OK, where to start. This has been a long thread full of wild misinterpretation. Most of it is a recycling of debates held regularly on internet forums. I sat on the sidelines as long as I could. If you are not interested in a thoughtful and knowledgeable response please feel free to skip my long-winded post.
If you're whining about "It's my public land I should be able to hunt it" You should do some research on the difference between Federal land management and State wildlife management. This is dead horse that has been beaten for so long that you're just pounding dirt at this point.
If you are whining about "My state gives multiple whitetail deer tags for $###" How many guys from western states do you think want to travel east to hunt whitetails? I'm guessing it is very few and that most of your NR tags are going to hunters from neighboring midwestern/eastern states. Your deer densities are higher (flooded market) and if this were a commodity that would mean that your product is less valuable. An elk is four times the size of a deer and easily 10 times as rare, we should charge 40x the price of a whitetail tag to be fair.
Now for some facts about deer tags in Idaho.
Idaho has a quota for NR deer tags (not including tags by NR in the controlled hunts). 14,000 that can be purchased as Regular deer tags or Whitetail Deer tags and an additional 1,500 that can only be sold as whitetail deer tags after the first 14,000 are sold. These can be used in any general season unit in the state. Because of this IDFG currently has no mechanism to distribute NR hunting pressure. As a result, the areas adjacent to other states with limited hunting opportunity, I'm looking at you Utah and Washington, have a higher percentage of NR hunters than units that are further from the border. The panhandle gets hammered by Washington hunters, Southeast Idaho gets hammered by Utah hunters. Overall, NR are 14% of deer hunters in Idaho. But in certain areas they are much more. In a particular Southeastern Idaho area, NR made up 30% of hunters. NR hunters are also 30% of the total in the panhandle area. While in other units only 5-8% of hunters are NR.
The purpose of these changes is to more evenly distribute NR hunting pressure. In doing so IDFG has acknowledged that fewer tags might be sold. The fee increase is meant to offset the potential reduction in NR sales. It is unclear if this change will reduce the total NR tag allocation but it might. The proposal did not call for a straight up reduction to 10% of tags, it said "no less than 10%".
Now for the elk tags.
Idaho offers 12,815 General season NR elk tags. This does not include the elk tags drawn in controlled hunts. 3,861 of those tags are in general zones that have a capped quota. That means the remaining 8,954 tags can be purchased for use in any of the non quota zones. In theory, all 8,954 could be sold for use in the panhandle zone and would result in a very lopsided R:NR distribution. In reality the same thing happens with these elk tags as with the general season deer tags. The non quota zones close to Utah and Washington get a lot of NR pressure while other zones receive less NR pressure.
Again, the purpose will be to more evenly distribute the NR pressure throughout all elk zones so that a few zones don't get over crowded. IDFG has not yet revealed what this distribution will look like, they are probably still trying to figure that out themselves, so no one really knows if this will reduce the NR tag allocation or not. However, it is clear that IDFG does expect to sell fewer NR tags and will increase the cost to offset that reduction. Whether the reduction will be due to NR choosing not to hunt in Idaho or by actually reducing the NR allocation remains to be seen.
Even though the NR quotas have not changed in decades (except the 1,500 Whitetail only tags which were added a few years ago) NR numbers can increase in certain areas as NR shift their focus and hunt in those areas. IF fewer NR hunt in southern Idaho and start hunting in eastern Idaho then eastern Idaho residents would be right in saying that NR pressure is increasing in their area. Overall nothing has changed but localized effects can occur as hunting pressure shifts.
The elephant in the room is the increasing number of resident hunters. There were roughly 20,000 more resident elk hunters in Idaho last year than in 2008. That is a 20% increase. The herds can only sustain a certain amount of pressure and eventually IDFG will have to reduce opportunity. The right thing to do is to reduce NR opportunity and preserve opportunity for residents. I don't think any state should issue a single NR tag if they don't first have enough tags for every Resident who wants one.
I cannot speak for how they determined the increased price amounts but it looks like it brings Idaho more closely in line with other states prices so I don't see much to complain about there. I also think that Idaho should charge residents more so I don't hold much sympathy for the NR hunting costs. You can't tell me that hunting is becoming a rich mans sport because a luxury item is expensive, and hunting outside of your home state is a luxury expense.
Now, do I actually post this or delete it? Ah, what the hell.