How will 75% Tag Allocation Affect Preference Points in CO?

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Jun 21, 2020
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Hoping some of y’all with good insight on the draw system can chime in. With CO officially moving from 65/35 to 75/25 for Elk, Deer, Bear, and Pronghorn, do you think CO residents will see a noticeable shift downwards in preference points needed to hunt the same units as previous years? As a CO resident, I’ve noticed that more and more units are harder to hunt on the limited 1st rifle tags with either 0 points or 2nd choice and 1PP selection. Hoping this will allow for more hunts to become available for residents.
 
I personally don't think you'll see a change, in 30+ years of playing the game I haven't seen PP's drop in any areas. I think the only way you would see that is if the license quota's jumped way up, and I can't see that happening from a herd management stand point. A few more residents will pick up a license but there will still be some that miss out and will blame the draw and CPW as giving all the licenses to non residents.

I think you'll see more licenses on the leftover list that will be open to residents and non residents alike.

I have a friend that's a Resident and I finally gave up on trying to help him with the draw because he just doesn't get it and is too set in his ways to listen to me. So he'll continue to struggle and not draw licenses in 0-1 PP areas.
 
I would hope Res get more opportunity, but at the same time the CPW can always reduce tag allotments so there wouldnt be a change.

Recently I saw one Hunt Code actually reduce in PPs required for Residents, so it can happen. And it was a good Deer tag
 
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I think it will drastically increase NR point creep. I don't see how it couldn't.

It should reduce resident point creep though. More tags go to residents.
 
Point creep for NR, little relief for Res. But depends on tag allocations. Although I will say. The last 5-6 years my mind as been blown by how fast some tags are going. There used to be some trash MD tags that would sit in the leftover up till the season opened and they are all gone by August 3rd generally
 
I am not overly concerned about it. I pay to play the game if point creeps gets me on the nr deer tag I am after then I will come back next year and try again. Probably won't help residents much but any extra tag to a resident is one less to a nr so it will have a effect but may not be very measurable. Good for residents of Colorado regardless
 
All else equal, shifting 10% of tags from non-residents to residents will increase the rate of point creep for NR's and decrease it (though probably not reverse it) for R's. But all else is never equal year to year (quotas change, OTC rules change, application quantities change, applicant behaviors change, etc), so who knows what point creep will actually do this year.
 
What I’ll be curious to see is for units that have 50%-60% draw rate for Residents, will that be enough to bump to almost a for sure draw with the shift? Guess we’ll have to see after this season. No way to totally predict.
 
What I’ll be curious to see is for units that have 50%-60% draw rate for Residents, will that be enough to bump to almost a for sure draw with the shift? Guess we’ll have to see after this season. No way to totally predict.

No, it won’t go from 50-60% to 90-100%
It’s going to stay the same, for a while. You have more residents hunting every year.
 
Not so sure about that ^^^^

There’s been a steady decline of Resident hunters for a few years.
Yeah I had thought CO had a decline in residents with an increase in non residents. But can’t remember where I found the data.
 
The other states that did appx the same thing in the past-decreasing the % of tags for non residents- caused the point creep to go up every single year…even a decade later……with no end in sight.
Plan on it

Example; there are elk units in AZ that take almost 30 points….but thats for guys that have been applying for over two decades. If you do the math and starting to accumulate points now, it would take hundreds of years to draw with points. Crazy.
 
Hoping some of y’all with good insight on the draw system can chime in. With CO officially moving from 65/35 to 75/25 for Elk, Deer, Bear, and Pronghorn, do you think CO residents will see a noticeable shift downwards in preference points needed to hunt the same units as previous years? As a CO resident, I’ve noticed that more and more units are harder to hunt on the limited 1st rifle tags with either 0 points or 2nd choice and 1PP selection. Hoping this will allow for more hunts to become available for residents.
Hopefully that allocation includes 2nd choice for residents.
 
I'll start this out by stating that I'm a guy who hunts multiple states in any given year. I often see residents complain about NR tags, and I can empathize with that, but only to a point. The reality is that NR tags pay for a lot of DNR staff, projects, and conservation in a lot of states, especially CO, where I often hunt as a NR.
 
It may not drop a whole point but it’ll be noticeable at the % of people drawn out at the lowest level. Those are usually the same folks year after year so it’ll probably reduce numbers in the OTC seasons from those who usually only draw every other year at 0-1pt. As a NR losing tag allocations, that’s actually not a bad trade-off.
 
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