18 minute read
2024 TBYE New Mexico Elk Hunting License Allocation Report
A Report on New Mexico's Elk Hunting License Allocation Practices
In 2022, the New Mexico Wildlife Federation(NMWF) and the New Mexico Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (NMBHA) released a groundbreaking report titled “Take Back Your Elk.” Looking at data from the 2020-2021 elk season, the report documented for the first time exactly how New Mexico’s system of allocating elk licenses benefits wealthy nonresidents and private interests at the expense of state residents.
Now the NMWF and NMBHA, in collaboration with Hispanics Enjoying Camping, Hunting and the Outdoors (HECHO) and Hunters of Color (HOC), have obtained information about the allocation of elk licenses in the 2022-23 elk season. The new results showed essentially no change since the first report on how the state allocates elk licenses.
Data Analysis by Brandon Wynn
Graphic Design by Mango Moon Media
Cover photo:
Bull Elk at Sunrise, Getty Images
New Mexico has a truly rotten, unfair system of elk management. The state treats hunters who apply through the public draw without hiring an outfitter worse than in any other state in the West.
The problem persists because the public officials who have the power to change New Mexico’s system of elk management – specifically the members of the State Game Commission and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham – refuse to fix it.
The governor and her hand-appointed game commissioners have ignored conservation organizations and private citizens who have demanded change to New Mexico’s elk license allocation system.
The governor and the commissioners also have ignored the formal calls for change from the New Mexico State Legislature’s Legislative Finance Committee and even Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M, the state’s senior U.S. senator.
The New Mexico Wildlife Federation, the New Mexico Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Hispanics Enjoying Camping, Hunting and the Outdoors and Hunters of Color all see that the state’s unfair system of allocating elk licenses will continue only as long as most everyday New Mexico hunters don’t know what’s going on.
The NMWF, NMBHA, HECHO and HOC are confident that when New Mexican hunters know the score, they will demand wholesale change.
Together, we can Take Back Your Elk.
Table of Contents
Context
Pay to Play: Elk Management in New Mexico
The New Mexico System in a Nutshell
How EPLUS Works
The Problem
Problems With New Mexico's Public License Draw
Only 57 Percent of New Mexico Elk Licenses Are Public
New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Benefits from EPLUS
Obstacles to Change
Game Commission Unresponsive to Demands for Change
State Game Commission Lack Independence
The EPLUS System Makes the State Quota Law a Joke
State Ignores Sen. Heinrich's Call to Reform EPLUS
The Way Forward
Where Things Stand
New Mexico Elk Management Contrary to North American Model
Not On Our Watch
$$$ Pay to Play
Elk Management in New Mexico
Travel the mountains of New Mexico in the fall and you’ll see countless pickups with out-of-state plates hauling camper trailers, ATVs and hunting gear. It’s the season when tens of thousands of nonresident hunters come here and hunt our elk.
Meanwhile, the chances are good that if you’re a New Mexico resident hunter, you and your family have had a tough time in recent years getting elk licenses in the public draw.
Many of us who grew up looking forward to gathering with friends and family in elk camp every fall have seen that event slip away. It’s hard to pass down hunting traditions when families can’t draw a license.
You can’t blame nonresidents for coming to New Mexico. Our state has some of the finest elk hunting in the world and people are willing to pay big bucks to come here and hunt.
But you can, and should, blame the New Mexico public officials who refuse to reform our state’s system of handing out elk licenses. And you must demand change.
The New Mexico System in a Nutshell
New Mexico is the only state in the West that hands a huge number of transferable authorizations straight to landowners. These authorizations allow whoever holds them to buy elk licenses from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish without having to compete in the public license draw. New Mexico calls this the “Elk Private Land Use System” (EPLUS).
Of the 36,008 elk licenses New Mexico issued in the 2022-23 hunting season, 13,639 went directly to landowners through EPLUS. Landowners are free to sell the EPLUS authorizations to the highest bidder. Nonresidents got 10,256 of the EPLUS licenses – over 75 percent of the total. The figures remained essentially unchanged over the past two years.
Of those 13,639 EPLUS licenses issued during the 2022-23 season, 2,704 allowed hunters to hunt on public lands in the entire game management unit in which the landowner’s property is located.
