit for
19 the buy-back at this point until we see that the fishery
20 kind of regains its economic footing if it can. It --
21 this is really tough times for them because the shrimp
22 imports don't show any signs of letting up.
23 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Assuming that you have a
24 more stable economic climate for the shrimping industry,
25 do we have a way to measure the effects of the two to
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1 distinguish between the two effects or two actions?
2 MR. OSBURN: Yes, I think so. I think that
3 definitely their catch rate, what they're actually
4 catching, because they have -- if they -- when they have
5 fewer competition on the water -- on Texas waters, their
6 catch rate will go up. And whether they are making money
7 at the dock when they sell that is a function of the
8 imports, but the fact that they're catching more per
9 trawl hour is a direct correlation to the regulations
10 that you all passed and the -- reduced by numbers of
11 shrimpers.
12 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Okay. Thank you.
13 MR. COOK: Hal, in general, I think of interest
14 on that topic right there -- talk to the Commission very
15 briefly about the basic condition of the shrimpery, the
16 shrimp population, comparatively speaking to where we've
17 been in recent years.
18 MR. OSBURN: Well, we're actually and, of
19 course, we -- because of the variability in shrimp stocks
20 and any of these natural species, we like to have a
21 number of years to have a trend to see that it's not a
22 one- or two-year phenomenon. But we have some of the
23 highest populations that we've ever detected of white
24 shrimp, which was one of the species that had been
25 targeted very seriously particularly by that Gulf fleet
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1 of very large boats.
2 We think that the rules did what they were
3 intended, which was to take pressure off the spawning
4 stock on the shore and beaches, and that has translated
5 into higher populations in the base. So the white shrimp
6 in particular, we're seeing a good rebound, and the brown
7 shrimp also has had good recruitment. So we think that
8 the rules are working.
9 MR. COOK: That was the only question I was
10 going to ask.
11 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any other questions
12 for Hal on the shrimp study?
13 (No response.)
14 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you, Hal.
15 That's a briefing item that doesn't require any
16 action.
17 Thank you.
18 Next we have another briefing.
19 Gary's not here, is he? Is --
20 MR. COOK: Ron George is here.
21 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Ron?
22 MR. GEORGE: Mr. Chairman, Commissioners, I'm
23 Ron George, Deputy Director of the Wildlife Division.
24 Dr. Gary Graham is representing this Agency at the
25 Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species
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1 in Chile, and he asked me to give the presentation.
2 The purpose of this briefing is to discuss
3 issues related to the Statewide Hunting and Fishing
4 Proclamation. And after discussion here today, some of
5 these issues will be brought back to the Commission as
6 proposals at the January meeting. If approved at that
7 time, they will be published in the Texas Register for
8 public comment with final Commission consideration at the
9 April meeting.
10 The Wildlife Division's White-tail Deer
11 Committee has brought forward a total of five issues they
12 would like to be considered. The first of these deals
13 with the regulations of wildlife management plans, and
14 this would change the wording from, "Population census,"
15 to, "Population data." This would allow the use of
16 browse surveys and other indirect indicators of the
17 population status with or in place of census data, actual
18 count data.
19 Under the current regulations, antlerless and
20 spike buck control permits, also known as ADCPs, may be
21 issued only by a Conservation Scientist Six or above.
22 The change that's proposed would allow any employee
23 authorized to approve wildlife management plans to issue
24 these permits.
25 The next issue also deals with ADCP permits.
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1 Until last year, ADCP application sheets had a December
2 10 deadline. But this was not in the regulation, so that
3 statement was removed from the application sheets. This
4 proposal would establish an official December 10 deadline
5 and would allow staff to more efficiently handle those
6 permit requests.
7 The deer range in Harris County is mostly in
8 the northern part of the county, which is Piney Woods
9 habitat. The proposed change which is shown here on the
10 slide would give Harris County the same deer regulations
11 as other adjacent Piney Woods counties.
12 The final issue related to white-tail deer is
13 to add a muzzle loading season in San Jacinto, Trinity,
14 Walker and Harris Counties. Staff recommends including
15 Harris County only if the previous proposal related to
16 Harris County is approved. There are currently 11 other
17 southeast Texas counties with a muzzle loading season.
18 The next issue relates to mule deer. At the
19 August Commission meeting, the Commission received a
20 request from the public to provide an MLD permit program
21 for mule deer in the Trans-Pecos. This proposal is
22 similar to staff proposals in previous years that were
23 rejected at that time by Trans-Pecos landowners.
24 The next issue relates to desert big-horn
25 sheep. It's a proposal from the Wildlife Division Sheep
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1 Team and the Texas Big-horn Advisory Committee to mark
2 big-horn skulls with a unique identifying plug; this
3 would make Texas consistent with other western states and
4 help prevent illegal possession and transport of skulls.
5 Both of these issues, mule deer and the big-horn sheep
6 issues, will be taken to the next meeting of the Trans-
7 Pecos Advisory Committee, which, I believe, is November
8 21, for their consideration.
9 In regard to Rio Grande Turkey, the proposal is
10 to change the general season closing date from the last
11 Sunday in February to the third Sunday in January in
12 Brooks, Kennedy, Kleburg and Willacy Counties. This
13 would make these four counties like the other south Texas
14 counties in regard to closing date. And this
15 recommendation is based on long-term drought in that area
16 and the depressed turkey numbers.
17 Current regulations allow pheasant hunting in
18 seven coastal counties in Texas. The proposal is to
19 close the pheasant season in four of those counties:
20 Wharton, Fort Bend, Brazoria, Matagorda. And that would
21 limit pheasant hunting along the coast only to those
22 counties that have a huntable pheasant population, and
23 those would be Chambers, Jefferson and Liberty Counties.
24 Pheasant season is also allowed in 37 counties
25 in the Texas Panhandle. The Agency has received a
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1 petition for rulemaking that would lengthen the season
2 for pheasants from 16 days, which it currently is, to 30
3 days and reduce the daily bag limit from three cocks to
4 two cocks. The staff anticipates that this would have no
5 biological effect on the pheasant population, but it
6 would result in some additional days of hunting, which
7 might be valuable for our youth around the Christmas
8 time.
9 Hunting for Lesser Prairie Chickens is
10 currently allowed in eight Panhandle counties. There has
11 been a long-term decline in Lesser Prairie Chicken
12 numbers throughout their range, and the current harvest
13 is only about 200 birds per year; staff attributes this
14 decline primarily to habitat loss and not hunting.
15 However, there is currently a multi-state
16 effort to recover the Lesser Prairie Chicken, and Texas,
17 having the majority of the Lesser Prairie Chickens still
18 in existence, would be the most logical place for getting
19 brood stock for stocking those other states. And so the
20 recommendation is to close the Lesser Prairie Chicken
21 hunting season.
22 The final issue relates to Mearn's Quail, and
23 would call for an open season with only a two-bird
24 aggregate daily bag -- two Mearn's Quail aggregate daily
25 bag statewide. This would provide a limited opportunity
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1 for hunters interested in taking all four species of
2 Texas native quail and would also legalize the occasional
3 Mearn's taken during other quail hunting.
4 This would be very similar to the regulations
5 which we currently have, which allow two White-tipped
6 Doves as part of an aggregate dove bag statewide. And if
7 you'll recall, White-tipped Doves occur only in south
8 Texas, but we allow that two in the bag statewide just
9 for simplicity's sake; the same would be true for the
10 Mearn's Quails, which occur only in the Trans-Pecos and
11 western Edwards Plateau.
12 And are there any questions related to these?
13 Yes, sir?
14 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Well, while we're talking
15 about the quail, what is the situation with the Gamble's
16 Quail?
17 MR. GEORGE: The Gamble's Quail is -- has a
18 very narrow range. It always has.
19 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Right.
20 MR. GEORGE: It's mostly along the Rio Grande
21 with occasional pockets away from the Rio Grande. And
22 there's a population right north of Van Horn, for
23 example. They do well in that habitat along the river;
24 they don't do well beyond that. And they are a legally
25 hunted species, and they can be taken right now as part
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1 of an aggregate 15-bird daily bag.
2 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Mr. Chairman, I also had
3 a --
4 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Go ahead.
5 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: On the mule deer and the
6 Trans-Pecos, you mentioned that the landowners might have
7 some objections to it. What were they -- I don't recall
8 when we heard it before what their objections were.
9 Could you refresh my memory on that?
10 MR. GEORGE: Well, MLDs, of course, allow a
11 landowner greater flexibility in harvesting their deer if
12 they have a management plan for that area. Their exact
13 objections I don't know, but objections sometimes fade
14 over time. Since this proposal came before the
15 landowners in the Trans-Pecos, we brought it forward for
16 your consideration and -- to see if you want to list this
17 as a proposal.
18 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Well, is there any high
19 fencing in the Trans-Pecos? And if so, would high
20 fencing affect the movement of mule deer as it does
21 white-tailed?
22 MR. GEORGE: To my knowledge, there are very
23 few high fences in the Panhandle. I would call on Dr.
24 Jerry Cook if he wanted to add anything to that. But, of
25 course, high fences would restrict the movement of deer
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1 if they were in the area.
2 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Angelo,
3 I attended the Trans-Pecos wildlife meeting back in
4 August, and there was a definite shift in the interest in
5 MLDs from -- and I think a lot of that is the function of
6 more wildlife management plans.
7 Is that correct?
8 MR. GEORGE: That's correct.
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: There are more
10 wildlife management plans now in the Trans-Pecos than
11 there were.
12 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Would you consider that
13 at all -- if we had the MLDs permitted out there, would
14 you consider that an incentive for people to high-fence
15 ranches in that part of the country, or is the size of
16 those ranches such that that's not a practical idea,
17 anyway?
18 MR. GEORGE: Many of those ranches in that area
19 are very large, and it would be expensive to high-fence
20 them. This could lead to some high-fence increase in
21 relatively small areas.
22 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: But the population of the
23 deer is pretty limited as far as deer per acre --
24 right? -- or --
25 MR. GEORGE: Correct.
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1 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: -- acres per deer?
2 MR. GEORGE: Mule deer populations were much
3 higher two decades ago.
4 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Right.
5 MR. GEORGE: And they've been depressed for a
6 long period of time, primarily due to drought. And,
7 hopefully, they'll recover at some time.
8 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Chairman Armstrong?
9 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: It's my understanding that
10 the Trans-Pecos Advisory Board will be meeting later in
11 November, and I hope that this is an issue that is taken
12 up at that meeting; we'll be able to get some input from
13 landowners in that region. I think that our friends in
14 the Trans-Pecos would say yes, drought is a big cause for
15 the rather alarming decline in both mule deer and prong-
16 horns, but the predation probably has a rather
17 significant role to play, as well.
