Hey Wade. I don’t have ALL the answers. I just pitched in to make a point about LARE. You’ll have to get someone else to address the BMV and gaming, etc. I actually voted for Daniels and I’m having heartburn with some of the things going on too. For example, here at West Boggs it starting to look like a time zone might bisect the lake and the park, leaving the gate house and office an hour different than the campground and boat ramp. It would take me an hour and 3 minutes to respond to a complaint that used to be 3 minutes away. That’s going to make for some interesting discussions about boating speed after sunset, camping checkout times, and such. I might just honor both and go to work on Central and go home on Eastern. That would be a 6 hours day. On the plus side I don’t think the fish will pay much attention to what time the politicians think it is.

Back on LARE and similar issues, I have to agree that the scale sometimes seems tilted toward feeding consultants. I know one service that lakes used to get from IDNR for free is now a requirement that we provide from private engineers. The requirements are much more involved than when the state did the same thing, and the cost is thousands higher. If that wasn’t bad enough, we then learned that the only engineers that would be accepted for the work were those on a list provided by the state office that set up the requirements. The very first engineer I spoke to for a quote had recently retired from the state office that wrote those regs and is now on the approved list. Go figure. But my experiences with LARE have been much better.