http://www.centredaily.com/sports/story/1330969.html

Critics of the Pennsylvania Game Commission have long requested that an outside agency investigate the commission’s deer program. The long-awaited deer audit is about to take place.

For the CDT/Mark Nale

While the number of deer is at the heart of Pennsylvania’s “Deer Wars,” the deer audit will not necessarily address this issue. The audit, however, will evaluate PGC’s liberal use of antlerless permits.

Pennsylvania House Resolution 642, passed last April, directs the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee to conduct an independent third-party, science-based evaluation of the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s deer management program and practices.

The contract to perform the PGC deer audit was awarded to Wildlife Management Institute, a non-profit group. They were formerly headquartered in Washington, D.C., and are currently operating out of three field offices. The Wildlife Management Institute has a long history of doing state agency reviews. They have conducted 70 such audits during their nearly 100-year history. The agreement, signed in late May, will pay WMI $90,215 for conducting their independent evaluation of the commission’s deer management programs.

I was curious as to exactly how such an audit would be conducted and when it would be finished, so I contacted the house Budget and Finance Committee as well as the Wildlife Management Institute to learn the details.

The audit’s scope and depth is determined by a Request for Proposals sent out by the Budget and Finance Committee in June 2008. The five-page document, along with the attached resolution, directs would-be applicants to focus their investigation on answering 15 questions dealing with the PGC’s deer population estimates, the size of wildlife management units, the PGC’s use of deer embryo data, deer health, habitat health, forest regeneration, deer/human conflicts and other issues. The RFP also asks that the audit compare Pennsylvania’s deer management practices to those used by other deer states and to determine what, if any, of their best practices should be used in Pennsylvania.

“We welcome the science-based study and are pleased that it will be accomplished by an entity outside the Commonwealth, one that will have considerable expertise in the appropriate fields,” PGC press secretary Jerry Feaser said.

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According to Wildlife Management Institute vice president Scot Williamson, who will be the lead biologist on the independent audit, the process is now underway.

“We are in the final stages of drawing up a request for documentation — a list of information to be supplied by the Game Commission for our audit,” Williamson said. “Some of the information should be easily supplied, while other data will take some time for the agency to assemble.”

Williamson will lead a team of at least two institute staff members and five sub-contracted experts. Team members hail from the states of Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Vermont and West Virginia. None are from Pennsylvania.

To insure impartiality, the Budget and Finance Committee wanted to select a non-Pennsylvania company. While WMI fits that bill, critics are pointing out that the institute worked for the PGC in 1999, and two of its board members also have Pennsylvania connections.

Peter Duncan, former executive director of the Pennsylvania Game Commission and retired Deputy Commissioner of the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, is the vice-chair of the board. In his long resumé, WMI board member and president Steve Williams lists that he had previously served as deputy executive director for the PGC.

Williamson responded when queried about WMI’s “connections” to Pennsylvania and if they might taint the Institute’s objectivity.

“We have a long-standing history of doing agency reviews, he said. “We are independent and objective — not a membership organization.

“Our board of directors will not have a direct input into the project. They provide oversight on finance, approve our mission and our business model.”

According to Williamson, WMI will review the data that is supplied by the commission and then meet with agency personnel during the summer to get any needed clarification or request additional information.

“We need to know enough about their techniques and methods to know what questions to ask,” Williamson said. “We will then use our own experience, published scientific literature and the methods that other states use to evaluate Pennsylvania’s deer program. Every state agency uses the literature to guide their management process. Pennsylvania is unique in that they have been able to do the science within the borders of the commonwealth. During the audit process, we will look at all of their deer studies.”

If some hunters are expecting the institute to provide an exact count of Pennsylvania’s deer, a question long-asked by the Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania, they might be disappointed.

“We are not going out in the field to count deer,” Williamson said. “There will be no independent population survey. We will look at the Commission’s data and the quality of the data and ask if it is defensible and reliable. If their data is up to the task, we will make a population estimate and indicate a level of confidence in the estimate. If the confidence level is too wide, the estimate won’t be worth the paper that it is printed on.

“We are also not going to tell you how many deer you should have; that is for the citizens of the commonwealth to decide,” Williamson continued. “We will look at your deer population goals. Are they responsive, measurable and based on a set of inputs that the public can understand? Does the PGC’s use of antlerless permits serve to move the deer herd towards that goal? We’ll also study their evaluations of deer health, commonwealth interests and forest regeneration.”

Although WMI has until February to complete their evaluation and submit a report, Williamson hopes that the process will be completed long before that.

“I’m the kind of person who likes to jump into a new project, immerse myself and get the job done,” Williamson said. “My expectation and goal would be to get busy and have the audit finished by the end of summer.”

Of course, part of the time factor depends on how quickly the PGC moves to supply the needed data to WMI. According to Feaser, his agency plans to “fully cooperate with the audit team.”

Mark Nale, who lives in the Bald Eagle Valley, is a member of the PA Outdoor Writers Association. He can be reached at [email protected].



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