In Fiscal Year 2020 the Ohio Division of Wildlife had revenues of nearly $5.4 million more than expenditures: that is something of a reversal from Fiscal Year 2019 when expenditures exceeded revenues by about $8.3 million.
Yet such swings are typical for a budget that has largely predictable income but sees expenses fluctuate due to completion of projects along with other commitments.
In all, for Fiscal Year 2020, the Wildlife Division scored $80.5 million in income with expenses of about $75.2 million. For Fiscal Year 2019, those numbers were $72.6 million and about $81 million, respectively.
“Expenditures depend a lot on when projects are wrapping up while revenues generally are more consistent, but we did see increases in revenue due to increases in license and permit fees,” said Kelley Moseley, the Wildlife Division’s executive business administrator, in effect, its chief financial officer.
Moseley said expenditures were down initially in Fiscal Year 2020 as COVID-19 impacted any number of on-going projects. And these items still flourished in the budgetary scheme of things, Moseley said.
Among those items were the fulfillment of the agency’s promise to complete the shooting ranges at the Delaware Wildlife Area and the Spring Valley Wildlife Area.
“Those projects came back to normal so there was little impact (by COVID),” Moseley said.
Not featured in the agency’s fiscal “pie chart” - which is found in the annual Wild Ohio magazine 2021 calendar - was the $15.6 million the Wildlife Division received from the state’s General Revenue Fund.
This notation is further explained as going for land acquisition for the formerly called AEP land; now known as the Appalachian Hills land in southeast Ohio.
Likewise listed separately are moneys for Governor Mike DeWine’s much vaunted “H20” initiative, Moseley said.
“That is funded separately,” she said.
Yet while the actual total dollars in revenue and expenditures are different between Fiscal Year 2019 and Fiscal Year 2020, the percentages dovetail very tightly.
For instance, in Fiscal Year 2019, fish management consumed 17 percent of all expenditures (nearly $14 million) while in Fiscal Year 2020 that category was 15 percent ($11.5 million).
The same went for wildlife management: 20 percent in Fiscal Year 2019 ($16.5 million) compared to 18 percent in Fiscal Year 2020 ($13.6 million).
Similar mirror imagery is seen with the other seven categories with some – such as law enforcement at eight percent for each fiscal year being identical.
On the revenue side of the ledger for Fiscal Year 2020, fishing licenses accounted for $16.4 million while hunting licenses generated nearly $11 million. However, deer tags more than equaled hunting licenses with $11.1 million.
As for fines? That saw a generated revenue of only $265,749 in Fiscal Year 2020; the smallest dollar amount of any of the 12 categories of income the Wildlife Division received.
Of chief importance regarding income received by the Wildlife Division are dollars from the federal government in the form of both fish and wildlife aid-to-restoration funding sources. In Fiscal Year 2020, this income receipt totaled $24.6 million, or 31 percent of the agency’s total revenue stream (and 33 percent in Fiscal Year 2019).
Not included in that aid money is income derived from the explosive increase in the sale of firearms and ammunition.
An excise tax on these products is levied by the federal government which in turn then doles the money out to the states, territories and such using something of a complex formula and arrives for reimbursement of approved projects.
“We really won’t see the bulk of this money (from firearms and ammunition sales) for two years though we might see a ‘bump’ this year,” Moseley said.
- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net
JFrischk4@gmail.com
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