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Game and Fish in good position to mitigate increasing costs

By
Mark Davis with the Powell Tribune, from the Wyoming News Exchange

POWELL — Due to inflation, the 2023 Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s budget is in flux. However, despite the rising cost of fuel, vehicles, employee benefits and construction materials, the department is well positioned to absorb the higher costs and continue its wildlife conservation and law enforcement efforts with few changes. 
At a meeting in Cody last week, the Game and Fish Commission gave unanimous approval to a preliminary budget that calls for the department to spend about $90.6 million in the coming fiscal year, which starts July 1 and runs through June 30, 2023. The budget is up from roughly $85 million of spending that was authorized in fiscal year 2022. 
The department doesn’t receive funding from the state’s general fund but wanted to support Gov. Mark Gordon in the effort to address state funding shortfalls, said deputy director John Kennedy. 
“When the governor asked all the agencies to take a hard look at their budget, we did the same thing. And we in fact, made cuts at that time,” Kennedy said in a Monday interview. 
Going into the 2023 budget, the Game and Fish wanted to keep its budget flat, with some exceptions. 
Officials looked at the programs they thought important to restore — like maintenance of department housing, offices, flights for determining wildlife population status and appropriate harvest levels, and trying to stay competitive with salaries for contract and seasonal employees. 
“Salaries for our contract and temporary employees were not competitive at all,” Kennedy said. “We couldn’t recruit for those positions.” 
On top of the priorities, department leaders were forced to look at inflationary costs while preparing the preliminary budget for next year. Inflation has cost the department for several years, Kennedy said. 
“In past years when we’ve been flat, that’s actually been a budget reduction, because we never factored in inflationary costs,” he said.
But this year is different. The department had no choice but to increase the operating budget in an effort to account for inflation. It factored in a 5% increase for property taxes, a 3% increase for flights, 3% for feed hay and 2% for utilities. 
Then there are vehicles and fuel costs. While preparing the budget, the department didn’t foresee just how much transportation costs would go up. 
“Obviously, fuel is … more insane than we probably predicted here,” said Millissa Raner, while running through preliminary figures during the commission’s meeting in Cody. 
Meanwhile, semiconductor chip shortages and supply chain problems have helped cause prices for both new and used vehicles to skyrocket. 
Regardless of price, the department has had a hard time simply finding vehicles to purchase, Kennedy said. Add in fuel costs — which have gone up about 38% — and it’s almost impossible to forecast an operating budget nine months out. 
Kennedy sounded certain that the Game and Fish will need to revisit the figures as costs become more clear. 
“It’s likely that during this fiscal year we’ll need to go back to our commission and talk to them about increasing the budget,” he said. 
The 2022 operations budget was about $81.3 million. But, the preliminary budget for 2023 is about $85.3 million; an increase of slightly more than $3.9 million. 
One-time expenses, not included in the operating budget, should come to about $5.2 million in 2023. 
Special programs funded by one-time expenditures include mule deer and pronghorn conservation efforts and hatchery improvements and repairs. Add the two together and the total department budget for next year is about $90.6 million. 
On a positive note, the projections call for more than $102.4 million in revenue for 2023. Those include sportsperson fees, licenses and tags (65%); federal aid in the form of taxes collected from the Pittman–Robertson Act, which collects taxes from the sale of hunting equipment, and the Dingell-Johnson Act, which collects taxes from the sale of fishing supplies (combined 21%); grants (6%); and interest (3%), plus a few other small sources. 
Kennedy has warned in the past that revenue streams are inconsistent because the number of hunting and fishing licenses sold can vary significantly from year to year. 
For decades, the number of hunters in the U.S. has steadily dwindled and that’s “led to a loss of conservation funding at state wildlife agencies,” according to a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center. 
Wyoming was one of the few states in the nation to see a consistent increase in hunting and fishing license sales over the past decade. 
But now, officials in nearly every state are reporting a moderate-to-massive spike in hunting, as people turned to the outdoors to find recreation while still mitigating the effects of COVID-19. The pandemic was a boon for most states and retail stores found it hard to keep outdoor equipment on the shelves. 
“Movie theaters, sporting events and other entertainment options shut down. Kayaks and bicycles flew off the shelves. Record numbers of hikers trekked through state parks,” Pew reported. 
The thousands of new hunters came as a surprise. It’s not the sort of activity that’s easy to pick up quickly. 
But fuel costs were at some of the lowest prices in the decade, and only time will tell how higher prices will affect outdoors enthusiasts. 
Any surplus is placed in the commission’s operating budget to be used for emergency projects and other unforeseen costs. If revenue 2023 projections pan out, the surplus would bring the total in the commission’s operations fund to about $20 million, according to Raner. 
Kennedy said the one-time operations fund is important for major projects like the new Cody regional office. 
“We wouldn’t be able to do that if the commission didn’t have these monies set aside in their operating fund,” he said. 
In addition to the fund, the commission holds reserves equivalent to six or seven months of operating expenses in a trust for future use. It created the savings after the Game and Fish stopped receiving allocations from the state’s general fund. 
The department previously received $800,000 from the state each year to defer the costs of free and reduced price tags. But the department has been returning the funds to help the state with recent deficits. 
The department’s budget will be finalized in July.
 
This story was published on March 31, 2022.

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