Texas sells Mule deer hunting area

[rickt300]

Near 49,000 acres of land was donated to the State of Texas for hunting and recreational use by the public and recently the state auctioned off 9,000 acres of it. The property was never opened to the public and it was in prime Mule deer habitat. Funny, I brought this up in the Texas hunting forum and got practically no response. Texas Parks and Wildlife must run the site because when you bring things like "Public Hunting Lands" up you get all kinds of static. Isn't state property public property, it is in Wyoming.

[Graybeard]

Strange indeed. Some crooked dealing no doubt. If you're talking about the Texas forum here it's run by no one but us but then it does get very little traffic really so I guess it's no big surprise it got no comments there. Not many folks seem to think of public land when they think of Texas.

[beemanbeme]

By saying they auctioned it off, do you mean they leased the hunting rights?  Or that they sold it outright? 
Public hunting land is pretty much unheard of in Texas.  For what it cost to join a good hunting club or lease a decent hunting tract, a fellow can finance a hunting trip to Wyoming or Colorado or Montana.

[weasel]

Tell me about it, my father-in-law has a place in Texas, it is leased out to 8 hunters, even I don't get to hunt there and I get along with him!

[rickt300]

Texas has a huge amount of state land they hide and auction off. Mostly I suppose to keep the cost of leases high. The Richard King Mellon foundation bought the property and donated it specifically to provide hunting and recreation to the public. Our corrupt land commissioner Jerry Patterson said of this provision, " it is probably unenforcable because a property owner should not have to ask a previous owner for permission to sell" Also saying they offered the property to both the Feds and TPWD who apparently declined to manage it. Why not just open the gates and let us hunt on it? Virtually all western states do it that way. Looking at it another way this property is "Public" so shouldn't the public have a say in it's use? The state is also trying to sell hundreds of thousands of acres around Big Bend that has never been opened to the public.

[beemanbeme]

If the land is public, how is access restricted?

[rickt300]

I wasn't talking about the Texas forum on this site, there is one called www.Texashuntingforum.com , I often visit the fishing form on the same site. They restrict access by not notifying the public it exists, even writing tickets for trespassing. The depth of the state of Texas's corruption as far as land goes has yet to be uncovered. The public even pays for the fencing that keeps them off the property.

[beemanbeme]

There are several suits wending their way thru Federal court in Wyoming about access to BLM land that is blocked by relatively small holdings that effectively control hundreds of thousands of acres of public land.  Maybe that will have an effect on all public land.  The point is however, until they are challenged in court and ordered to stop, they ain't gonna stop.

[rickt300]

There is a group called the Goodfellows in Sarasota, Wyoming. They bought some property straddling the only road in to a huge area of public land. They built their clubhouse straddling the road. It is built like a barn with doors blocking the road.  This "club" is made up of the local insiders that call the shots in the area.