Well, happy Tuesday!

It’s June 1, and tomorrow, California big game hunters, your applications for limited draw hunts are due in Sacramento by 17:00. Miss this deadline, and not only do you not get into the draw for this year, you also miss your opportunity to acquire another preference point.

No big deal, right? The draw deadline is pretty much the same every year. We get our applications and big game booklets (listing season dates, locations, and availability) in the mail. We run out and get a license (or for those of us with lifetime licenses, they come in the mail), we do a little research to decide where and when we want to hunt, and we shoot those applications in to the Licensing Branch office. There’s always plenty of time.

Except this year.

Someone, somewhere at DFG, screwed the pooch this year and the application booklets, licenses, and the whole shebang didn’t start showing up for folks until about a week or two prior to the deadline. Still plenty of time, of course, unless you know, you had other things going on. For example, I was in NC on business for the past two weeks. I heard through the grapevine about the delay, but since I had yet to receive my booklet, license, or tag applications, I couldn’t do anything about it anyway. All I could do was hope everything would be waiting for me when I got home, so I could put it all together and get it in the mail. Of course, with the Memorial Day holiday and no mail service on Monday, that kinda put things up against a pretty solid wall.

Now I’ve found the big game booklet with the elk applications, and I’ve got my little pre-printed address stickers to go on it, but as far as I can tell I still haven’t recieved my 2010-2011 lifetime license, or the 1st deer tag application that is supposed to come with it. Should all of this turn up today, I can still overnight the whole works to DFG… and I will, as soon as I get home from work, despite the cost of overnighting mail.

I’m pretty pissed off. I suppose even if it were just me, I’d be mad. The thing is, though, I know I’m not the only one impacted by this. I’d even hazard a guess that a lot of folks will just now be figuring out that they’re about to miss the deadline… especially those who don’t visit the web forums, blogs, or DFG website.

OK, so pissing and moaning doesn’t serve much of a constructive purpose, and venting here is barely cathartic. But this whole thing illustrates a bigger issue… where the hell is California’s online licensing and application program? Heck, I can buy a license online to hunt Texas, Colorado, or even North Carolina! I can’t get one in the home state of Silicon Valley? It can’t possibly be THAT hard!

It’s been in the works since 2006, but the whole thing was something of a sour joke the last time I heard it come up at the Fish and Game Commission meeting. The system was supposed to have been piloted for fishing license last May, but it looks like they’re still piloting now. According to the DFG website, the program is due to rollout in mid-August of 2010 (although this update was from December of 2009 and I haven’t seen anything else since). I don’t know if I should get my hopes up or not, given the way the state bureaucracy moves things along.

It’s past time, Sacramento. Implement the damned thing, or fire the idiots who have spent the better part of five years diddling the database and wasting our money, and get someone in there who knows what the hell they’re doing!

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