Saltwater fishing licenses to cost more

Louisiana saltwater anglers who want to avoid paying 50 percent more for their fishing licenses need to purchase them within the next week as a $7.50 increase goes into effect Aug. 1.
Any licenses purchased before then will be valid until June 30, 2015.
The increase was the first rate hike in 14 years as the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries bumps license fees for recreational and saltwater fishing from $15 to $22.50.
The fees bring Louisiana from the next lowest (Mississippi is the lowest at $10) to the next highest (Texas is highest at $35) for saltwater fishing fees in the five Gulf Coast states. An additional $2.25 million is expected to be generated annually, which will be used to fund the agency’s LA Creel program, the department said in a news release.
Saltwater fishermen must purchase both a freshwater and saltwater license. Freshwater license fees will remain unchanged.
The Coastal Conservation Association of Louisiana, with LDWF support, sponsored a bill to increase license fees in this year’s legislature, the news release stated. The bill was signed by Gov. Bobby Jindal on June 19. The license fee increase contains a sunset provision where the increase will have to be revisited in 2018.
The increase does not affect sportsmen who have purchased a lifetime license and those fees will not increase, Ashley Wethey, department spokeswoman said in an email.
LDWF recognized the shortcomings of the federally established Marine Recreational Information Program to provide the best available data to fisheries managers and began collecting their own recreational statistics through a new data collection program called LA Creel, the department news release stated.
Wethey responded to an email request to explain what those shortcomings were.
“NOAA Fisheries uses … estimates from previous years to predict upcoming harvests and set future fishing seasons. There can be a large difference between what NOAA Fisheries predicts … and how much is actually harvested, resulting in miscalculations and harvest overages. When the uncertainty of the MRIP estimates is examined, it is clear that it is nearly impossible to use these numbers to reasonably forecast recreational harvests.
“The lack of precision in recreational landing estimates provided through the MRIP survey leads to a lack of confidence in those estimates. We feel that a change in the survey design that we’ve built into LA Creel provides precise recreational landings estimates in a cost effective and efficient way,” Wethey said.
NOAA claimed it was improving the Marine Recreational Information Program used for counting and reporting marine recreational catch and effort. The program was launched in 2010 and replaced a similar program that had been collecting information about angling in the U.S. since the 1980s, the NOAA website stated.
The new state program, first used in 2013, is better, Wethey said.
“LA Creel is a more precise data-gathering tool than MRIP that provides real-time quota monitoring to ensure the best management decisions are made.
“LA Creel has improved methods for precisely estimating recreational harvests and implementing management measures. In the survey’s inaugural year, LDWF biologists measured 23 times more fish and interviewed more than 49 times the vessel trips than the MRIP survey did, already providing a better foundation for sound management of this fishery. With much more intense sampling, LA Creel will have much tighter confidence intervals and provide more reliable, timely data,” Wethey said.
Since federal officials do not recognize LA Creel as MRIP compatible, over half a million dollars typically used to fund recreational surveying in Louisiana was pulled, leaving the department responsible for the financial burden of data collection, the news release stated. The department recognized that it was unable to adequately fund a high quality, precise recreational survey for the long term and sought angler support to fund the survey through a license fee increase.
The news release says anglers can expect a host of benefits from new fees to replace the half-million dollars pulled by the feds.
Wethey said those benefits include:
—More precise saltwater recreational landings estimates, resulting in greater confidence that stock assessment results are accurate.
—LA Creel uses innovative technology to capture angler catch information, reducing dockside and telephone survey questions and relying on email, anglers’ preferred method of contact, as the primary survey method.
—More localized fishery management decisions with recreational landings estimates determined on a basin level. Each of our basins has their own unique habitat. The department requested this data from the MRIP program for years with no success; through LA Creel, the department would be able to collect landings data on a localized level for the first time in Louisiana history.