For the first time in a quarter century, the Pennsylvania Game Commission may soon have the authority to manage its own financial house. Two pieces of legislation that recently cleared a key committee hurdle are poised to fundamentally reshape how hunting licenses are priced and who can access the deer woods in the Keystone State — and both carry consequences that will ripple far beyond Harrisburg.
Two Bills, One Big Shift in Power
A bill that would give the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) the ability to adjust its own license fees and another that would create a five-day hunting license during deer season have moved forward. These are not minor administrative tweaks. Together, they represent a structural overhaul of how the state manages one of its most important conservation funding mechanisms — and they come at a moment when Pennsylvania's hunting community is watching closely.
The House Game and Fisheries Committee approved sending House Bill 2690 and an amended Senate Bill 1313 to the full House for approval. Both measures now face the broader legislative chamber, where their fates will be shaped by competing interests ranging from conservation advocates and sportsmen's groups to fiscal hawks in the Republican caucus who have historically guarded the legislature's authority to set those fees.
The Fee-Setting Bill: Breaking a 26-Year Freeze
The headline provision of House Bill 2690 is straightforward but politically loaded: strip the legislature of its exclusive grip on hunting license pricing and hand that authority over to the agency that actually manages the resource. The house bill, introduced by Rep. Thomas L. Mehaffie III, a Republican from Dauphin County, would give the PGC similar powers that the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (PFBC) has involving setting its fees for licenses and permits. That comparison matters. The Fish and Boat Commission has operated with that autonomy for years, adjusting its fee structure in response to real-world conservation needs without requiring an act of the legislature every time the budget math changes.
Presently, the state legislature needs to approve license fees for the Game Commission. The result has been a system calcified by political inertia. Since 1999, Pennsylvania residents have paid $20.97 for a general hunting license, and nonresidents have paid $101.97 for the annual license. That freeze has persisted through more than two decades of inflation, changing land access dynamics, rising wildlife management costs, and the emergence of chronic wasting disease as a major challenge to the state's deer herd. The math is brutal when you run it: a dollar from 1999 is worth far less today, meaning the PGC has been managing a modern agency on a budget effectively shrinking in real terms every single year.
How the New Process Would Work
Supporters of HB 2690 are careful to emphasize that this is not a blank check for bureaucrats to hike fees without oversight. According to the bill's co-sponsorship memo, lawmakers would no longer be able to set prices, and proposed fees would instead go through a rigorous and transparent process. The PGC, the bill says, would propose a change, the public would be notified and asked for comment, a hearing would be held, and the board would vote on its adoption, with the opportunity for either committee to veto it. That veto provision is significant — it preserves a meaningful legislative check while removing the bottleneck of waiting for the full General Assembly to act.
The bill aims to give the PGC more flexibility to serve Pennsylvania's hunters, trappers, and wildlife enthusiasts through its independently funded conservation work. That independence is a critical piece of context. The PGC does not receive state funding. Revenue comes from hunting license sales, Pittman-Robertson Funding, and other conservation sources. Because the agency lives and dies by what it collects from the hunting public, every year the legislature fails to authorize a fee increase is another year the PGC absorbs rising costs through budget cuts, deferred maintenance, or reduced programs. With that context in mind, tying fee flexibility to a transparent rulemaking process — rather than the whims of a legislative calendar — seems like a reasonable course correction.
Junior License Provisions: An Olive Branch to New Hunters
Embedded within HB 2690 is a provision that ought to get more attention than it has. The bill would also set the junior hunting license at $2 and the junior resident combination hunting and furtaker license at $5. For this year, juniors pay $6.97 for a license and $9.97 for a combination. Those proposed prices represent a meaningful reduction — dropping the junior hunting license by nearly 70 percent from its current rate. In practical terms, this is an explicit recruitment tool. Cost is a proven barrier for youth participation in hunting, and a $2 entry point for a 12-year-old who wants to follow his father into the woods during deer season is the kind of policy that actually moves the needle on license sales long-term.
The additional licenses that have been layered onto the system over time tell their own story. A second spring turkey tag license was created in 2006 for $21.97, and the annual pheasant permit, which started in 2017, sells for $26.97. Each of those add-ons was created by the legislature — a process that, in the absence of fee-setting authority for the PGC itself, becomes the primary mechanism for generating additional revenue. Giving the commission direct fee authority would allow it to manage these structures more nimbly, without having to lobby Harrisburg every time the numbers need adjusting.