18 Would you come?
19 MR. GEORGE: Well, certainly, predators eat
20 deer. Many studies in the scientific literature indicate
21 that predators are often controlled by the numbers that
22 are prey, rather than vice-versa. Predators have to eat
23 something; when there are low deer numbers, they
24 sometimes eat other prey like javelina and even skunks,
25 racoons or whatever's available. But yes, predators are
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1 a factor, but long-term drought and habitat are probably
2 a bigger factor.
3 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Thank you.
4 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Al, Commissioner
5 Henry?
6 COMMISSIONER HENRY: Would you go back to
7 Number 2 and briefly tell me about the change in
8 philosophy that's bringing about this change with the
9 issuance of the permits? And is there any concern about
10 control or broadening it or lengthening?
11 MR. GEORGE: In terms of who can --
12 COMMISSIONER HENRY: Issue the permits.
13 MR. GEORGE: -- issue the permits? Right now,
14 as I said, the Conservation Scientists Six or above -- in
15 other words, our upper-level folks, are issuing these
16 permits. We have personnel on the staff, some long-term
17 employees, that are -- some of them are even technicians
18 that are imminently qualified and are now allowed to
19 approve wildlife management plans.
20 And if we -- and those are the individuals,
21 those people that can approve wildlife management plans,
22 that we would allow to also make the decision on issuing
23 these control permits. And we feel those people are very
24 qualified to do that.
25 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Well, we seem to be
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1 going backwards in your list, because I want to go back
2 to Number 1.
3 MR. GEORGE: Okay.
4 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Ron, can you discuss
5 a little bit more the reasons behind that proposal that
6 the -- I'm familiar with the browse surveys and
7 participated in those, but you may want to discuss --
8 MR. GEORGE: Right.
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: -- specifically how
10 that makes it more flexible.
11 MR. GEORGE: Statewide spotlight surveys are
12 probably the most used census technique for deer. But in
13 east Texas, where you -- a spotlight doesn't go very far,
14 that's not a very effective way of counting deer. So
15 other ways of getting some handle on what the deer
16 numbers are include things like browse surveys where you
17 actually go out and look at plants -- you know, you look
18 at different kinds of plants, plants that are known to be
19 ice cream plants for deer and plants that are less
20 palatable. And a skilled biologist can make a
21 determination of how many deer are in that area.
22 Other things would be like just the physical
23 condition of the deer. You just observe the deer. If
24 they're skin and bones, you know you've got more deer
25 than the habitat can support. But those kind of factors
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1 would be then used and -- in addition to actual count
2 data or census data or maybe in place of actual count or
3 census data, which is just a more efficient way of
4 counting and determining deer populations in all kinds of
5 habitat we have to deal with in Texas.
6 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And then I have one
7 other question on the pheasant. Was there any indication
8 of the landowners' and the hunters' concerns about that,
9 about the reduction in bag limit? Do they want more
10 days --
11 MR. GEORGE: The --
12 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: -- as a trade?
13 MR. GEORGE: The staff has recommended for many
14 years to increase the season length particularly in the
15 Panhandle area, and there has consistently been
16 resistance from the landowners in that area to a longer
17 season. Most of the pheasant hunting in that area occurs
18 during the first weekend of the season. But since this
19 was a proposal -- actually, a petition for a rulemaking,
20 which we have to address in some manner, and it called
21 for increasing the season length, which we think would be
22 beneficial to hunters in the area, particular local
23 hunters and youth that might be able to hunt more during
24 that period of time, this is brought forward for your
25 consideration.
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1 And as a legal matter, the petition for
2 rulemaking, as I understand, has already been denied by
3 the Agency because we couldn't implement it within 60
4 days. But we have contacted the petitioners and told
5 them that we would include this as part of the normal
6 regulatory package for your review, and that's what we're
7 doing now.
8 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And the petitioners
9 are hunting groups, or landowners, or both? Or --
10 MR. GEORGE: The petitioners, as far as we
11 know, are hunters in the area, and I don't know more than
12 that about them.
13 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And in those
14 counties -- you had the map up earlier --
15 MR. GEORGE: Right.
16 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: -- and you don't need
17 to go back and find it.
18 MR. GEORGE: Okay.
19 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: But it's mainly
20 northwest?
21 MR. GEORGE: That's correct.
22 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Right
23 MR. GEORGE: There are 37 counties, and --
24 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: The southern
25 Panhandle and northwest Texas?
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1 MR. GEORGE: Right.
2 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: I don't remember
3 exactly what our wildlife management plan numbers are
4 there, but they're not particularly high or -- certainly
5 not when compared with south Texas. But is there an
6 opportunity in here to encourage wildlife management
7 plans in that area as a possible alternative?
8 MR. GEORGE: I think that's a good possibility.
9 The Panhandle has traditionally been much slower in
10 adopting any kind of wildlife management, quite frankly.
11 I went to school at Texas Tech in the early '70s, and
12 there was -- you could go essentially anywhere at that
13 time, knock on the door and go pheasant hunting any place
14 pheasants were for free. And you could also hunt water
15 fowl and sand hill cranes.
16 Over time, landowners in that area and hunting
17 guides have recognized that wildlife has a value. And as
18 that has happened, those free hunting opportunities have
19 declined; people willing to pay to hunt have recognized
20 that economic benefit, and you're seeing a whole lot more
21 interest in managing for wildlife than you did two or
22 three decades ago.
23 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Do we have pretty
24 good data on hunters' success for pheasant hunting in the
25 Panhandle?
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1 MR. GEORGE: Yes, we have good data. Hunting
2 success is quite low, usually one or two cocks per season
3 per hunter.
4 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any others?
5 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Well, the pheasant
6 population of the Panhandle has had the same problems as
7 a lot of other wildlife in Texas. The drought has
8 affected it, I think, significantly, and, also, some of
9 the habitat up there has changed. The southern counties
10 especially have gone to a lot of CRP where there used to
11 be grain. And the population is distinctly down in, say,
12 counties like Hale County, for instance, where I've
13 hunted quite a bit.
14 Is that -- do you see any changes in that that
15 might improve the population and density of the pheasants
16 up there? Or --
17 MR. GEORGE: You are correct. When CRP came
18 into the Panhandle, I predicted it would have a very
19 positive benefit for pheasant in that area; it was
20 providing nesting cover and wintering cover where it
21 didn't occur before. Unfortunately, a lot of that CRP
22 went into grain fields and didn't go into cotton fields
23 very much.
24 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Right.
25 MR. GEORGE: And the pheasant population in
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1 some areas even went down. But where pheasants can
2 survive and you can get off a brood, they now have, you
3 know, almost unlimited winter cover, and so those birds
4 are surviving well. I've lost your original question.
5 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Well, I'm just wondering
6 if anything significant was being done to improve the
7 habitat --
8 MR. GEORGE: Oh, yes.
9 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: -- situation.
10 MR. GEORGE: Right. As part of the new farm
11 program, there are -- and, in fact, the last farm bill,
12 as well, there was provisions that allowed putting in
13 food plots as part of the CRP package that would,
14 hopefully, add that missing component of food to CRP.
15 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: I noticed in -- for
16 instance, in South Dakota, a lot of the CRP land was
17 actually crops that were beneficial to the wildlife,
18 whereas, in the Panhandle, the CRP that I was familiar
19 with was almost entirely, I believe, Love grass, if I'm
20 not mistaken --
21 MR. GEORGE: Right.
22 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: -- which is -- other than
23 for cover has no value at all. Is that not correct?
24 MR. GEORGE: That's correct. Love grass was
25 the cheapest thing to put in. When the CRP came in in
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1 1985, there was suddenly a tremendous market for native
2 grasses, and some of those states that already had native
3 grass programs of various kinds had the seed on hand, but
4 there wasn't enough to plant 4 million acres in Texas.
5 In some counties where -- even when a landowner
6 could find the seed, the local county committee
7 disapproved of native grasses, native plants, on the
8 grounds that they could spread the money further across
9 more farmers by going to cheaper things like Love grass.
10 Some of that CRP has now been taken out of the CRP
11 program. Some of it has been entered in the program --
12 re-entered in the program again but under different
13 requirements that allow more native grasses and native
14 plants.
15 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Is there anything we can
16 do or have done to increase the use of more helpful
17 plants?
18 MR. GEORGE: I think we are doing it. We're
19 making slow progress in that direction. Some states have
20 three and four staff that are just federal farm program
21 biologists. For a number of years in the early -- mid-
22 to late '80s, I served as the federal farm program
23 coordinator for Texas as an additional duty, and we got a
24 lot of progress on the national level and the state level
25 at that time; it didn't translate down much to the county
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1 level.
2 We now have a full-time federal farm program
3 coordinator that's up at Temple, I believe, Chuck
4 Kowaleski. And he has been in place now -- he and his
5 predecessor -- for about five years. And they're making
6 a lot of progress.
7 And we're talking about the possibility of
8 getting federal farm program dollars to actually hire a
9 Texas Parks and Wildlife staff, three or four of them,
10 that would spend all their time working with the federal
11 farm program and with local counties and local farmers.
12 And we think we're on the right track; we're just kind of
13 slow in getting that done.
14 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: I can't resist touting one
15 of my --
16 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Yes.
17 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: -- favorite subjects.
18 The -- giving all the help we can to the re-introduction
19 or rehabilitation of these sort of lands in the native
20 grasses is an important task. The economics of it are
21 tough in a chicken-and-egg sort of situation because -- I
22 know that native plant seed is very expensive.
23 We have partners in this effort with Texas
24 Department of Transportation and some universities and
25 the like and a lot of private landowners that would like
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1 to see this happen, and I'm glad to hear that the
2 Department is joining hands in that effort to try to
3 recreate habitat where it once existed and has not and
4 we'd like to see it back again.
5 MR. GEORGE: Yes. Well, there's seed -- native
6 seed available that's adapted to northern Texas that's on
7 the market now. Seed for southern Texas is generally not
8 there, but we're working with the Caesar Kleburg Wildlife
9 Research Institute at Kingsville to try to remedy that.
10 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Thank you.
11 MR. GEORGE: Thank you.
12 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Following up on that
13 comment, I couldn't help but think that we've had a lot
14 of success in creating incentives for landowners to do
15 the sort of management you're talking about by giving
16 them a reason to do it. And I'm looking at this
17 proposal, and I'm wondering if maybe this proposal
18 doesn't really fit the model we know works.
19 And what I'm wondering is if we want people to
20 manage and make their own, instead of waiting for someone
21 to bring them a program -- what I've noticed is what
22 works best is if they're encouraged to go do it
23 themselves -- if we have this longer season without a
24 reduction in bag limit for those who have a wildlife
25 management plan that is focused exactly as you say,
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1 Commissioner Anglo, towards better habitat for pheasant.
2 I mean I really don't know that we're following the
3 models that we know work.
4 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Commissioner Fitzsimons,
5 it would seem to me to be consistent for us to do that.
6 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Could that be
7 considered?
8 MR. GEORGE: It certainly can be considered.
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any other questions?
10 I didn't mean to take the whole morning on pheasant.
11 (No response.)
