By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
By a split vote on Monday, the New Mexico State Game Commission opted not to explore new options for distributing the state’s bighorn sheep tags to benefit resident hunters.
Commissioner Roberta Salazar-Henry proposed that New Mexico Department of Game and Fish staffers meet with interested groups and individuals over coming weeks to try to craft alternatives to continuing with the bighorn management approach the state has followed since 2014.
Salazar-Henry said she wanted to explore whether some bighorn hunts could be limited to New Mexico residents only, while others could be left open to outfitted hunters and nonresidents. Currently, all bighorn ram hunts are open to residents, outfitted hunters and nonresidents.
Salazar-Henry as well as Commissioner Deanna Archuleta and Commissioner Tirzio Lopez voted in favor of considering new options for bighorn management. However, Commission Chair Sharon Salazar Hickey voted against it, killing the suggestion, which needed four votes to pass.
The game commission has seven seats, even though it only has five appointed members currently. Commission Vice Chair Jimmy Bates was absent from Monday’s meeting in Santa Fe. Salazar Hickey said passing a measure requires at least four votes – the majority of the seven – despite the vacancies.
The New Mexico Wildlife Federation and other organizations for years have criticized the state’s practice of lumping all Rocky Mountain ram tags into a single hunt code while lumping all desert ram tags into another hunt code. The state has followed that approach since 2014, when bighorns came under the state’s quota law.
New Mexico’s quota law specifies that residents must receive a minimum of 84 percent of the tags for each hunt. The law reserves 10 percent for residents or nonresidents who have contracted with an outfitter and 6 percent for nonresidents who haven’t contracted with an outfitter.
In order to have enough tags to give New Mexico residents the required minimum of 84 percent and still have a tag left over for an outfitted hunter, a specific hunt must have a minimum of seven tags. And in order to give a tag to a nonresident hunter who hasn’t contracted with an outfitter, a hunt must have at least 13 tags.
But by lumping all the tags together under single hunt codes, the commission effectively ignores the state law definition of “hunt code,” which states it must specify the species, weapon type and time frame for a specific hunt. The bighorn and desert ram hunts are spread out over several months and many are hundreds of miles apart.
Salazar-Henry said at the commission’s March meeting in Socorro that she wanted a legal opinion from the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office whether the commission’s approach to bighorn tags was legal. Rep. Nathan Small, D-Las Cruces, later filed a request for a formal AG’s Opinion on the matter.
The AG’s Office issued a legal opinion last week concluding that the game commission’s approach to issuing bighorn tags is legal. The opinion states that the game department must follow state law by giving 84 percent of the tags for each license draw to residents, 10 percent to outfitted hunters and 6 percent to nonresidents.
However, the game commission commonly fails to allocate licenses to all three categories of hunters in its draw procedure for other species, including elk and oryx.
The NMWF and other critics have urged the game commission to ask the New Mexico State Legislature to address the quota law rather than continue to lump the bighorn tags together.
Chair Salazar Hickey said she was concerned that the game department already has held public meetings about its suggestion that the game commission continue with its existing practice of lumping all the tags together under single hunt codes for the next four years of the bighorn rule. She said considering something else would likely delay adoption of the sheep rule.
Stewart Liley, biologist with the game department, said the game commission could hear any new suggestions in June and then publish them before voting on them again in August.
Salazar-Henry noted that the game commission isn’t scheduled to finalize the elk rule until October. That timetable would still give time to get the hunts approved under the rule into the annual regulation and information booklet that the game department publishes at the end of the year.
Albuquerque hunter Brandon Wynn had urged the commission to set aside sheep hunting that’s anticipated to open up in the Jemez for New Mexico residents only.
When Salazar-Henry’s proposal to consider other options failed to pass, Wynn spoke from the audience, telling Chair Salazar Hickey, “You did not listen to the public, it’s shameful.”
In other action, the game commission also heard from game department biologist Liley as he discussed the pending four-year management rules for a range of species, including elk, deer, antelope and javelina.
The game commission is proceeding to consider a new four-year rule for elk management in the state without considering the state’s Elk Private Land Use System which controls the distribution of nearly 40 percent of the state’s elk licenses to private landowners.
Under EPLUS, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish issues permit authorizations to private landowners who have properties in elk habitat. Landowners commonly sell the authorizations for thousands of dollars to hunters. Some authorizations limit hunting to the landowner’s private property but others allow hunting anywhere in a game management unit, including on public lands.
In cases where hunters hunt public lands with a unit-wide permit they’ve purchased through the EPLUS system, they compete for elk meat and trophies with state residents who have drawn elk licenses through the public license draw system.
In late 2020, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Finance Committee staff recommended that the game commission make sweeping changes to EPLUS to bring elk management in the state in line with neighboring states that commonly reserve 90 percent of all elk licenses for state residents.
The NMWF and other conservation groups have urged the game commission to address EPLUS as it considers the future of elk hunting in the state. Salazar-Hickey has said the commission won’t open the EPLUS rule for discussion.
Ray Trejo, southern New Mexico outreach coordinator for the NMWF, testified that there’s no way the game commission can make informed decisions about elk management without weighing EPLUS. He noted that the the roughly 13,000 tags that go into the program annually represents about same number as the population of Luna County, where he lives in Deming.
Liley said the game department is recommending that the commission disallow the use of scope sights on muzzleloaders. He said the success rates of using scoped muzzleloaders are equivalent to using centerfire rifles due to recent improvements in muzzleloader technology.
Liley said the state expects to allow limited hunting for Gould’s turkey in coming years. The turkey has been on the state endangered species list since 1974, he said.
The state will likely limit hunting of the Gould’s turkey to once-in-a-lifetime, Liley said. He said he expects the state will allow hunting of between 30 to 40 birds a year.