February DEC report <\/a>showed no hunting-related shooting incidents, violations or license revocations occurred during the first five years of the pilot. Erie and Rockland remain the last two counties to not participate. <\/p>\nTodaro, a Republican, said when the legislation was first introduced a few years ago, some legislators had concerns over safety.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first time around, the legislators, I noticed more in the urban setting where there is no hunting allowed, it seems that their concern was, ‘oh, geez, this, this is a child. They should not be handling a weapon.’ That was their main thing,” Todaro said. “They did not want to be responsible, to have a death during this pilot program and something they voted for. It’s understandable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Todaro believes they now have enough votes to both pass the law and bypass any veto from County Executive Mark Poloncarz. <\/p>\n
“It’s the parents that want to make the decision for their child to go into the woods and hunt. We have a lot of government, the overreach is not something that many are happy about,” Todaro said. <\/p>\n
Enrolled youth have to take a safety course with homework, pass a test and must be supervised while hunting. The person supervising them has to be a parent, guardian or adult mentor 21 years old or older, with more than three years of experience hunting. The child can only hunt deer, not black bear, must wear high-visibility clothing, must remain on the ground and can not use tree stands.<\/p>\n
In 2024-25, over 12,000 youth hunters were licensed and estimated to have brought in over $200,000 in license fees through the program.<\/p>\n
The DEC is asking the state to make the program permanent and no longer require counties to opt-in through local laws. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Erie County could soon opt-in to a state Department of Environmental Conservation pilot program allowing 12- and 13-year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[136,138,137],"class_list":["post-156569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}