12 MR. GEORGE: Thank you, very much.
13 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: They deserve our time.
14 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Yes, that's right.
15 They do deserve our time.
16 Any other questions before we go to inland
17 fisheries?
18 (No response.)
19 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: You're next.
20 Thank you, Ron.
21 MR. KURZAWSKI: Good morning, Commissioners.
22 My name is Ken Kurzawski; I'm with the Inland Fisheries
23 Division. And this morning as -- I will brief you on
24 some of the regulation proposals we are considering. As
25 Ron George mentioned, we will formally present these to
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1 you in January.
2 All right. These -- this year's potential
3 changes are a result of our evaluations of the
4 regulations. These evaluations are ongoing and are a
5 vital component of our regulations process.
6 We are constantly evaluating through population
7 surveys, angler catch, specifically harvest fare, and the
8 angler desires and their opinions on these regulations to
9 determine their success and if they are meeting our
10 objectives. This has been an important part of our
11 process for the last two decades, but we are going to
12 formalize it through our new strategic plan.
13 We're going to set up sort of sunset groups of
14 regulations. For instance, we would take slot limits for
15 bass -- take a look at those and look at them as a whole
16 and see if they are meeting their objectives.
17 The potential regulation changes that we have
18 for this year share some common ground. They are going
19 to -- the ones we will discuss today are ones that will
20 all revert back to statewide regulations from special
21 regulations. And for these special regulations to work,
22 angler harvest must play an important role in reshaping
23 the populations, and we believe the ones we're going to
24 discuss with angler harvest wasn't sufficient for that to
25 happen.
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1 The first is on Lost Creek Reservoir in Jack
2 County. We propose to change the limit for large-mouth
3 bass from the current 16-inch minimum back to the 14-inch
4 minimum. The bag limit would be -- of five fish per day
5 would be retained.
6 The goal of this change would be to increase
7 the opportunity for angler harvest by dropping it back
8 down to 14 inches and, also, utilization by tournament
9 anglers. There's a nearby reservoir, Lake Jacksboro,
10 that the anglers also use, and making the regulations the
11 same with these two reservoirs would be an advantage
12 there.
13 The next is Lake Waxahachie in Ellis County.
14 We currently have a 14-to-18-inch slot, and we propose to
15 change that back to a 14-inch minimum with a five-fish
16 bag. And once again, here our goal is to increase
17 utilization by tournament anglers and, also, some
18 opportunity for angler harvest. The 14-to-18 slot wasn't
19 producing many fish in that slot, and anglers weren't
20 harvesting many fishes below 14 inches, so we weren't
21 having any impact on the populations that we wanted.
22 The last group of regulation changes concerns
23 12 reservoirs. We implemented a 12-inch minimum bag
24 limit or -- 12-inch minimum length limit on these
25 reservoirs which was from -- which was a change from the
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1 statewide regulations, which is 10-inch, and we are
2 proposing to revert that back to the 10-inch minimum.
3 Daily bag would remain at 25 fish.
4 These changes on these groups of reservoirs
5 were implemented in both 1992 and 1995. The objectives
6 at the time of the 12-inch minimum were to increase
7 population numbers, decrease variability in the year-
8 class strengths and increase yield by providing a larger
9 fish to the anglers.
10 We have not seen any noticeable improvements in
11 these populations. Other factors, such as water flows,
12 water levels and conditions during the spring spawning
13 run, are having a greater impact on these populations,
14 and angler harvest was not -- at least in these
15 situations was not the one that was shaping the
16 population on a year-to-year basis. So we are proposing
17 to move it back to that statewide 10-inch minimum.
18 One other potential change that we're
19 considering concerns Lake Ray Roberts. We're evaluating
20 the current -- that currently has a 14-to-24-inch slot
21 for large-mouthed bass. There is some local desire to
22 revert back to the 18-inch minimum. We did receive a
23 petition for rulemaking on that. We are in the process
24 of evaluating our fall population sampling, and, also, we
25 will plan to gather more public input in that area.
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1 We've scheduled a public hearing in the local area in
2 December to try and determine -- get a little bit more
3 input from the anglers.
4 We initially put the 14-to-24-inch slot for
5 large-mouthed bass based on some desires in the local
6 area to take advantage of the potential that Ray Roberts
7 showed to produce some trophy bass and, in that way,
8 enhance that lake. We need to go back there and look and
9 see if -- that that's still what the bulk of the people
10 in the local area want and to see what the population has
11 been doing since we've implemented that.
12 Those are all the changes we are considering at
13 these -- this time. Do you -- I'll be happy to answer
14 any questions if you have them.
15 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Henry?
16 COMMISSIONER HENRY: On several occasions, I've
17 received mail from people in the general area that
18 complain about the Department's regulations and changes
19 favoring tournament anglers and people in search of
20 trophies. I couldn't help but notice that on several
21 occasions, that term is used here. Would you comment on
22 that, please -- on that assertion by those individuals
23 and the Department's philosophy in general?
24 MR. KURZAWSKI: Well, our philosophy in general
25 and particularly with large-mouthed bass is trying to
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1 develop a quality fishery and take advantage of whatever
2 that local lake -- the conditions in that lake can offer.
3 And actually, we -- when we do propose special
4 regulations, most of the time, tournament anglers are
5 against those. They favor the statewide 14-inch minimum,
6 which is in -- generally is favorable to a lot of
7 anglers.
8 Also, we have special regulations for bass on
9 approximately 25 of our major reservoirs, those
10 reservoirs 500 acres and over. When you spread that
11 across 167 reservoirs around the state, we don't think
12 that's a large amount.
13 And as I said, we usually implement those to
14 provide an improvement in the quality of the fishery in
15 that local area. We don't look at them as trying to
16 favor tournament anglers or any particular angling group;
17 we're trying to, you know, provide a -- improve the
18 quality of fishing in that area.
19 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: In the same vein as
20 Commissioner Henry, I've had several -- not any
21 significant number but several people question or ask
22 questions regarding our limits. And I think the approach
23 there or the concern they've got is that they'd like to
24 keep more fish maybe. I wondered, considering the fact
25 that so much is going to catch and release with the bass
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1 fishing now, if what -- how we feel about our limits as
2 to whether those -- how those are affecting the quality
3 of the fishery and whatnot.
4 MR. KURZAWSKI: Well, we believe that in a lot
5 of cases, they have improved the quality of the fishery.
6 Certainly, in -- bass anglers -- even when you have a 14-
7 inch minimum, a lot of them don't keep fish. There's a
8 lot of it that is self-regulated catch and release.
9 And a lot of the -- for instance, the slot
10 limits we have -- a lot of the times, they don't work or
11 they don't work as well as we'd like them to because
12 anglers don't want to keep those fish 14 inches or less.
13 We seem to have a little more problem with the
14 regulations -- of anglers keeping those fish because they
15 don't want to.
16 And once again, the bulk of our -- you know,
17 the -- 80 percent of our reservoirs are either a 14- or a
18 16-inch minimum/five-fish bag. So there's -- we think
19 there's plenty of opportunity for places for anglers to
20 catch -- who want to keep bass to keep bass.
21 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Do you see many of the
22 general public and maybe some of the guides, also, that
23 would like to keep more? Is that a significant number,
24 or not?
25 MR. KURZAWSKI: Especially among guides, no.
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1 Most guides are -- it seems they focus on catch and
2 release. They believe their livelihood is better served
3 by people catching fish and releasing them and then
4 having the opportunity to catch a larger-sized fish.
5 COMMISSIONER WATSON: And I'd like to expand a
6 little bit on Commissioner Henry's question. You know,
7 you seem to have focused on the activities of the
8 tournament fishermen, and I'd just like to know where you
9 are in your thinking relative to the state being
10 compensated for the damage that tournament fishermen do.
11 I mean they're using a state resource, and most
12 of these are highly profitable and for-profit
13 tournaments. And, you know, to my knowledge, we're --
14 you know, we're not being adequately compensated for the
15 damage that they cause in our reservoirs and the loss of
16 the fish.
17 MR. KURZAWSKI: Well, there is certainly some
18 mortality associated with catch and release, whether it's
19 done by tournament anglers or by normal, every-day
20 anglers. And we see a lot of catch and release by both
21 groups every -- I mean, you know, just regular, every-day
22 bass anglers and tournament anglers.
23 And we see a lot of tournament activity on some
24 of our major reservoirs -- Sam Rayburn -- and we haven't
25 been able to associate any negative impacts to the
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1 populations even with -- when we know there is some
2 mortality associated with that activity. We think the
3 fact that these anglers -- tournament anglers are
4 catching a lot of fish and releasing most of them when
5 they can keep those fish, there are some -- you know,
6 there are negatives and benefits to that.
7 MR. DUROCHER: Commissioners, I'm Phil
8 Durocher, the Director of Inland Fisheries. This issue
9 comes up fairly often to us. We have no data to indicate
10 that tournament fishing is having a negative impact more
11 than anyone else on our reservoirs.
12 The issue of whether or not people should be
13 allowed to make a profit on the waters? That's a whole
14 separate issue. But from a biological point of view, you
15 have to remember that the fish that these people are
16 releasing are legal fish; they could legally keep them
17 all. And the fact that they are returning most of the
18 fish, even if there is some mortality, I think is a
19 benefit to the fishery.
20 COMMISSIONER WATSON: But they are using our
21 resources to make a profit.
22 MR. DUROCHER: Some of them are, yes, sir.
23 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Rising?
24 COMMISSIONER RISING: Yes.
25 Phil, I was -- I hear quite a bit about the
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1 catchability of the bass populations as it relates to the
2 Florida -- the penetration of the Florida strain versus
3 the northern strain bass. And have we looked at changing
4 the population or stocking more northern strain for
5 catchability?
6 MR. DUROCHER: That's -- those studies on the
7 catchability are official studies that we did, you know.
8 So we're not trying to hide anything about what the
9 relationship is between the northern and Florida bass. I
10 can say that statistically, there is a difference in the
11 catchability between the northern and the Florida bass.
12 They seem to be more aggressive -- the northern bass seem
13 to be more aggressive and easier to catch.
14 Now, how that's reflected on a body of water
15 with a normal fish population -- for instance, some of
16 the lakes in the state that have the highest catch
17 rates -- Falcon Lake when it had water in it, and Fayette
18 County and some of these other lakes -- are predominantly
19 Florida bass. And I'd hate to think that -- I wonder
20 what the people in Florida think about -- their fish seem
21 to be pretty easy to catch.
22 Now, we didn't introduce the Florida bass with
23 the intention of having the Florida bass dominate all the
24 bass fishing in the state of Texas; we had set a goal of
25 trying to get 20 to 30 percent of the Florida bass.
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1 There are some lakes particularly in south Texas where
2 Florida bass do well, and they are dominating the
3 populations. And we are in the process of producing more
4 northern bass to go back and try to switch those
5 populations back to what we wanted them to be, in the 20
6 to 30 percent range.
