Fish, Wildlife and Parks outlines how nonresident licenses and drawing mechanics shape hunting opportunity and revenue

Emily Cooper, licensing bureau chief with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, told the House Fish, Wildlife and Parks committee the department uses licenses and permits as distinct management tools: a license authorizes harvest and possession of an animal while a permit modifies a license’s opportunity.

Cooper described A licenses (targeting antlered animals) and B or antlerless licenses (used to directly manage population size). She said the department manages population size, age structure and male-to-female ratios with a combination of hunter numbers, methods, season length and timing, bag limits and access programs.

The presentation laid out how statutorily limited nonresident combination licenses are allocated. Cooper said the big-game/elk combination bucket has a combined quota (the 2024 drawing used a 17,000 combined quota example) and noted nonresidents are limited by statute to a maximum of 10 percent of a quota. When residents apply for fewer than 90 percent of a quota, the remaining portion can become available to nonresidents or, if unsold, placed on a surplus sale where residency limits no longer apply.

Using the 2024 drawing as an example, Cooper said of a 17,000 combined bucket 12,224 drew as general elk combos and 4,776 were separated as "orphan" deer licenses and repackaged into the deer-combination quota, plus leftover landowner-sponsored licenses added to the pool. She said that sequence produced a 2024 deer combo drawing that started with 10,496 available tags after repackaging.

Peyton Child, licensing business analyst, walked lawmakers through 10-year trends in license sales and hunter effort. Nonresident license sales for deer and elk remain relatively steady because of statutory limits, Child said, while resident sales showed a notable jump in 2020. Hunter-day estimates and block management sign-in data indicate hunters are spending more days in the field overall and that hunter effort has shifted eastward: Regions 6 and 7 have seen increases while Regions 1 and 2 declined.

Robin Bartsch, licensing operations manager, summarized block-management trends: enrollment declined roughly 10.5 percent from 2013 to 2023, but recorded hunter days increased about 56 percent. Bartsch flagged Region 7 as an area that lost a large number of acres available to block management cooperators over the decade.

On revenue, presenters said nonresident purchases account for a disproportionate share of deer/elk license receipts (department slides cited roughly three‑quarters to four‑fifths of that revenue coming from nonresidents for those license types). Cooper also noted policy changes and bills matter: she cited Senate Bill 281 (2023) as a driver that will further reduce some nonresident DRB sales.

Committee members pressed staff on methodology. The department said its hunter-harvest survey is typically conducted every other year, that phone surveys and block-management sign-in cards are the primary hunter-day sources, and that one hunter may purchase multiple license types (sales do not equate one-for-one to number of unique hunters). Staff offered to provide more granular data on bird-license utilization within combination packages in a follow-up.

The presenters closed by saying the department expects nonresident revenue to remain a stable and important funding source and that certain license categories will continue to adjust under statutory and rule changes. The committee moved next to scheduled bill hearings.