The Five-Day Deer License: Hunting for the Diaspora
The second piece of legislation — Senate Bill 1313 as amended — is aimed at a different kind of problem, and it takes an entirely different approach. Rather than overhauling fee governance, it creates a new category of license designed specifically for people who left Pennsylvania but never really left Pennsylvania behind.
The PGC supports the bill, as it was amended by House Game and Fisheries Committee Chair Anita Kulik, to create a new "Native Pennsylvania Annual License" to allow individuals who were born in Pennsylvania or previously lived in the Commonwealth to purchase a five-day hunting license for the regular firearms deer season. It is a quietly creative piece of policy. Millions of people who grew up hunting in Pennsylvania's forests now live in New Jersey, New York, Maryland, or across the country — people who still own property in the state, who still have family there, who still feel the pull of opening day of rifle deer season the way other men feel the pull of the Super Bowl. The current license structure offers them a binary choice: pay the full nonresident fee of $101.97 or skip the trip entirely.
The Property Tax Angle
Rep. David Maloney, the minority chair of the committee and one of the bill's more complex voices, raised an interesting dimension to the five-day license question. Maloney said the proposal will help those who moved away but still pay property taxes in Pennsylvania. That is a real constituency — former residents who pay into the state's tax base, often on hunting camps or family land held for generations, but who currently have no licensing option between the full nonresident price and nothing. A short-term license calibrated for the firearms deer season acknowledges that reality and creates a pathway back to the woods that makes economic and practical sense.
Opposition and Skepticism
Not everyone is on board. The fee-setting bill drew pointed criticism from within the committee itself. Rep. David Maloney, a Republican from Berks County and minority chair of the committee, opposed the bill. "It's not going to come as a surprise that I don't support this bill. And quite frankly to compare the Game Commission with the Fish and Boat Commission, I think is a stretch. The differences that they have are huge," he said.
Maloney's argument reflects a broader conservative skepticism about delegating taxing power — or what amounts to taxing power — to an executive agency. The counterargument, made implicitly by the bill's supporters, is that hunting license fees are not general taxes. They are user fees paid by a specific constituency for access to a managed resource, and the agency that manages that resource is better positioned to price that access than a legislature that considers the question once every few decades. The 26-year freeze on the resident license fee is, in a sense, the strongest evidence for that argument.
That tension — between legislative control of revenue and agency flexibility — is not unique to Pennsylvania. States across the country have wrestled with it, and the trend has generally moved toward giving wildlife agencies more autonomy. The logic is straightforward: wildlife management is technical, dynamic, and resource-intensive. Fee structures should reflect that complexity rather than being locked in place by political gridlock.
The PGC's Perspective: Flexibility and Data
The Game Commission has been unambiguous about where it stands. After the meeting, the Game Commission said it approves of both pieces of legislation. Regarding House Bill 2690, "The PGC supports having the authority to establish and maintain classifications of hunting and trapping licenses and fees for each license classification," John Buffone, press secretary for the agency said in an email. "If approved, this bill would provide the PGC with flexibility to create its own license structure, which would make it easier to meet the ever-evolving needs of hunters and trappers. Additionally, this authority would allow opportunities for better data collection on the preferences of Pennsylvania hunters and specific species and seasons."
That data collection point deserves a closer look. When the PGC has the authority to create different license tiers — say, a five-day license, a species-specific permit, or a short-term visitor pass — it also gains the ability to see what hunters actually buy. That behavioral data is enormously valuable for conservation planning. If a new license category sells out in two weeks, that tells the agency something important about demand. If a permit sits on the shelf, it reveals something equally important about what hunters actually want versus what administrators assume they want. Fee autonomy, in other words, is also a research tool.
A Decades-Long Fight Finally Gaining Traction
This push for PGC fee autonomy is not new. In recently submitting their annual reports, both the Pennsylvania Game Commission and Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission expressed a need to raise the price of licenses. Only the Legislature is responsible for raising license fees. The Senate Game and Fisheries Committee has passed two pieces of legislation — Senate Bills 1166 and 1168 — that would allow the individual commissions to set their own fees by regulation. Those Senate bills represented an earlier wave of the same reform effort, one that stalled before reaching the finish line.