7 COMMISSIONER RISING: Okay. So we are doing
8 that --
9 MR. DUROCHER: Yes, sir.
10 COMMISSIONER RISING: -- down south?
11 MR. DUROCHER: We are doing that.
12 COMMISSIONER RISING: Okay.
13 COMMISSIONER AVILA: Phil, do we currently
14 charge -- we don't currently charge tournaments any fee
15 for a tournament?
16 MR. DUROCHER: No, sir. We tried to get
17 legislation passed about ten years ago to require a
18 permit -- it was not even a charge. It was going to be a
19 free permit just so we could get a handle on how much of
20 this activity was taking place and use these tournament
21 people to gather some data to monitor population trends.
22 And that was defeated.
23 But no. Currently, we have no charge for
24 tournaments.
25 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Ramos?
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1 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Phil, you mentioned
2 northern bass and Florida bass. After some years, don't
3 you end up with a hybrid bass when you stock your --
4 MR. DUROCHER: Yes. Most of the fish are
5 hybrids.
6 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: And how do they from a
7 catchability standpoint compare to northern bass or
8 Florida bass, or do you know?
9 MR. DUROCHER: I don't know. I don't have any
10 data. I mean, you would assume that it would be
11 somewhere in between. But we just don't know. We
12 haven't looked at the hybrids. But I can say most of our
13 reservoirs have a considerable number of hybrids in them,
14 and I don't know if there's any way we could measure the
15 difference in catchability.
16 It's more related to numbers. When your
17 population is high, you're going to catch more fish.
18 That's what drives it.
19 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: That makes sense.
20 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Phil, on the issue of
21 tournament permit and gathering of data, what -- how
22 would that help? I mean, you don't have it now, and, ten
23 years ago, you asked for it. I guess my question is:
24 What were your reasons for asking for it, and would you
25 still like that data that you would be able to get?
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1 MR. DUROCHER: We -- the fishery resource is
2 pretty extensive that we have to deal with. Like Ken
3 said, we have about 200 major reservoirs, 500 acres or
4 better. Because of the limitations on our staff, we
5 sample these reservoirs routinely about once every two or
6 three years; so we've got two- or three-year periods
7 there where we're not gathering any data on these
8 populations. We had hoped to use the tournament data.
9 The only requirement of this permit would be
10 that the tournament send in a report at the end of the
11 event telling us what they caught, the size of the fish,
12 and that type of thing. And we could use that data to
13 supplement our data in the interim, between when we do
14 our sampling.
15 We looked at -- we were looking at it kind of
16 as a reg flag, you know. If we saw something significant
17 happening in tournament catches on a reservoir, for
18 instance, that would be an indication to us that maybe we
19 need to go put some effort in there to try to figure out
20 what's going on. That was the way we intended to use
21 that data.
22 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And do you get any of
23 that data at all voluntarily? Or --
24 MR. DUROCHER: That was the -- that was what
25 was claimed at the time, that they would be willing to
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1 give this to us voluntarily. When I first came here in
2 the late '70s, we instituted a voluntary tournament
3 survey. At that time, we were getting returns from
4 about -- anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of the
5 tournament people were sending these reports in
6 voluntarily.
7 So we re-instituted that program after the
8 permit was defeated. And I don't think we ever got more
9 than 25 percent. In fact, it got so low several years
10 ago that it wasn't of value to us, so we completely
11 dropped the program.
12 COMMISSIONER HENRY: I have another question
13 I'd like to ask.
14 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Yes, Commissioner
15 Henry.
16 COMMISSIONER HENRY: Jim, on the question of --
17 particularly of tournament and tournament fishing, what
18 is your department's recent -- I take it, since you've
19 been around -- recent history with regard to problems in
20 that area? Are they any more substantial than in the
21 general angler population with regard to controls and
22 lack of controls?
23 MR. STINEBAUGH: I think it would be safe to
24 say, Commissioner Henry, that there are not -- we
25 generally don't have people out there checking them real
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1 closely, because we haven't had problems with them.
2 COMMISSIONER HENRY: It's fair to say that they
3 monitor themselves well?
4 MR. STINEBAUGH: Yes, sir.
5 MR. DUROCHER: They're very avid, and they fish
6 a lot. And, you know, I don't try to tell people why
7 they need to fish just as long as they go fishing.
8 (Laughter.)
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: I'd agree with that.
10 Well, again, returning to the concept of looking at
11 models that have worked in other areas of management, we
12 through wildlife management plans gather quite a bit of
13 data in the wildlife division from private individuals,
14 again, managing a public resource. Do you think there's
15 any real resistance to asking for this sort of
16 participation from the tournament community to help us
17 manage the resource better?
18 MR. DUROCHER: I suspect there would be quite a
19 bit of resistance, and it's in the -- the idea is, "Where
20 do you go next," you know, when you institute a permit.
21 Even though you don't have any regulatory requirements on
22 that permit, the concern is that sooner or later, you're
23 going to put some regulations on them. That was their
24 primary concern.
25 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And their desire to
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1 help the resource doesn't override that?
2 MR. DUROCHER: Well, it didn't.
3 (Laughter.)
4 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: All right.
5 Does anybody else have any questions?
6 (No response.)
7 MR. KURZAWSKI: Thank you.
8 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you.
9 I think we have coastal with Hal up again.
10 MR. OSBURN: I don't know why Phil has such
11 trouble with his fishermen; mine always agree with me.
12 (Laughter.)
13 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Yes. We remember.
14 MR. OSBURN: Mr. Chairman and Commissioners,
15 I'm Hal Osburn, Coastal Fisheries Director. I'd like to
16 brief you today on some preliminary proposals for changes
17 to the statewide hunting and fishing proclamation. We
18 intend on proposing in January some measures to clarify
19 and simplify the existing regulations, but our main
20 emphasis is going to be on spotted sea trout.
21 As you know, staff has spent considerable time
22 this last year reviewing the management strategy for the
23 recreational spotted sea trout fishery, one of the
24 largest on the coast. Our sampling data have confirmed
25 increases in fishing pressure and efficiency in this
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1 fishery; we've also detected a decrease in the proportion
2 of large trout abundance, as well as a decline in the
3 trout life expectancy.
4 In addition to our biological data review,
5 we've also sought input from anglers through a variety of
6 scoping processes. One of the most helpful was the
7 creation of a spotted sea trout work group composed of a
8 wide diversity of stakeholders, including fish guides,
9 city officials, bait camp owners, conservation
10 organizations and general anglers. As you can imagine,
11 we received a wide range of suggestions.
12 We learned that the current 15-inch minimum
13 size and ten fish daily bag limit were still popular, but
14 we also found widespread concern about two particular
15 issues: The increasing effectiveness and use of live
16 fish, such as croakers, for bait, and the increasing
17 number of fish guides.
18 There has been a 300 percent growth of fish
19 guides since the early 1980s, but this actually reflects
20 the management success that we have had in rebounding
21 over-fished stocks of trout and redfish. You don't have
22 guides if you don't have fish. The guides are good
23 fishermen; they have a catch rate of about three times
24 the average angler, and that ratio goes up even higher
25 when guides use live fish for bait.
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1 Our creel survey data show that for the guides
2 with the highest catches, those with five or more trout
3 per person on the trip, live fish is the dominant means
4 of harvesting. Now, frequent suggestion for addressing
5 this high harvest rate, one that we heard even from fish
6 guide organizations on the coast, was to establish a boat
7 limit equal to the daily bag limit times the number of
8 customers. And the guides would still be allowed to fish
9 on the trip, and they could even retain fish at the end
10 of the trip.
11 This idea has actually been around for awhile
12 even for inland waters. And with the concurrence of Phil
13 Durocher and Inland Fisheries, we're recommending this
14 rule preliminarily for all species statewide.
15 In addition, to bring the guide license fee in
16 line with their impact on the resource, as Commissioner
17 Watson was suggesting, we're suggesting that we increase
18 the fee, which is currently $75 a year, for a fish guide
19 license. We don't have a specific value to offer right
20 now, but we will be talking with our inland guides and
21 our saltwater guides in trying to gauge an appropriate
22 license fee for those entities. Proof of coast guard
23 certification as a for-hire captain or equivalent
24 training would also be a suggested requirement for
25 receiving the fish guide license.
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1 A final recommendation specifically for coastal
2 trout fishery would be the establishment of a 25-inch
3 maximum size limit with one trout over that size allowed
4 per day. Now, for the trout population, the effect of
5 this maximum size limit combined with the -- and this is
6 combined with the guide boat limit -- would be a 13
7 percent increase in the spawning biomass, which would
8 help keep our populations high and even building.
9 Our modeling efforts on our data indicate that
10 these changes would also produce a 39 percent increase in
11 the population of trout greater than 25 inches. Not only
12 would there be more large trout to catch, but they would
13 be caught by a greater distribution of all angler types
14 over a longer period of time.
15 Now, as opposed to a host of other possible
16 size and bag limit combinations that we've heard in our
17 scoping process, the advantages of these two specific
18 changes are that they address the two greatest concerns
19 we heard in our scoping process and they cause the least
20 disruption of current fishing practices. In addition,
21 they do take a moderate proactive approach to the steady
22 increase in coastal angling pressure.
23 Prior to offering these as formal proposals at
24 the January Commission meeting, staff will reconvene the
25 spotted sea trout work group to gather their input, and,
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1 in addition, we will review the results of our ongoing
2 statewide mail survey of both fresh water and saltwater
3 fish guides.
4 That concludes my presentation. I'd be happy
5 to answer any questions.
6 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Hal, I would just
7 like to thank you for your hard work on this. I went to
8 three of those seven scoping meetings; I've never seen
9 anything so thoroughly scoped in all my life.
10 (Laughter.)
11 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: It was -- the
12 tournament -- the spawning biomass term may not be
13 familiar to most people, but -- I think Commissioner
14 Rising and I were both at that meeting where it became
15 obvious that that is really where the rubber meets the
16 road, so to speak, as far as the resource. Could you
17 talk about how that --
18 MR. OSBURN: Well, basically, any population of
19 animals is dependent on reproduction for the next
20 generation, and spawning biomass is just one way of
21 describing basically the fecundity of the population:
22 How many trout and what size they are. As -- the larger
23 the average trout in the water and the more trout in the
24 water, the greater your reproduction is going to be and
25 the greater number of eggs and juveniles you're going to
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1 produce for the next generation.
2 So we have seen the spawning biomass, the
3 reproduction, increase steadily from the kind of the bad
4 old days in the '70s and '80s. It -- we believe that the
5 carrying capacity of the environment is capable of
6 handling even more trout. They are not food-limited;
7 they're only limited most seriously now by fishing
8 mortality. So tweaking the rules to allow more fish to
9 be in the water longer -- particularly the larger ones --
10 will increase the reproduction for the next year.
