As a former volunteer EMT I don't for a moment disagree with incentives for certain first responders. What I have a lot of issue with is a legislature that sees it as fully appropriate to stick the rest of the sporting community with the tab for their feel good law of the week and not have it paid by the general population. And having sat for a few years on the NYS Conservation Fund Advisory Board I'm fully aware that we'll also see less federal matching funds for sport fish and wildlife restoration.



US Fish and Wildlife Service administrators are required by law to withhold any matching funds related to a free license and to reduce the allowable matching funds tied to reduced cost licenses by dividing the actual income amount by the cost of a full price license that person would otherwise have bought. In this case the USFWS will pay only 50% of what it would have payed for a full price license. You and I get stuck with the tab.



Yup, the rest of the sporting public and not the general public is forced ti pay for every free or reduced license twice. Once when we make up the shortfall in direct financial support for the WRC and once when we get shorted on the related federal matching funds.



The morally correct thing to have done was to tie the benefit to a guaranteed funding stream from the state's general funds and make the annual availability of the benefit contingent on annual funding in order to pay the WRC the total of both the price reduction and the federal matching fund reduction to the WRC. The legislature made a calculated and conscious decision to reach in our wallets to pick up the tab for all other North Carolinians. That's the part I have heartburn with; one small slice of the state's population being forced to pay for someone else's feel good idea that the whole state should be paying for.



Note: I am NOT referring to the lower cost licenses such as juniors and seniors as they are sold at the full price set by law for the portion of the population. It is only those licenses either given free or at a reduced cost to a special interest category while others pay full cost for the same privilege that USFWS payment is reduced for and for which you and I make up the reduced price of.





Lance