Jun. 26, 2023
HARRISBURG – Rep. David Maloney (R-Berks) today blasted the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) for total mismanagement of the rollout of the state’s new online doe license system after he warned during a committee meeting last year that he feared this would happen.
During the Sept. 21, 2022, House Game and Fisheries Committee meeting on Senate Bill 431, Maloney expressed his concerns as a longtime Pennsylvania hunter with such a dramatic change to how sportsmen and sportswomen have applied for their doe tags for decades and moving the application of doe tags to a strictly online system that had yet to be created.
“I said that I agreed with the bill conceptually, but my only request was for a hearing. I asked for briefings and evidence that a new system would be built to handle this massive influx of new data and briefings to assuage my concerns prior to full House vote, but we had no hearings, and I was never contacted again. It wasn’t an outlandish request given what sportsmen have experienced with the performance of the PALS system over the years,” Maloney, now the Republican Chair of the committee, said.
And again, on the House floor during final passage of the bill,
Maloney asked his colleagues to pause and ask for a hearing on the bill.
“I was just under number 3,800 on the waiting list this morning,” Maloney said, “with assurances I would be notified when my time was ready and would have 10 minutes to submit my application. But smartphones are unlikely to transmit that kind of data and navigate a clogged website very quickly, and of course my 10 minutes came and went with no doe tag.
“What about people who have to work? They can’t check every 10 minutes to see if their time is up, and then what? Ask the boss to ‘hang on a sec while you try to grab a doe tag?’ And as was pointed out to me today, if you have junior hunters, you have to log in a separate time for each one because they can’t buy their own tags.
“The PGC is a broken agency. This is just one more debacle they will excuse away because no real ramifications will ever occur, and they know that. The commissioners and staff are disconnected from the men and women who fund their very existence – a shortfall I will be addressing in the very near future.”
Representative David Maloney
130th District
Pennsylvania House of Representatives