11 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And that's
12 accomplished by the size limit of --
13 MR. OSBURN: By the size limit and the reduced
14 take by the boat limit concept for guides, because the
15 guides will basically -- if there was three customers on
16 the boat and the guide and you adopted this rule and it
17 passed, there could be 40 trout landed, and then, in the
18 future, it would be 30 trout.
19 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: I was impressed that
20 the guide associations, the Coastal Bend Guide
21 Association, just for an example, were all in favor of
22 limiting themselves, which I thought was very
23 progressive.
24 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Mr. Chairman?
25 I was -- some of the concern expressed by the
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1 fishing public initially had to do with the thought that
2 we might be going to change the minimum size -- is that
3 correct -- but you've decided now not to do that -- not
4 to recommend that?
5 MR. OSBURN: That's correct. There was concern
6 that 15-inch -- if you go up on that, there would be
7 definitely some biological benefits that we've
8 recognized. But it would probably -- that would be
9 outweighed by concerns that folks would not be able to
10 catch as many fish. Because -- as with any fishery,
11 most -- over 50 percent of the harvest of trout happens
12 between 15 inches and 17 inches. If you moved it up, it
13 would be that same 2-inch increment for most of the
14 people.
15 But at this point, we're taking a more
16 conservative approach to the fishery. It's not in
17 biological trouble. So I think we will -- you know,
18 we'll continue to look at that and see if we can build
19 support for improving the fishery even better than it is.
20 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Well, that should have
21 eliminated a large degree of the opposition. Correct?
22 MR. OSBURN: I think so.
23 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: It eliminated my
24 opposition.
25 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: For one. That's pretty
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1 important.
2 COMMISSIONER RISING: Hal, I had a question.
3 Do -- I've also seen models that show an increase in
4 fishing pressure for the future. Do these proposals that
5 we're looking at here -- do they kind of keep up with the
6 models that we're seeing for increase fishing pressure as
7 far as the biomass? I mean I know it's a -- that's
8 probably a complicated number that you have to look at,
9 but --
10 MR. OSBURN: Yes, it is. I know that between
11 1990 and 2000, there was a 19 percent increase in the
12 population of folks moving to the coast. We anticipate
13 that that's going to grow.
14 People will have more leisure time, and they
15 are getting better at fishing. And so, you know, I think
16 it's something that -- this is certainly a step in the
17 right direction. That increase in spawning biomass is, I
18 think, important, but I would suggest that it would be
19 wise to monitor those trout populations as we've been
20 allowed to do, and report back frequently on that.
21 COMMISSIONER RISING: What percentage of the
22 angler -- recreational anglers usually catch more than
23 one fish over 25 inches? Do we have any -- I know the
24 numbers that I've seen --
25 MR. OSBURN: Yes.
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1 COMMISSIONER RISING: -- seem pretty low.
2 So --
3 MR. OSBURN: Yes. It was actually --
4 COMMISSIONER RISING: -- it's probably less
5 than 1 percent, or something thereabouts.
6 MR. OSBURN: Actually, it was more like 2
7 percent. Now, the guides are twice that or more. So
8 it's -- and even -- and we looked at our tournament
9 anglers. We looked at our guide anglers separately.
10 It's a very low percentage of their catch, and, quite
11 frankly, we would like it to be higher. So these
12 proposals could do that.
13 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any other questions
14 for Hal on the spotted sea trout?
15 (No response.)
16 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you, Hal.
17 I believe we'll take a short break and adjourn
18 the --
19 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Recess?
20 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Recess. I'm sorry.
21 -- recess the Regulations Committee and reconvene in ten
22 minutes.
23 (Whereupon, a short recess ensued.)
24 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: We reconvene the
25 Regulations Committee at 10:32.
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1 And the next item on the agenda, I believe, is
2 the crab trap season, Robin Reichers. This is our Senate
3 Bill 1410 work.
4 Robin?
5 MR. REICHERS: Chairman Fitzsimons and
6 Commissioners, my name is Robin Reichers, and I'm the
7 Management Director of the Coastal Fisheries Division.
8 I'll be presenting a proposal regarding the abandoned
9 crab trap removal program in the statewide hunting and
10 fishing proclamation.
11 As mentioned earlier by Bob, this item proposes
12 final adoption of amendments to Chapter 65 Section 78,
13 crabs and Ghost Shrimp. In the 77th Legislature, Senate
14 Bill 1410 granted the authority to create the closed crab
15 trap season for the purpose of removing abandoned traps
16 from the waters of the state.
17 Closure could range from ten to 30 days, and,
18 after the first 7 days of the closure, volunteer help can
19 be used to remove the traps because, basically, at that
20 point, it is declared litter. The closure can occur at
21 any time in February and March as it was created by the
22 legislation.
23 In reviewing the 2001 abandoned crab trap
24 clean-up, we were able to pick up over 8,000 traps during
25 the week of the closure or -- during the 16-day closure.
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1 We had over 550 volunteers using their own boats, and
2 over 200 of them brought vessels down on our organized
3 clean-up to help remove the traps from the state waters.
4 In all, over 58 companies, organizations,
5 municipalities and government entities donated resources
6 ranging from tarps and gloves to grappling hooks to grab
7 the traps, all the way to actually getting donated
8 facilities to actually take those traps and -- refuse
9 facilities, if you will.
10 And, of course, as you heard, earlier in the
11 year, when we did a more complete review of the closure,
12 we actually had commissioners come and participate in the
13 closure, and basically everybody, every division that was
14 anywhere near the coast, helped in some way. And we
15 certainly appreciate all of those efforts.
16 Based on input from the crab advisory committee
17 and a review of last year's closure, the Department again
18 proposed and published in the Texas Register a proposal
19 for a 16-day coast-wide closure. This year, we chose to
20 basically propose to move the closure from March 1 or --
21 to have the closure from March 1 to March 16. That's a
22 difference in -- we actually held it in the last two
23 weeks of February last year.
24 And again, we would have no exemptions
25 regarding any particular types of traps. All traps would
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1 have to be removed from the state or -- from the waters
2 of the state.
3 We held four public hearings on this issue
4 along the coast. We had 41 people in attendance; 22
5 people participated by giving comments. And, of course,
6 the comments typically have a wide range. And this year,
7 we did get some comments that were suggesting that we
8 only close in certain areas of the coast or that we close
9 every other year or something like that, as well as, of
10 course -- one individual mentioned that if we would just
11 create a biodegradable trap, this would all be solved.
12 We're going to work on some of those things,
13 but, for this year, we're still looking at a 16-day
14 closure. And in general, most of the comments that
15 directly related to the closure were regarding the timing
16 of the closure. And we would -- most of those comments
17 basically asked us to move it back into the first two
18 days of the February closure.
19 To give you a little background, our crab
20 advisory committee met, and they were the ones who
21 suggested moving it. It was truly driven at that point
22 by some issues on the lower coast; they felt like they
23 were in good crabs when the closure occurred, and when it
24 opened back up, there weren't as many. So they were
25 proposing that move. So that's why we went to public
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1 hearing with it that way.
2 But based on the comments we received at public
3 hearing, we are proposing to move it back into February,
4 the last two weeks of February. I can tell you we have
5 double-checked back with all of the crab advisory
6 committees minus one that we haven't been able to get in
7 touch with, and based on the comments, they concur, as
8 well, that we move it back into February.
9 What this would basically mean is the closure
10 would start February 15. It's in pink or red or magenta
11 on your screen there. The first seven days of the
12 closure would be the time when wardens or law enforcement
13 could pick up traps. The main event days, as shown there
14 in green, actually would start. We would target our main
15 event weekend as the 22nd and 23rd. The closure would
16 run through the 2nd, and the fishery would open back up
17 on March 3.
18 If you have any questions, I'll be happy to
19 answer them at this time.
20 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any questions for
21 Robin?
22 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: It sounds good.
23 MR. REICHERS: Thank you.
24 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: We thank our Chairman
25 for being part of that.
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1 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Well, I've enjoyed it.
2 MR. REICHERS: We look forward to it again this
3 year.
4 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: I do, too.
5 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: If there are no
6 further questions or discussion, without objection, I'll
7 place this item on the Thursday Commission meeting agenda
8 for public comment and action.
9 Next we have the scientific breeder population.
10 Jerry Cooke?
11 MR. COOKE: Mr. Chairman and members, my name
12 is Jerry Cooke. I'm Game Branch Chief for the Wildlife
13 Division, and I'll be presenting to you the proposed
14 changes to the scientific breeder proclamation. And I am
15 doing this without the benefit of slides. So --
16 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: All right.
17 MR. COOKE: The reason that I didn't prepare
18 any slides is because I thought this was going to be
19 fairly simple on the outset because the only action that
20 was being brought to you was the repeal of our
21 importation suspension as directed at the last Commission
22 meeting.
23 Unfortunately, in order to accomplish that by
24 this meeting and accommodate the public comment period,
25 we were required to withdraw several sections that were
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1 included in the adoptions in the last meeting. So I'm
2 going to lay those proposals to you, as well, for re-
3 adoption today to be included when we go to the secretary
4 of state with your actions.
5 Besides the repeal of the importation
6 suspension, which would place all importation under the
7 entry requirements of the Texas Animal Health Commission
8 in the future, the temporary transfers of fawns for
9 nursing purposes and the temporary transfer of deer for
10 veterinary treatment, we thought it was fairly clear at
11 the outset that we meant that they needed to stay inside
12 the jurisdiction of the state of Texas, but it obviously
13 wasn't clear to some. So we're making it a little more
14 overt in our regulations.
15 Also, it was not clear in our regulations just
16 exactly who could or could not buy a purchase permit for
17 the purposes of transfer of ownership. And we're making
18 it clear that it could be either the buyer or the seller
19 in the proposal.
20 Also, two of the adoptions from the previous
21 meeting involved a fawn report, a November 1 fawn report,
22 and, also, a pre-release inspection requirement for
23 scientific breeders. And there was a great deal of
24 confusion about those particular issues and some
25 particular concerns of the breeders in that adoption in
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1 the way that it was done, basically. So we promised them
2 that we would bring it back before you now for another
3 discussion.
4 And to, hopefully, assist in that discussion,
5 we also brought it before our TTTMLDP task force last
6 Thursday and asked for their recommendations to the
7 committee. Basically, their recommendations were to
8 repeal the fawn report from the requirement and rely on
9 the annual report and periodic inspections by the
10 wardens, as it has been done in the past. Also, they
11 propose that we also repeal the pre-inspection
12 replacement.
13 Their third proposal was basically to replace
14 the pre-inspection requirement -- pre-release inspection
15 requirement with a very straightforward proposal, and
16 that is: To release deer from a scientific breeder
17 facility to the wild, that facility should be involved in
18 the voluntary CWD monitoring program with the Animal
19 Health Commission and be able to produce a valid herd
20 health management plan for CWD that had been approved by
21 the Animal Health Commission.