That means that hunters who can afford to pay their way to the front of the line and buy these so-called “unit-wide” EPLUS licenses compete directly on public lands with hunters who drew licenses in the public lottery.
Remember, the landowners don’t own the elk, and they don’t own the public lands. But through EPLUS, they get to sell the right to hunt the public’s elk on public land — and they usually sell it to nonresident hunters.
How EPLUS Works
The EPLUS program was created in recognition of the important benefits that private lands make to the elk populations and hunting opportunities in New Mexico. The program gives hunters and landowners a way to work together to effectively manage and hunt elk on private lands.
-New Mexico Department of Game and Fish
The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish minces its words very carefully in describing EPLUS. It never states flatly that it’s giving landowners authorizations as compensation for the forage that elk eat or the damage they can do to fences.
If the department admitted that it hands out elk license authorizations as compensation, it would be required to undertake the huge administrative task of documenting that it wasn’t overpaying landowners. The “anti-donation clause” of the New Mexico State Constitution generally prohibits giving public property to private individuals.
In addition, the department already maintains a fund supported by all hunters that provides landowners with fencing materials and other support to minimize elk damages to their lands.
Instead, the game department states blandly that, “The EPLUS program was created in recognition of the important benefits that private lands make to the elk populations and hunting opportunities in New Mexico. The program gives hunters and landowners a way to work together to effectively manage and hunt elk on private lands.”
That’s right – the game department would have New Mexico hunters believe that EPLUS is allowing them to “work together” with landowners by giving landowners a huge share of the public’s elk licenses. What the department fails to mention, however, is that if hunters want to work together with landowners through EPLUS, they better remember to bring a fat checkbook.
In addition, New Mexico has a law on the books that allows landowners to kill elk or other wildlife that they maintain is damaging their land. If landowners aren’t happy with what they get out of the EPLUS system, the constant threat is that they’ll shoot down herds of elk. Indeed, some landowners have done so over the years.
Flexible Hunt Schedule
There’s yet another perk that hunters who can afford to buy an EPLUS tag get that doesn’t apply to resident hunters who draw a tag. The EPLUS system allows hunters to specify a block of consecutive days when they want to hunt within an open period of months. The hunt dates for public draw hunts, meanwhile, are set in advance and hunters have no flexibility to change them.
Problems with New Mexico’s Public License Draw
After subtracting the EPLUS licenses, New Mexico had 22,369 licenses left over that were issued in the 2022-23 season through the public draw. Residents and nonresidents alike who rely on the public draw to acquire an opportunity to hunt elk in New Mexico compete in the draw for these remaining licenses.
New Mexico also has a unique “outfitter set-aside” law that reserves 10 percent of the licenses issued through the public draw to hunters who contract with an outfitter before filing their draw application. Nonresidents drew 1,429 of these “outfitter set-aside” licenses (90.2 percent) in the 2022-23 season while residents drew just 155 (9.8 percent).
New Mexico outfitters commonly advertise that hunters have a better chance of drawing a tag if they retain their services. No other state in the West has this type of unnecessary welfare system for its outfitting industry.
Finally, New Mexico sets aside another 6 percent of the elk licenses in the public draw for nonresidents who haven’t retained an outfitter prior to drawing. Of all the nonresidents who hunted in New Mexico in 2022-23, only 935 of those licenses were acquired fairly in the public draw, on equal footing with other do-it-yourself (DIY) public land hunters.
Bottomline for the 2022-23 season: New Mexico issued just over 36,000 elk licenses of all types. Of that number, 23,388 (65 percent) went to residents and 12,620 (35 percent) went to nonresidents.
Only 57 Percent of New Mexico Elk Licenses are Public
All told, in 2023 more than 42 percent of New Mexico elk tags were privatized: nearly 38 percent through the EPLUS system and another 4.4 percent of the total reserved for hunters who retain outfitters The net results of these tag allocation policies is that only 57 percent of elk licenses in New Mexico are obtained by purely public, unguided draw hunters. This is by far the lowest percentage of public resident elk tags of any western state.
Other states in the West, including neighboring Arizona, generally limit nonresident hunters to a maximum of 10 percent of licenses. Those other states don’t give wholesale landowner license authorizations; they allow landowners to sell access to their lands only. Unlike New Mexico, these other states don’t allow landowners to sell something they don’t own: the public’s wildlife.
