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I support a SW license with major conditions that I would expect would be laughed at... But I believe making the bass a gamefish is more of a coastal decision than a local one. Sure, they did it in Jersey but they still lose a ton of there fish to netters and such - not to mention all of the forage fish.... I don't see game fish status being too much of a salvation for the fish. That's something I've been on the fence about for a while. The Rhody bass rod & reel comms don't make as much of a dent in things like the Va/Mar/Potomac chaps or like the Mass guys do... I think 40 per day in Mass is excessive...
Anyway - Sandman, you're partially right, it's all about the money AND THE CONTROL of a resource. Not for the benefit of the resource but the benefit of control. If a SW License was able to generate say 150,000 anglers by $25-30 a head, you would have almost 4 million in revenue to drop back in to the system if it all went there. To be able to hire an additional 30 bodies (mostly enforcement officers & some staff) for 1 million per year would be a start. How many people rolling out of a Marine Bio program would be thrilled to make 35K a year in Environmental Management? Probably a fair amount of them. The reason why the Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws could afford to be a Marine Biologist was because his family was loaded - not because many jobs in that field pay well...
We are at a day & age where if the right plan was put forward, things could be manageable... The problem is that we are not at the right day & age to agree to do what needs to be done, instead we have a handfull of people without a clearly defined scope deciding things where they have little knowledge or care to know.
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