22 So basically, the first three elements -- the
23 repeal of the importation, the temporary transfer issue
24 and the purchase permit issue -- could all be addressed
25 tomorrow in an adoption; however, the three final ones,
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1 which would be the fawn report repeal if you choose to do
2 so, and the pre-release inspection should you choose to
3 do so, and the adoption of the monitoring program
4 requirement for release, could only be done in January.
5 We would have to publish that following this meeting for
6 action in January if you so directed.
7 If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try
8 and answer those at this time.
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any procedural
10 questions for Jerry?
11 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: I have one question.
12 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Ramos.
13 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Jerry, what's the
14 rationale behind repealing the pre-release inspection
15 requirement?
16 MR. COOKE: It would be replacing it with --
17 the requirement would be part of the voluntary monitoring
18 program, which would be a pre-release inspection process.
19 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Oh. Okay. So we would
20 still have the -- an inspection program?
21 MR. COOKE: Instead of relying on our
22 biologists, our game wardens or a private practice
23 veterinarian, it would be placing it within the context
24 of an existing monitoring program through the Texas
25 Animal Health Commission.
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1 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Okay.
2 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any other questions
3 for Jerry on this issue?
4 (No response.)
5 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Jerry, if there are
6 no further questions or discussion, without objection,
7 I'll place this item on the Thursday Commission meeting
8 agenda for public comment and action. And, Jerry, you
9 stay right there. We'll start in --
10 MR. COOKE: I'm staying, sir.
11 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: -- on the agenda item
12 of trap, transport and transplant of game animals and
13 game birds.
14 MR. COOKE: Again, Mr. Chairman, my name is
15 Jerry Cooke, Game Branch Chief for the Wildlife Division.
16 And I'll be presenting to you a brief presentation
17 related to the published proposal. The proposal that was
18 published for public comment was simply to remove white-
19 tailed deer and mule deer from the Triple-T program until
20 that section were repealed by your further actions.
21 To give you a quick update on a long process
22 that has covered the last year, basically, the suspension
23 of importation of breeder deer was for the purpose of
24 allowing the Animal Health Commission the opportunity to
25 establish entry requirements that would protect the
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1 resource, and that has been accomplished.
2 The effort to establish a voluntary monitoring
3 program among scientific breeders to allow the Animal
4 Health Commission the confidence that they could detect a
5 2 percent incidence of disease should it occur has been
6 accomplished. And that -- we have begun our initial
7 testing processes in the state of Texas. We are testing
8 every clinical animal that we can place our hands on.
9 During this hunting season, we will be sampling
10 and testing virtually all deer taken on wildlife
11 management area state park hunts this year, which will
12 give us a relatively good, stratified sample. And, also,
13 later in this meeting, you'll have an opportunity to get
14 an update on the status of our draft CWD management plan
15 for Texas which has been done in conjunction with the
16 Animal Health Commission.
17 Since the last time I've shown you this map,
18 chronic wasting disease has been found in free-ranging
19 white-tailed and mule deer in this -- in the U.S. It has
20 been free-ranging in Wisconsin and New Mexico and
21 Illinois and has been found in a confined elk herd in
22 Minnesota and a confined white-tailed deer facility in
23 Wisconsin. And each of these new discoveries was a
24 significant geographic distance from any place that we
25 had known it was before.
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1 So I wanted to focus a little on the potential
2 impact of TTTMLDP disease. And that's all it is is
3 potential, and I want to stress that.
4 Number 1: Texas has among the highest density
5 deer populations on the planet. Approximately 4 million
6 deer are found in Texas; over a third of those are found
7 in about 25 percent of the state. And this has all been
8 developed through the restoration efforts of this Agency
9 over time and with the cooperation and assistance of the
10 private landowners of Texas.
11 Hunting in Texas is about a $1.6 billion
12 enterprise; however, about $644 million a year goes into
13 rural economies directly as a result of white-tailed deer
14 hunting in Texas. About half of that is found in the
15 Edward's Plateau, the Piney Woods and south Texas, with
16 fully a quarter of it found in the Edward's Plateau
17 alone.
18 The Triple-T program -- I've placed this slide
19 up to emphasize one point. There has always been some
20 permits issued in this state for trapping and moving
21 animals. Some of them were research related, some were
22 management related, et cetera. However, in 1993, when
23 the Triple-T program was developed by the legislature and
24 implemented by this -- by the Commission, those
25 activities have significantly increased in Texas.
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1 This slide just shows the number of animals
2 moved through the years in the program. The big drop-off
3 there between '97 and '98 was primarily related to our
4 Commission's -- this Commission's actions in requiring
5 that management plans and adequate habitat be identified
6 in release sites before a permit could be approved.
7 Also, the jump there in 2000/2001 is primarily
8 because the Commission has allowed for trivial transfer
9 of animals where it was not particularly a resource issue
10 identified at the time.
11 I mentioned the restoration efforts in Texas
12 briefly. To make -- be a little more clear about that,
13 in 1939, with most of the game species in Texas
14 completely depleted, primarily through unregulated
15 hunting -- market hunting, this Department and its
16 predecessors re-established the white-tailed deer
17 population in Texas by trapping and moving about 31,000
18 deer. It is clearly a good management tool under certain
19 contexts. Since 1993, 38,000 deer have been moved under
20 this program.
21 The map on the left shows the counties in which
22 deer were trapped over the past two years in this
23 program; the map on the right shows the counties in which
24 those deer were released in the same period of time. To
25 put those both on the same map, the yellow counties are
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1 those that served only as trap sites, the green counties
2 served only as release sites, and the red counties served
3 only as -- served both as trap and release sites.
4 The Texas Animal Health Commission went through
5 a fairly extensive exercise in assessing -- in using a
6 risk assessment. It's an unfortunate use of terms
7 perhaps, but that's what it's called: A risk assessment.
8 And that risk assessment involved evaluating the number
9 of white-tailed, mule deer and elk known to have been
10 brought into the state of Texas and where they were
11 brought and the population size of the receiving
12 counties.
13 These 14 counties were basically outliers; they
14 were so high on the priority list that they were
15 identified specifically for the purpose of alerting both
16 us and the Animal Health Commission that regardless of
17 what sampling we do in Texas, we need to sample those
18 counties for sure.
19 Their total risk analysis included about 84
20 counties, no more than 64 of which I consider to have a
21 significant value in that evaluation. And these are
22 those 64 counties.
23 The particular impact of Triple-T in a
24 relationship to this assessment is shown on these two
25 maps. Basically, the left-hand map is identifying the
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1 counties that were identified both in the risk assessment
2 and identified as trap counties. The map on the right
3 shows where the deer that were trapped in those counties
4 were released. This represented about 2,200 animals over
5 the two-year period of time, which was about a quarter of
6 all the deer that were moved in Texas over those two
7 years.
8 We held four public hearings to address the
9 specific proposal of withdrawing white-tailed and mule
10 deer from the Triple-T program. They were in La Grange,
11 Cotulla, Kerrville, and San Antonio.
12 117 people attended those. The vast majority
13 were either opposed to the proposal outright or proposed
14 to it as it was written. I might want to clarify, too,
15 that everyone who had participated in a Triple-T permit
16 on either side over the past two years were delivered a
17 specific invitation to come to these hearings to be sure
18 that those who would be regulated by any potential change
19 would have an opportunity to comment.
20 Also, we received other comments by e-mail;
21 most of those were in support of the proposal as it was
22 written. We also received significant objection to the
23 proposal or -- opposition to the proposal, shall I say,
24 from the city of Lakeway, the city of Hollywood Park,
25 Fair Oaks and Horseshoe Bay specifically. These are the
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1 four major communities in the state of Texas that use the
2 Triple-T program to remove deer from their communities.
3 This is another issue, and this was the primary
4 reason we brought together the Triple-T task force, which
5 has been very useful to us in the past in solving very
6 prickly issues. We laid this specific proposal before
7 them, and there was considerable discussion. They're a
8 very professional group; I applaud them on their ability
9 to sit quietly and listen to everyone else's views
10 despite their particular feelings on those issues.
11 And as the initial sweep around the table took
12 place, it went all the way from, "We support this 100
13 percent," to, "We oppose it 100 percent," but, through
14 conversation and through discussion by the group, they
15 came to at the time a consensus proposal or
16 recommendation to this Commission.
17 Basically, their recommendation was this: Do
18 not remove white-tailed or mule deer from the program;
19 however, in order to qualify for a trapping permit, there
20 should be some testing on the site where trapping is to
21 take place during the hunting season immediately
22 preceding the issuance of the permit.
23 The recommendation to the Committee was that
24 this test be the number equivalent to 10 percent of the
25 number of deer that would be moved under the program;
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1 however, this number should be no less than ten to allow
2 for a significant test; however, it need not be more than
3 40 lest it weight down our own sampling efforts in the
4 state. If any positive CWD case were found in any of
5 these tests, the permit would be denied.
6 And all animals moved would be tattooed with
7 identification for identification purposes, perhaps
8 linking it to a specific permit number, for example, so
9 that if any cases appeared elsewhere, we'd have some
10 trace-back method to follow up with further research.
11 Also, because of some concern about the fact
12 that Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostics Laboratory is
13 in its first year of using its new immuno-histochemistry
14 [phonetic] testing facilities, that perhaps a backlog of
15 testing or a failure of equipment, et cetera, could
16 needlessly interrupt the issuance of a permit that might
17 otherwise be issued.
18 The recommendation of the committee was that if
19 samples were provided by December 10, as an example, that
20 would allow five weeks previous to a January 15 decision
21 date so that if, for whatever reason, those samples were
22 not completely tested by the January 15 date, perhaps the
23 permit should be issued, anyway. And that was the
24 conclusion and recommendation of the committee that I
25 brought to you.
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1 And basically, that is my presentation. And I
2 will be happy to try to answer any question that you may
3 have at this time on these issues.
4 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Jerry, how are things
5 going with the diagnostic lab? Are they keeping up with
6 whatever?
7 MR. COOKE: The numbers of samples are very,
8 very small. I'm only aware of -- now, the facility, you
9 know, was set up to handle scrapie diagnosis, as well.
10 It's useful in all of these avenues. As far as I know,
11 we've submitted nine samples and there has been 23 other
12 deer sample submissions by others that have gone through
13 their facility.
14 So who knows? They have advised me that they
15 believe that from the time they put their hands on a
16 fresh brain stem, they can have a test out in two weeks;
17 if they put their hands on an already preserved brain
18 stem, it's much, much shorter. They think that they
19 could handle up to 100 or 150 samples per day without
20 stressing their staff or equipment too much, but, again,
21 that has not been tested.
22 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: But they're confident
23 that they can handle what's coming their way?
24 MR. COOKE: Yes, sir.
25 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: All right.
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1 Any other questions?
2 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Yes.
3 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Ramos.