New Mexico’s elk policies let landowners with holdings in elk country – many of whom don’t live in the state – put serious money in the bank. Bull elk license authorizastions commonly sell for more than $10,000 each in highly desirable units. Beyond the increased revenue generated from nonresident hunting licenses, no additional revenue is generated for Game Department conservation efforts from the sale of private land tag authorizations.
New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Benefits from EPLUS
In late 2020, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) 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.
“Game and Fish takes great effort to set hunt levels for big game in a way that sustains herds; however, landowners and out-of-state hunters, not New Mexicans and public land hunters, are the beneficiaries of department policies,” the LFC audit report states.
“The high utilization of EPLUS by nonresidents is financially beneficial to the department because they pay significantly higher license fees, but that same private system likely creates opportunity for wealthier, out-of-state hunters at the expense of New Mexico residents,” the LFC stated.
The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish now charges nonresidents $773 for a quality/ high-demand bull elk license compared to $90 for residents.
State Ignores LFC’s Call to Reform EPLUS
The LFC called on the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish to work with it and the Department of Finance and Administration “to add Accountability in Government Act measures to report …. The ultimate beneficiaries – resident or nonresident – of EPLUS elk tags.”
However the game department has not made any public reports about the distribution of the licenses. The department only has turned over the information to conservation groups in response to requests under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act, and reluctantly at that.
Game Commission Unresponsive to Demands for Change
The game commission in 2022 held a series of public hearings on its adoption of its four year “elk rule,” that sets seasons and license numbers for elk hunts allocated through the public draw. At every meeting, representatives from NMWF and others asked commissioners also to open up for revision the separate, permanent rule that established the EPLUS system. But the commission steadfastly refused to do so.
In March 2022, then-Commission Chair Sharon Salazar Hickey had authority to call for the commission to address the EPLUS rule while the commission updated its general elk rule. However, she said she had no intention of opening the EPLUS rule. In refusing to take it up, she noted that the game department staff didn’t have it on the list of rules to be updated.
“So, that said, at this point in time, I see no need to change this schedule,” Salazar Hickey said in response to a request to open the EPLUS rule. “But I don’t want to shut things down in communications. So, commissioners, I’m going to ask that each of us continue to be very receptive to these kinds of discussions.”
Salazar-Hickey’s statement that the commission wasn’t going to consider changes to EPLUS because the game department staff hadn’t requested it was puzzling. The game commission sets policies and regulations and the game department staff executes them and carries them out, not the other way around.
Instead of speaking up for state residents and changing the system, Governor Lujan Grisham and the majority of state game commissioners have served the interests of the private landowners, outfitters and others who profit handsomely from the existing system.
Lujan Grisham and the game commission talk a good game when it suits their purposes to promise to be responsive to residents’ concerns. And they say they welcome public involvement in setting New Mexico’s wildlife management policies. But the facts tell a different story.
When Lujan Grisham was running for her first term in 2018, she responded to a questionnaire from NMBHA saying she believed nonresidents were getting too many big game licenses.
“I believe the resident quota is too low,” Lujan Grisham told NMBHA in 2018. “When you combine the number of licenses issued to nonresidents through the public draw along with the number of private land licenses issued, nonresidents receive a higher share of licenses than in any other western state. A thorough review of the public and private land systems laws and regulations must be initiated in order to develop an equitable solution that respects New Mexico residents.”
But well into her second term, Lujan Grisham has yet to initiate any such review.
State Game Commission Lacks Independence
Under New Mexico law, the governor appoints all seven members of the game commission and they serve at her pleasure.
Two former commissioners have said publicly that Lujan Grisham forced them off the commission when they refused to do her bidding. Several other game commissioners have resigned during Lujan Grisham’s tenure as governor without publicly stating a reason. Although the commission is supposed to have seven members, it’s suffered from chronic vacancies under her administration.
In early 2023, Lujan Grisham blocked a bill that had passed the New Mexico State Legislature that would have protected game commissioners from political pressure. The bill would have specified that commissioners could only be removed for cause determined by the New Mexico Supreme Court. The bill died when the governor refused to sign it.
In addition to protecting game commissioners from being removed at will by the governor, the commission-reform bill would have allowed state lawmakers to appoint four commissioners while allowing the governor to appoint only three.
The EPLUS System Makes the State Quota Law a Joke
The game commission shall issue elk licenses to private landowners.