State Rep. Keith Gillespie (R-York), the committee chair, has been among the reform's advocates. "Both of those agencies, Pennsylvania Game Commission, Pennsylvania Fish, and Boat Commission, are professional agencies," he said. "They're not going to price themselves out of the market, and they know where they need to direct those resources to and how to manage it." That confidence in the agencies themselves is a key part of the reform's political pitch. The PGC is not a revenue-maximizing corporation. It is a conservation agency funded almost entirely by the people who hunt, and its institutional incentives align with keeping those people in the field.
What Pennsylvania's Hunting Landscape Actually Looks Like
Understanding why these bills matter requires some sense of the scale of what the PGC manages. Pennsylvania's 11.4 million acres of forest make it one of the most forested states in the nation and a genuine hunting powerhouse. The Keystone State ranks among the top states for wild turkey harvest and consistently records impressive white-tailed deer numbers. The Pennsylvania Game Commission manages 1.5 million acres of State Game Lands offering free public access, supplemented by state forests, national forests, and thousands of miles of accessible terrain.
Pennsylvania's black bear population has grown substantially, with huntable densities across the northern tier, Pocono Plateau, and south-central mountains. The state's elk herd in north-central Cameron, Elk, and Clinton counties is a conservation success story, with limited draw tags offering one of the most memorable hunting experiences in the eastern United States. Managing all of that — the habitat, the populations, the access, the enforcement, the education programs — costs real money, and a $20.97 resident license that has not budged since the Clinton administration is not keeping pace with those obligations.
The Bigger Picture: Recruitment, Retention, and the Future of Hunting
Declining license sales are not a Pennsylvania-specific problem, but they are a Pennsylvania problem. A Pennsylvania lawmaker has introduced separate new legislation to encourage more first-time hunters as the game commission says it's selling fewer licenses. The trend lines are familiar to anyone who follows conservation funding nationally: the hunting population is aging, younger generations are less connected to the tradition, and many of the policy structures in place were designed for a mid-20th-century demographic that no longer fully exists.
The five-day license addresses one slice of that challenge — the lapsed hunter or the transplant who still has roots in Pennsylvania. The junior license price reduction addresses another — the cost barrier that stops a parent from putting a license in a kid's hands before they're sure the investment will stick. And the fee-setting authority addresses the structural issue underneath all of it: an agency that cannot respond to market conditions cannot build the kind of flexible, modern licensing system that today's hunters actually want.
Sen. James Malone (D-36, Lancaster) has introduced separate legislation, SB 1142, that would guarantee new hunters a free antlerless deer tag for one year after they complete the PGC Hunter-Trapper Education Course and purchase their first standard hunting license. "By removing the cost and complexity of securing an antlerless tag, Senator Malone's bill aims to make it easier for new hunters to harvest their first deer. The bill also aims to reduce crop damage and the other negative impacts of deer overpopulation by increasing the total number of antlerless deer harvested statewide." Taken together, these bills sketch the outline of a broader legislative mood: Pennsylvania's hunting infrastructure needs modernizing, and the legislature, however slowly, appears to be responding.
What Comes Next
Both HB 2690 and the amended SB 1313 now head to the full House floor, where they will need majority support to advance to the Senate and ultimately the governor's desk. The PGC approves of both bills, which removes one potential point of friction but does not guarantee smooth sailing. Fee-related legislation always carries political risk, and even bills framed as administrative reforms can attract opposition from members worried about the optics of appearing to authorize higher costs on their constituents.
The hunting community, for its part, has a clear interest in seeing both bills pass. A Game Commission with the authority to price its own services is a commission better equipped to fund the work that keeps Pennsylvania's deer herds, turkey flocks, bear populations, and elk herd in the kind of shape that makes Pennsylvania one of the premier hunting states east of the Mississippi. A five-day license gives the sons and grandsons of Pennsylvania an accessible way back into the tradition without paying the full freight of a nonresident tag. And junior pricing that actually encourages participation plants seeds that will pay dividends in license revenue — and in hunters in the field — for decades.
Pennsylvania has not seen this level of structural hunting legislation in a generation. Whether or not every piece passes in its current form, the conversation happening in Harrisburg right now is exactly the kind that sportsmen across the country should be watching. The issues — funding, access, recruitment, bureaucratic flexibility — are not unique to Pennsylvania. They are the defining challenges of American hunting in the 21st century, and the Keystone State is attempting to tackle them head-on.