4 MR. COOKE: Yes, sir?
5 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Jerry, based on the
6 historical movement of deer within Texas, do you have an
7 estimate of how many animals would actually be tested if
8 we implemented this program?
9 MR. COOKE: I'm sorry. I didn't prepare that,
10 to be very frank with you. I think -- I'm going to guess
11 here, since we were talking about 2,200 animals in a
12 previous slide over a two-year period, 1,000 or 1,500
13 animals times 10 percent.
14 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Okay. Did I --
15 MR. COOKE: We're not talking a big number.
16 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Did I understand you to
17 say that we would be compelled to grant a TTT permit if
18 for some reason the lab could not do the testing of the
19 animal?
20 MR. COOKE: That --
21 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: That would be mandatory?
22 MR. COOKE: That was the recommendation. That
23 was the recommendation of the committee to this
24 Commission.
25 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: But it seems to me at
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1 least -- my philosophy is that either we test or we get
2 the test; otherwise, we perpetuate that uncertainty of
3 movement. But do you know the rationale behind saying
4 irrespective of the testing, we would be compelled to
5 grant a permit?
6 MR. COOKE: Just what I said: That there was
7 concern about whether or not -- in other words, if a
8 landowner were interested enough to go to the trouble of
9 taking samples from their own property and submitting
10 them to the lab in a timely fashion -- this is no
11 different than we do, for instance, in applying for a
12 Triple-T permit.
13 If you submit your application by such-and-such
14 a date, we guarantee you a turn-around time. And if you
15 wait later than that, we don't guarantee a turn-around
16 time.
17 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Right. I guess my concern
18 is that as -- forget CWD. But as it is now, no one is
19 really guaranteed a TTT permit.
20 MR. COOKE: Correct.
21 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: And I -- the way I heard
22 you was that we would guarantee someone a TTT permit.
23 MR. COOKE: Oh. That -- I don't believe that
24 was the intent of the committee at all.
25 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Okay.
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1 MR. COOKE: I think what -- the intent of the
2 committee was that we allow the application process to
3 take place, and if we were otherwise going to approve a
4 permit and would hesitate to approve it because of a lack
5 of testing, then this mechanism would then trigger a
6 reconsideration of that. It would not be a guarantee of
7 a Triple-T permit, only within the context of whether or
8 not all the samples were completely tested.
9 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Well, was there any
10 discussion that perhaps -- at a minimum, in instances
11 where you could not get the tests back, perhaps one or
12 two tests would be done as compared to the 30 or 40 as
13 per the formula? In other words, you would have to have
14 some testing even if it's only one, two or three animals?
15 MR. COOKE: That would be up to the Commission
16 to determine if there was some test less rigorous than
17 what was -- what they recommended.
18 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: But only in the event that
19 you could not -- for some reason, the lab couldn't --
20 MR. COOKE: Yes.
21 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: -- have the turn-around?
22 MR. COOKE: Yes. I understand.
23 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Angelo?
24 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Mr. Chairman, with -- in
25 that regard, I think it's -- it would be inadvisable for
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1 us to put that provision in this until it has been proven
2 that we can't meet the testing requirements, because I
3 think it just -- as Commissioner Ramos just mentioned, it
4 just opens the door to further questions about whether or
5 not we're taking care of the problem. So I would -- I'd
6 strongly recommend that we not put that provision in it.
7 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Let me just mention one
8 thing. I feel philosophically that we have an extremely
9 valuable resource in this state. And to the extent that
10 there's uncertainty within the state as to CWD, it seems
11 to me that we need to address it as quickly as possible
12 and do the adequate testing. And perhaps the samples
13 should be submitted as early as next month. I mean --
14 MR. COOKE: Oh. There -- that was also part of
15 the discussion. That was basically why the dates were
16 included in the recommendation, because if you said,
17 "Well, you know, if you can't get them done, then all the
18 samples would go in January 1," which --
19 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: I'm sure what they're
20 concerned about is we can't meet the requirements that
21 the testing be accomplished, I mean that they provide the
22 samples and we don't get them tested. But I think
23 there's -- you don't have any evidence that that's going
24 to be a problem. And until there is proof that it's a
25 problem, I don't think we should put that in there.
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1 MR. COOKE: Well, I also want to clarify that
2 these tests would be done at the landowner's expense, not
3 at ours.
4 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Good.
5 MR. COOKE: So they wouldn't be submitting them
6 to us, but directly to TVMDL.
7 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: That was -- the
8 purpose of my first question was that there's no -- they
9 feel confident --
10 MR. COOKE: Yes.
11 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: -- that the
12 diagnostics can be done.
13 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: So there's no use tying
14 our hands in that regard at this point.
15 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: I would agree.
16 Commissioner Montgomery?
17 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Two questions on the
18 methodology. Is there any concept in there of time line
19 between testing and shipping?
20 MR. COOKE: In what regard?
21 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Well, in regard to
22 when you test the population, you have a statistically
23 valid sample of the population at that time --
24 MR. COOKE: Oh. I understand.
25 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: -- and you don't
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1 wait --
2 MR. COOKE: I understand.
3 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: -- six months.
4 MR. COOKE: Ten percent would actually be less
5 than what would be considered to be an adequate sample to
6 absolutely diagnostically -- in other words, we're
7 testing the state of Texas at a rate to detect a 2
8 percent incidence, but we intend to be accumulating those
9 samples over a number of years.
10 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: I'm talking about the
11 potential lag time between the time of testing and the
12 time of shipping.
13 MR. COOKE: Oh.
14 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Is there any need to
15 build in any concept of time?
16 MR. COOKE: I personally don't believe so. I
17 mean, most of the movement of deer under the Triple-T
18 program is after the hunting season's over; they don't
19 normally trap deer in the season.
20 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: But if the testing is
21 done within that calendar year, or that quarter or that
22 six months --
23 MR. COOKE: Oh. I see what you're saying.
24 We -- the context that was used in the discussion was to
25 use animals taken during the normal hunting season on the
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1 property immediately prior to the actual trapping.
2 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Oh. Okay.
3 MR. COOKE: Now, we're not granting permission
4 to go kill deer outside of the season.
5 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Then I think you've
6 answered my second question --
7 MR. COOKE: Okay.
8 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: -- which was, Is
9 there a concept in there that the animals tested come
10 from the same source and you don't have a pool that
11 you're shipping where 10 percent -- animals came from one
12 place and 90 came from another?
13 MR. COOKE: No. They should be coming from the
14 trap site specifically. That was --
15 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Under that
16 methodology, how do we monitor that?
17 MR. COOKE: Well, it would be difficult to
18 monitor except accepting the word of the landowner that
19 was involved. I mean, there's a certain amount of
20 boldness to a landowner who will sample from his own
21 property test for that and a certain amount of trust
22 involved in how that information would be used. And I
23 think there should be some reciprocal trust in that
24 regard. That's a personal view, though.
25 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Certainly.
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1 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Ramos?
2 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: One more question.
3 Jerry, the window for the actual movement of
4 the deer is March 1 through --
5 MR. COOKE: Actually, our -- the current window
6 for Triple-T is October 1 through March 31. In reality,
7 most people start applying, you know, in August and
8 September and October with no intention of moving animals
9 until after the hunting season is over.
10 So in this particular context, if you were to
11 adopt such a thing as requiring testing for a final
12 approval of the permit, in actuality it would have very
13 little impact on the actual activity; however, there's a
14 lot of planning that's involved in that in scheduling
15 helicopters and those kinds of things.
16 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Well, what I was wondering
17 is: For those breeders or those individuals who are
18 testing who could not meet the March 31 deadline, would
19 there be anything wrong in extending that window, let's
20 say, through April?
21 MR. COOKE: That --
22 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Would there be any impact
23 to do that to ensure that they could get their testing
24 done?
25 MR. COOKE: That March 31 cut-off is a
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1 biological issue.
2 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Okay.
3 MR. COOKE: By that time, fetuses have reached
4 the point where handling animals roughly, as you do in a
5 normal trapping operation, could have a detrimental
6 welfare effect on deer. All of our opening and closing
7 windows for trapping is based on those kinds of things,
8 biological ones; it's not an arbitrary date at all.
9 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: So we shouldn't mess with
10 that?
11 MR. COOKE: I would not recommend that we mess
12 with that, primarily because it accommodates the welfare
13 issues that are of concern to others who otherwise would
14 simply oppose trapping and moving of deer at all, in my
15 opinion.
16 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Thank you.
17 MR. COOK: Jerry, as I recall, the issue of the
18 testing -- you know, the, "Get your samples in by
19 December 10" -- you know, that issue came up, again,
20 because of this concern about a possible backlog and not
21 knowing just exactly how, you know, efficient that lab --
22 MR. COOKE: Right.
23 MR. COOK: -- at A&M is going to be and the
24 fact that USDA has priority over our samples.
25 MR. COOKE: That's right.
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1 MR. COOK: There are other people who submit
2 samples to this laboratory that they have to work.
3 MR. COOKE: That's correct.
4 MR. COOK: So we tried to reach a reasonable --
5 the group, the task force, you know, tried to find a
6 reasonable offer there. And we certainly -- you know,
7 it's --
8 MR. COOKE: That's correct, Bob. And I
9 appreciate you bringing that up, because the USDA funded
10 all of the equipment and the training for the facility at
11 TVMDL. And I guess they're just old-fashioned enough to
12 want to have priority over their equipment, and so I
13 don't know to what degree that would be.
14 But this testing facility at A&M is not a Texas
15 testing facility; it's a regional testing facility for
16 USDA. And their samples would in fact, you know, move
17 ahead of Texas local sampling in the queue.
18 Thank you, Bob. That's another main reason
19 that this was discussed.
20 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you.
21 MR. COOK: Also, I think it's important for the
22 Commission -- I wanted to advise the Commission that I
23 have received a couple of contacts since the Thursday
24 meeting. There are a couple of the folks for sure within
25 the task force who are concerned about this agreement
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1 that was reached on Thursday and have expressed that
2 concern. And I think they'll be at our session tomorrow
3 and can speak to that.
4 And I'll, you know, recommend that -- I'll not
5 try to express their concerns other than that the bottom
6 line is that in thinking it through, in retrospect, they
7 would prefer that the Triple-T permit be left open as it
8 is, no testing and none of the requirements that we're
9 talking about here. And that's important.
10 The task force -- I thought and, I think, all
11 of us who were present thought that the point reached
12 between suspending Triple-T and continuing to allow
13 Triple-T under something around the conditions as
14 discussed here and as proposed -- and by the way, we had
15 four of their folks -- I believe it was four of the
16 folks -- on the task force help with the exact wording of
17 how it was done. And that has all been run through, and
18 we'll continue to work with them closely.
19 But it was a very helpful and very productive
20 session. I think we all agreed on that and still do --
21 that that approach is a good approach to addressing these
22 kinds of issues. But since the meeting, I think it is
23 important that the Commission knows that there has been
24 some reconsideration in the group. And I think you will
25 hear that tomorrow.