No quantity is stipulated, leaving it up to the game commission to decide.
New Mexico residents must receive at least 84% of the licenses through the public draw.
EPLUS licenses never go through the public draw so the quota doesn’t apply.
New Mexico state law says only that the game commission shall issue elk licenses to private landowners. The law doesn’t say how many, leaving that entirely up to the game commission.
A separate provision of state law specifies that New Mexico residents must receive at least 84 percent of the licenses issued through the public draw. The law reserves 10 percent of draw licenses for hunters, either resident or nonresident, who contract with an outfitter, and it reserves 6 percent for nonresident hunters who haven’t contracted with an outfitter prior to applying.
But the EPLUS system renders the state quota law meaningless. Because the EPLUS licenses never go through the draw, the 84-percent resident quota doesn’t apply to them. Accordingly, state officials maintain that they’re following the law while the actual resident share of all licenses is only 65 percent.
State Ignores Sen. Heinrich’s Call to Reform EPLUS
The LFC audit prompted Sen. Heinrich, D-N.M., to write to game commissioners in 2020 urging them to act to reform EPLUS.
“Each year, the so-called ‘EPLUS’ program takes thousands of opportunities to hunt elk on our public lands away from average hunters and instead gives these public land hunting opportunities to the wealthiest few,” Heinrich wrote.
The game commission has failed to act in response to Heinrich’s request.
Where Things Stand
Powerful forces in New Mexico benefit from the current system of giving such a huge share of elk licenses to private landowners and nonresidents.
The landowners themselves enjoy handsome profits at the expense of the public. The state’s outfitting industry fights any effort to roll back the provision of state law that earmarks 10 percent of the remaining permits for their clientele in the public draw. These powerful private interests are not going to give up their cash cow without a fight.
Both landowners and outfitters will squawk and fight over any effort to reform New Mexico’s broken elk license system. They claim keeping it in place is essential for their way of life, and for rural communities.
Don’t believe it.
Every other state in the West manages its elk herds without giving a huge cut of elk licenses straight to landowners. And they also do it without giving a huge subsidy to their thriving outfitting industries.
New Mexico Elk Management Contrary to North American Model
New Mexico’s wildlife belongs to all the people of the state – not just to landowners and the wealthy.
The EPLUS system and other corrupt aspects of New Mexico’s current system of wildlife management run squarely contrary to the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Yet, strangely enough, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish claims to adhere to the model.
The North American Model spells out seven basic tenets that support the notion that wildlife is a public trust, an American birthright, and that wildlife species need to be managed in a way that their populations will be sustained forever. Among the tenets is the precept that every citizen – not merely the wealthy – has an opportunity, under the law, to hunt and fish.
Somewhere along the way, New Mexico has slipped its moorings. It has abandoned the bedrock, egalitarian traditions of wildlife management that were handed down by visionary conservationists such as Theodore Roosevelt, Valerius Geist, and Aldo Leopold, the founder of the NMWF.
Instead, New Mexico has drifted quietly into a European system of wildlife management. Our state has become a place where landowners are encouraged to act as if they own the wildlife on their estates and even on surrounding public lands. They get to hunt every year, and allow their friends to join them. Any tags they don’t use, they sell to the highest bidder.
Not On Our Watch
The New Mexico Wildlife Federation, New Mexico Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Hispanics Enjoying Camping, Hunting, and the Outdoors and Hunters Of Color encourage every New Mexico hunter, their friends and families to contact their elected state senator and state representative and demand wholesale change to this unfair system. Click HERE to find your member of the delegation.
Tell your lawmakers that you demand fairness for New Mexico hunters. Tell them you’re counting on them to support legislation to do the following:
Ensure that resident hunting opportunity is a top priority for our state game commission and game department.
Specify that 100 percent of public land elk hunting opportunities be distributed through the public draw system.
Repeal the “outfitter set-aside” that earmarks 10 percent of the licenses in the public draw to hunters who can afford to retain an outfitter.
Let’s rein in this system. This is New Mexico, not Europe. We don’t have any royalty, and nobody is above the law. We’re all created equal and all of us should have equal access to public resources, especially our wildlife, regardless of wealth or land holdings.
Our elk and our wildlife belong to all of us. If we work together, we can Take Back Your Elk.
