Outdoors: Georgia wrestling with how to handle WMAs, PFAs

One of the good things the State of Georgia did "back in the day" was to create several public hunting and fishing areas that stretch the length and breadth of the state, from North Carolina to Florida, and the Atlantic Ocean to Alabama.

The public hunting and fishing areas are known as Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) and Public Fishing Areas (PFAs).

The WMAs are managed for a wide variety of specialized hunting opportunities, including deer hunting with guns or archery, deer hunting with dogs, quail hunting, dove hunting and waterfowl hunting. Likewise, the PFAs are managed for different fishing opportunities depending on the locale and habitat.

There are a total of 995,333 acres in WMAs, an area about the size of the State of Rhode Island, and 2.218 acres of surface water in the PFAs. For the hunter or fisher who can't afford to own a piece of land or join an club, all it takes to hunt or fish this state-sized chunk of land (in addition to the usual licenses) is a $19 WMA stamp.

Financially, the WMA stamp is a bargain compared to the $600-1,200-per-year expense of joining a deer club, or even the $100-150 cost of going on a dove shoot.

It's not all happy hunting and heavy stringers in the land of the hunting or fishing everyman. In the last few years, with the State of Georgia having fallen on financial hard times, the WMAs have become a perennial target of the budget-cutters. WMAs are targeted because, although the State of Georgia manages nearly a million acres of land, the state only owns 362,639 acres, approximately one-third of the managed lands. The other two-thirds is owned by the federal government (441,816 acres) and private landowners (190,878).

The federal land is managed through cooperative agreements with the different federal agencies (United States Department of Agriculture - National Forests - and the Department of Defense - large lakes and military bases). The privately owned land is leased, every year, for an average annual lease rate of $5.98 an acre.

These numbers may make your eyes glaze over, but that's $6 every year for every acre, and that expenditure has been a favorite target of the cost-cutters, resulting in several WMA properties being removed from the program and loss of public access.

WMAs have traditionally been "wild lands" in remote areas of the state, with little or no traditional recreational value other than that for which they are named - hunting. But as the population has grown, remote areas aren't so remote anymore, and outdoor recreation has increasingly diversified to include hiking, biking, birdwatching, camping, horseback riding, bouldering, orienteering, boating, shooting and other so called "non-consumptive" activities. Right now, these activities are generally allowed on WMAs, and right now, these "non-consumptive" users pretty much use the WMAs when and where they want, with no licenses or fees required.

On Crockford-Pigeon Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the usage by non-traditional, non-hunters, is 21 percent greater than by the traditional users, and many of these new users are from Tennessee, there being no license or residency requirement to use the WMA for non-hunting activities.

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