Summary of Important Changes

The final rule proposal differs significantly from the proposal that originally went to public hearings and is much improved because of the all of the public input that we received at hearings and through the work of the Fishing Tournament Advisory Committee (FTAC) . Most of the major changes are summarized below.

Organizer Fees

We propose to significantly lower the required fees for tournament organizers with the intent of recovering only our "new" costs relating to tournament fishing. Fees would be $25, $100, or $200 depending on prize amounts and tournament format. Fees would be lower for "immediate release" tournaments less likely to incur incidental mortality (a major issue for the NRB) with the idea of providing a financial incentive to use tournament formats that minimize incidental mortality. Youth and disabled events would be exempt from fees. We could not come up with a fair and enforceable definition for "charity" or "non-profit" tournaments but believe the lower fee structure will not be an impediment to those events. The $200 fee would be incurred only by "catch-hold-release" or "catch and kill" events awarding more than $10,000 in prizes.

Individual Participant Fees

We have removed the individual tournament participant fee. Although this was a highly recommended option by Fishing Tournament Advisory Committee (FTAC), DNR and legislative legal staff believe the original legislation, Wisconsin Act 249 [April 2004, PDF 14KB], only gives us authority to charge fees to tournament organizers to recover costs of administering the program.

Full Recovery of Costs

The Natural Resources Board through motions and instructions given during public NRB meetings has directed the Department to recover the costs of administering the tournament program entirely from the fees. Based on public input and advice of the FTAC, we have reduced the cost of the tournament program to only "new" program costs by not including law enforcement costs (on the assumption that no new staff or expenses are being incurred with these new rules), and tournament data collections (on the assumption that collecting valuable biological information from tournaments is actually a benefit to all anglers and shouldn't be paid for by the tournament anglers themselves). With these changes, the new projected revenues closely match the projected new costs at around $33,000 per year.

Bass Culling Pilot Study

The NRB in an approved motion also required us to recover any unreimbursed costs of the bass culling tournament pilot study through fees. We originally prorated the cost across all tournaments, but public comment suggested it should be applied only to bass tournaments and sunset when the money is collected. So we have proposed a $2 per angler surcharge for bass tournaments (except immediate release tournaments) for a six-year period to recover this charge. That fee would be added to the cost of the tournament permit.

Tournament Limits

We recommend retaining the permit structure with limits on the number of tournaments based on waterbody size - though we are responding to public input that the originally proposed numbers would be overly limiting on some waters by applying the limits based on the specific waterbody or river pool where the weigh in will occur rather than pooling the water acreages for connecting waters or chains. This will have the effect of spreading out the effort out on lake chains and allowing additional tournaments on the Mississippi River.

Incidental Mortality

We have learned that there will be incidental mortality of bass and walleyes in ""catch-hold-and release" tournaments if the water temperature is above about 75 degrees, and to date there have been no studies or methods developed to improve handling techniques to make this go away. Mortalities observed in Wisconsin bass ranged from 16-34 percent and nationally have averaged 25 percent. We proposed a complete ban on this tournament format at the hearings but this was highly unpopular with bass tournament anglers. In this rule we propose an alternate strategy of an automatic bag limit reduction from five to three for bass and walleyes during dates when the average water temperature would be above 70 degrees Fahrenheit for walleyes or 80 degrees Fahrenheit for bass. Those dates are approximately the first week of July through the middle of August (80 F) for bass and the middle of June to the first week of September for walleye (70 F). This does not make the incidental mortality issue go away - but it will reduce the mortality since fewer fish will be handled and stress in livewells will be reduced.

Aquatic Invasive Species

The NRB has expressed concern about tournaments spreading VHS and other invasive species. The hearing proposal included a requirement that tournament organizers submit an AIS plan as part of their application but there is understandably a lot of confusion as to what the plan would include and how it would be administered. Given the recent and proposed changes in boat and bait handling laws relating to VHS, we believe the AIS plan requirement is outdated and have replaced it with a requirement that tournament organizers and participants must comply with all existing state rules, and that the DNR has the authority to include appropriate AIS protocols in tournament permits if there are invasive species issues.

Tournament Application Process

The "open window" for tournament applications has been moved up to April 1st through June 30th in the year prior to the tournament with final decisions made by August 1st. If limits are not reached, organizers can still apply for a permit up to 30 days prior to the tournament. There will still be a lottery if limits on particular waterbodies are reached.

Other Restrictions

The provisions that a fisheries biologist may add to the permit if the format is "catch-hold-release" include redistribution of fish, restriction on the area that can be fished to reduce the time that fish are held in live wells, and the distance fish are transported to the weigh-in site. These conditions would be stated when the permit was issued.

Contact Information

Hopefully this information will help in your review of the new rules. If you have any questions about the new rules, please contact:

Joanna Griffin, Statewide Fisheries Database Manager,
(608) 264-8953
or
Andrew Fayram, Fisheries Policy Analyst,
(608) 266-5250