Just recieved this email from USO. Just wondering if any of you have got the same email?
This is Lawrence Montoya, or "Griz." I was lead plaintiff in the recent suit against Arizona on the discrimination against nonresidents in getting permits for bull elk and antlered deer in the Arizona Strip. I've been reading a whole lot of angry messages from a whole lot of people who don't know the facts. I know I'am going to get a ton of nasty e-mails for this, but I wanted to put out there the real facts so everyone knows how we got the point where a federal court struck down Arizona's nonresident caps as being unconstitutional.
In a word, Arizona gave the Court no choice.
For years, we tried asking the Commisssion just to let some more permits go to non-residents. They told us to get lost. We got a lawyer who knows the Constitution and asked him to talk to Arizona.
Way back in the summer of 1997 , there was a meeting with the Director of the Arizona Game and Fish Department and two lawyers from the Arizona Attorney General. Our lawyer before the meeting had given them constitutional cases showing that their discrimination against nonresidents was illegal. There is in fact something called the United States Constitution. He reminded Arizona of what it said and meant. We didn't want to sue, we just wanted more fair treatment of nonresidents. Heck, nonresidents already pay 5 times as much for a license. We subsize the Arizona Game Department, just like in other states.
Arizona was letting nonresidents have only about 6-8% of the permits. The law said nonresidents could draw "up to 10%", but the way their system worked nonresidents were only getting 6 to 8%. Right next door here in New Mexico, nonresidents can draw up to 22%. You can stand on one side of the border, hunting the same elk herd in the same forest, but theh law is different three feet to the west where nonresidents were getting almost completely shut out. Arizona residents were getting a better deal in NM than Arizona was giving New Mexicans. Not exactly fair.
So what did we ask for? We asked for only a 10% share for nonresidents. That's less than New Mexico, less than Wyoming , less than Colorado.
What we were told: "Take your best shot." We told them that if we had to sue the Court would have no option but to throw the caps out completely and that they wouldn't like the result. Arizona's response: "Do what you gotta do." These are almost exact quotes.
For the past seven years, we kept telling Arizona they were going to lose. We kept offering to compromise and work with them. We got the same response. And what we told them would happen, happened.
By the way, this is what Arizona was fighting about: They re-ran their draws going back to 1998 as though there were no caps (the way they did it before 1991). The sky would not have fallen. Without the caps non-residents would have drawn something like .95% above the caps for elk and 2.85% above the caps for antlered deer. Thats all the difference our suit will make. Anyone who can get Arizona's briefs from this year can read it themselves. By the department's own numbers, only something like 86 more bull elk permits and 164 more deer permits-out of thousands-would go to nonresidents. Arizona hunters need to calm down. It's not the end of the world. They are still going to get 85-90% of the permits, like they were getting before the caps were put in in 1991.
So why are nonresidents getting like 850 additional permits this year? That is nothing to do with us. We never asked for more permits, just a more fair share for nonresidents. It was the Game Commission that chose to simply give permits this year to every nonresident who got kicked out because of the caps. We wanted them to re-run the draw and do it. They just handed out more permits.
So thats the story, as true and correct as I know how to tell it.
This "Griz" knows most of those tags will still be going to Arizona's prime hunts.