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1 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Commissioner Angelo?
2 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Bob, I don't want to
3 belabor the point too much, but I do think that it's --
4 if we feel that the testing is a legitimate requirement,
5 which, obviously, you do, then to waive it just because
6 there's a thought that the testing might not get
7 accomplished, I think, would be a mistake. I want to
8 reiterate that.
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Well, it's not
10 logical. It's not consistent with what you're -- no. I
11 think you're right. And, also, we don't know. Until we
12 start running some tests through, we don't know.
13 Chairman?
14 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: I want to ask Bob some
15 follow-up questions to his comment. I was present at the
16 task force meeting, but I did not -- was not able to stay
17 for the entire thing, and I can characterize what I saw
18 for the time I was there. But I think it's important
19 that we all recognize that this was a group that
20 represented a broad spectrum of interest in this issue,
21 and I want to be sure we understand that we're working
22 together on this thing.
23 Bob, do you feel that the task force covered
24 the necessary ground, aired the concerns that should be
25 aired and worked together to come up with a justifiable,
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1 reasonable and helpful solution?
2 MR. COOK: Absolutely. I -- and I -- again, I
3 think -- Jerry touched on this, but I want to reemphasize
4 it. You know, right at the start of the meeting, it was
5 clear that -- you know, we had -- I forget the exact
6 number, but -- 12 to 15 folks present at the meeting from
7 this task force.
8 And when we first went around the table, there
9 were clearly about five or so that were saying, you know,
10 I think we ought to suspend this; We just don't know
11 enough; We're concerned about it. And then there was a
12 group of about equal number saying, Look, this is a great
13 tool; This is a tool that's very helpful to us; It's
14 important to us; There are areas and issues that this
15 tool helps us address problems and needs, and we'd like
16 to retain it as is.
17 And so we kind of started from there, as you
18 know. And you were present for that. And throughout the
19 meeting, I -- and this suggestion, the basics -- quite
20 frankly, the basics of this suggestion came from one of
21 the outside members of this task force that made these
22 suggestions.
23 And we kind of worked to get their -- and as
24 Dr. Cook has characterized and accurately so, there were
25 some concerns about the testing schedule and this, that
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1 and the other. And I think they did a good job of
2 addressing that to come forward with a very helpful
3 recommendation and this whole study, this whole effort,
4 to learn more about our situation.
5 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Yes. I want to just
6 express that I hope that the task force continues in the
7 future to work together on these kinds of issues; I think
8 it's critical that they do. I also want to commend the
9 members of the task force for an exemplary example of
10 leadership. This is a sensitive issue that requires firm
11 and steady leadership, and that is what I'm seeing from
12 the different groups and individuals involved. I don't
13 have anything else to say.
14 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Well, if there are no
15 further questions or discussion, without objection, I'll
16 place this item on the Thursday Commission meeting agenda
17 for public comment and action.
18 MR. COOKE: Mr. Chairman, if I might?
19 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Yes, Jerry.
20 MR. COOKE: On the last agenda item, the
21 scientific breeder, there were three items that we lay
22 before you with the possibility of publishing them for
23 public comment. Could I have some direction on that?
24 Should we publish those proposals --
25 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Yes.
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1 MR. COOKE: -- for a January consideration?
2 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Yes.
3 MR. COOKE: Thank you.
4 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Now, the Number 7 on
5 our agenda, the Future of Hunting Plan, has been
6 withdrawn and moved to tomorrow. And next is Doug
7 Humphreys' CWD update briefing. We're right on the
8 subject.
9 MR. HUMPHREYS: I love the lead-in to this.
10 Mr. Chairman and Commissioners, I am Doug Humphreys, the
11 Assistant Game Branch Chief of Texas Parks and Wildlife.
12 With me today is Dr. Ken Waldrup from the Texas Animal
13 Health Commission. Dr. Jerry Cooke from our department
14 will also be here to answer questions later. I do want
15 to recognize Commissioner Jill Wood from the Texas Animal
16 Health Commission; she is also in the audience today and
17 attending this session.
18 I'll present the Texas chronic wasting disease
19 management plan for sampling. The management plan
20 describes the process for decision making and provides
21 information about chronic wasting disease. It's a
22 comprehensive management approach to reduce the threat of
23 the disease to the free-ranging and game farm susceptible
24 species and effectively manage against CWD should it
25 emerge within the state.
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1 Jurisdiction. The Texas Animal Health
2 Commission and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department each
3 have jurisdiction for their respective regulatory
4 responsibilities: Texas Animal Health Commission for
5 animal health issues with alternative livestock
6 producers, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for
7 management responsibility for free-ranging service. CWD
8 knows no political boundaries, potentially affecting both
9 public and private property.
10 There is ongoing targeted surveillance for
11 clinical deer on a statewide basis. Thus far since June,
12 nine have been collected, and all were negative; 23 other
13 deer have been sampled, and all negative. And Texas
14 Animal Health Commission has sampled four white-tailed
15 deer and seven elk from the voluntary monitoring program
16 which is in place, and all were negative.
17 Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is
18 expecting to sample between 1,500 and 2,000 deer from
19 public hunts on WMAs and state parks and cooperating
20 landowners this fall. This sampling will provide
21 information from many regions of the state. If a
22 positive deer is detected, an area large enough to detect
23 three additional positives if 2 percent of the herd were
24 infected would be sampled. If more positives are
25 detected in that sample, additional sampling would be
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1 necessary to determine the distribution and the
2 prevalence of the disease.
3 The "X" would be the location of a positive.
4 The circle is the area surrounding the positive to be
5 sampled. The diameter of the circle from which 150
6 samples can be collected may be eight miles in Kerr
7 County and could be 16 miles in Colorado County, as
8 examples.
9 Contingency plans to control the spread of
10 chronic wasting disease include evaluation of the system
11 where the positive was detected, determining herd
12 attributes or physical barriers which may limit
13 distribution of animals and, therefore, the disease.
14 Strategies for possible treatment following sampling will
15 be discussed and reviewed with the TTTMLDP task force.
16 I just have to say that many people from both
17 Texas Animal Health Commission and Texas Parks and
18 Wildlife have provided assistance to Dr. Waldrup and me
19 toward developing the plan. And do you have any
20 questions?
21 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you for your
22 work.
23 Does anybody have any questions on this
24 briefing item?
25 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Dr. Waldrup, thank
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1 you for being here today. Are -- do you have any
2 comments that you want to add to the presentation just
3 made or elaborate on any of the comments made?
4 DR. WALDRUP: If I may backtrack to Dr. Cooke's
5 presentation before with regard to lab space?
6 Texas is actually very fortunate in that our
7 Amarillo lab is due to come online to also start CWD
8 testing. The projected date for initiating that is
9 December 1. Don't hold that -- don't set that in
10 concrete just yet. But we would be the only state really
11 with two labs functioning.
12 And I think there were legitimate concerns from
13 last year, when all of the testing was done at the
14 national lab in Ames, Iowa. Some of the results were
15 backed up three or three-and-a-half months. But I'm
16 actually very confident especially when you have two labs
17 online that we can get results certainly within three
18 weeks.
19 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: That's encouraging.
20 DR. WALDRUP: I'm sorry. Now back to your
21 question.
22 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: I have a question. And
23 you're always cautioned not to ask your question if you
24 don't know the answer, but I'm going to take that risk
25 right now. Are you comfortable with the Triple-TTT plan
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1 to go ahead and submit and get the Triple-T permit paper
2 work in order and then wait and see until January what we
3 find? Are you comfortable with the plan as articulated
4 earlier by Dr. Cooke?
5 DR. WALDRUP: Madam Chairman, yes, I am. I
6 think that any plan that gives us additional surveillance
7 is certainly positive, and it's a positive all the way
8 around. I think that part of the question posed to the
9 TTTMLDP group was, Okay, nobody's opposed to testing;
10 It's just how much.
11 And again, at this point in time, if we assume
12 that there's not a widespread CWD problem in Texas, I
13 think that the numbers that were put forth are certainly
14 adequate; if we find we have a problem, then we'll need
15 to adjust that. And that would sort of be -- my
16 professional comment toward the Triple-T situation is
17 that should we find we have a problem -- and that's not
18 actually just limited to CWD, tuberculosis and even
19 anthrax at a given time, any disease problem that could
20 be potentiated from one place to another -- I think the
21 Triple-T has to be re-evaluated.
22 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Thank you.
23 DR. WALDRUP: But I am confident that the
24 testing as proposed by this group is good.
25 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Thank you.
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1 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any other questions?
2 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: Well, just a comment.
3 Based on what you said, Doctor, it seems to me
4 then that perhaps -- if we're already testing for CWD,
5 perhaps we should expand it and test for TB, I mean,
6 while they're there. And I'm not suggesting we do that
7 now, but there's a vehicle there where we could do
8 extensive testing if we felt it would be necessary.
9 DR. WALDRUP: Commissioner, we're actually
10 incorporating that CW -- I'm sorry -- the TB testing in
11 with our scientific breeders. For example, when -- if a
12 scientific breeder submits an entire head to the lab,
13 they are checking for TB, as well.
14 Fortunately, with TB -- many of you know Dr.
15 Dan Baca with my agency. Dan started a program four
16 years ago on selected wildlife management areas and
17 selected private areas specifically looking for TB, and
18 we have necropsies of over a thousand animals and to date
19 have found no TB whatsoever. So we're already really a
20 step ahead in that game.
21 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any other questions?
22 Thank you for that briefing.
23 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: I just want to reiterate
24 that what we really want to do here is take care of the
25 deer herds of Texas in a reasonable, responsible way and
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93
1 work with the interested parties to get there. Thank
2 you.
3 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Thank you, gentlemen.
4 DR. WALDRUP: Thank you.
5 MR. HUMPHREYS: Thank you, Commissioners.
6 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Any other business
7 before the Regulations Committee?
8 (No response.)
9 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: I know this is
10 everybody's favorite committee and we'd like to take the
11 whole day, but, hearing none, a motion to adjourn the
12 Regulations Committee at 11:20?
13 COMMISSIONER RISING: Motion.
14 COMMISSIONER RAMOS: I'll second.
15 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: All in favor, aye.
16 (A chorus of ayes.)
17 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And --
18 CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Thank you, Commissioner
19 Fitzsimons.
20 (SESSION ENDS.)
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94
1 C E R T I F I C A T E
2 MEETING OF: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department
3 Regulations Committee
4 LOCATION: Austin, Texas
5 DATE: November 6, 2002
6 I do hereby certify that the foregoing pages,
7 numbers 1 through 94, inclusive, are the true, accurate,
8 and complete transcript prepared from the verbal
9 recording made by electronic recording by Penny Bynum
10 before the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
11 12/10/02
12 (Transcriber) (Date)
13 On the Record Reporting, Inc.
14 3307 Northland, Suite 315
15 Austin, Texas 78731
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