Where Should Fish and Wildlife Fine Money Go?

[RB]

So hypothetical situation, four people in a vehicle in the forest during modern firearm. A WDFW officer does a stop three of the four have loaded rifles in the vehicle, an open container of alcohol is with the same three, and one has shot an illegal Buck for the area. How much would the ticket fines be for this? I would imagine there would be quite a hefty fine for this situation.

Reson for the question is this type of situation seems to happen every year and these types of situations make the hunting community as a whole look bad and give antis more fuel. It would be nice to see those that commit the crime pay for enforcement and better habitat. 

I believe the part of the equation you forgot to include is they are Either undocumented foreign nationals / or when brought before the magistrate they claim that they don't understand the laws of this country and this is the way we hunted in there native country/

I've stated this a lot of times. I have a higher percentage of unpaid citations/cases from actual Americans than illegal immigrants. I think the reason is because they want that fine paid ASAP so there isn't any "issues"  It's not uncommon for me for an illegal immigrant to pay a fine before the court even processes the ticket.

My assumption was these monies went back to the state and would help fund the WDFW some how, but I see now that it really does not. I find it disheartening that in this situation Bubba, Cooter, Leroy, and Billy Joe don't put squat back into the WDFW for blatantly breaking several laws that could carry some hefty fines and taking game away from law abiding hunters of all weapon choice.

[fireweed]

Keep it at the county,  We don't want tickets to be like traffic cameras and a slush fund. There are so many ticky-tacky rules that if they wanted to it would be easy to find something wrong with pretty much anybody that is out there a lot.  Anyone who says its easy to follow all the rules, just doesn't know all the rules.  Remember, hunting and fishing are supposed to be FUN.  These are recreational pursuits.  I don't want to worry anymore than I do about the distance between the shank and barb of all my hooks, or is my square inches of orange is visible from every angle. 

[olyguy79]

About 2 years ago several legislative staff members in Olympia, including myself, looked at the possibility of using fish and wildlife fine money to help fund WDFW. What we found is the majority of the states do allocate at least some of the money to the fish and wildlife agency.

We looked more in depth with a comparison between WDFW and California DFW. 100% of CDFW fines go back to fish and wildlife in some manner. At the time period we looked at CDFW had about 200 more officers than WDFW yet WDFW and CDFW contacted about the same number of violators and wrote about the same number of tickets.

So you have WDFW who gets no money from their tickets writing about the same amount of tickets as an agency which gets 100% of their tickets. So take that however you want.

Agencies are always reluctant to ask for fine money because of how it can look to the public. But I will say that officers can only write so many tickets, we can't setup some type of red light camera equivalent for fish and wildlife offenses.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Oh Mah]

You forgot the new choice:

The homeless clean up fund.

[boneaddict]

You forgot the new choice:

The homeless clean up fund.

 how about the wolf cleanout fund.