The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission is ending its volunteer deputy program after more than a century, leaving 36 deputies across the Commonwealth without their positions \u2014 including one Lancaster County man who has served for more than 40 years.<\/p>\n
The program will officially end Sept. 1.<\/p>\n
For Dave Eichler, the decision marks the end of a 40-year career as a volunteer deputy. He first joined the program in 1985 after a friend he knew through the Boy Scouts suggested he become a deputy.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t know it was going to come to this. I’m saddened. I’m going through all the phases of loss,” Eichler said.<\/p>\n
Volunteer deputies assist the PFBC’s full-time waterways conservation officers with duties related to fishing and boating enforcement.<\/p>\n
For Eichler, that work has included interacting with anglers and boaters, helping during trout stockings and providing traffic control when crowds gather near stocking locations.<\/p>\n
“Its more than just being with a boat or being with a trout stocking truck, it’s also traffic control,” Eichler said. “Oftentimes there’s a parade of cars of interested people that follow the stocking truck to the streams, and it’s up to the officers to do the traffic control.”<\/p>\n
Eichler said the deputies were not given much explanation when they were notified of the decision.<\/p>\n
The commission said ending the program is part of the “natural evolution of modern conservation law enforcement.”<\/p>\n
The change will also affect how coverage is handled in Lancaster County.<\/p>\n
Without Eichler, the full-time officer he assists will be responsible for roughly 500 square miles of the county alone.<\/p>\n
For Eichler, the end of the program means saying goodbye to the people and waterways that have been part of his life for more than four decades.<\/p>\n
“I’ll miss most is the interaction with the public, with the angling and the boating public,” Eichler said. “I’m going to miss that. A lot of people out here know me.”<\/p>\n
With the program ending Sept. 1, Eichler is spending his final days on the water as a PFBC volunteer deputy before hanging up his badge for good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission is ending its volunteer deputy program after more than a century, leaving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[115387,28,30,29,115386],"class_list":["post-274564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-eichler","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-the-pennsylvania-fish-and-boat-commission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274564","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=274564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}