701-566-9300The Natural Resources Legislative Interim committee met again to discuss how to get the pilot program for testing out an app regarding posting lands for hunting up and running. The three counties have volunteered and been chosen for their geographical locations as well as their diversification in terms of how developed their GIS systems are. GIS stands for Geographical Information Systems and it is used by counties in varying degrees to update land ownership parcels. Of our 53 counties, 31 have their own resources while 22 hire it out. Some counties update parcel information (owners, description, splits, value, etc.) every day while others do it once a year and everything in between. Parcel information is the key to being able to show hunters – on an app or on their computer- what land would be open or closed to hunting in our state. The pilot counties will be asking their landowners to go onto the website (all of this is yet to be developed) and enter their preference as to if it is open or closed to hunting on whatever parcels they control. The three counties that will be participating were said to be Richland, Ramsey and Slope. Noting that the presumption is that unless posted, ND rural lands are open for hunting as they always have been; Chairman Erbele stated that “closed states still have trespassing issues. This does not fix trespassing.” A farmer himself, the chairman noted that getting the app up and running for landowners to go online and designate their land by July will be a challenge. It was stated that July was just about the latest Game and Fish could wait because they have printing issues with their first hunting season (for early Canada goose) beginning in August. At any rate, there are so many peripheral issues that it would not be possible to keep this under several pages in length if I were to go into all of them. There are three different bills being drafted for the next meeting for the citizen/legislative panel which makes up this interim committee to entertain. That is probably going to be late April or early May.
