Carl G. Roe, Executive Director
PA Game Commission
Before the House Game and Fisheries Committee
March 21, 2006
"It has certainly been a
challenge to implement the Strategic Plan in an era of declining resources," Roe
said. "Our strategic plan is a
forward-looking plan that is based on program expansion and the introduction of
new programs. Implementing the plan is problematic when, in fact, we are cutting
other programs to meet our current funding levels.
"With that, we have made
significant strides in some areas of our strategic plan. For example, as part of
the strategic objective to update and develop wildlife species management plans,
we have developed management plans for deer, turkey, elk and bear. By next
spring we will add woodcock and ruffed grouse. We developed a comprehensive
wildlife plan for species of special concern that received laudatory remarks
from the USFWS.
"Within the goal of developing
a sustainable funding structure, we have established a Foundation that is
headquartered in
"Additionally, we did not let
the shortage of Game Funds preclude us from moving forward. We obtained other
resources to achieve our objectives. We have partnered with the National Wild
Turkey Federation to fund a banding study that will allow us to determine wild
turkey harvest rates.
"Within the objective of
developing a revised mapping and media display based on GIS for easy
identification of Public Access Programs, we submitted and received a grant from
the National Shooting Sports Foundation that funded this project.
"These are but a few examples
that demonstrate that we are moving forward with various elements of the plan
regardless of the declining resources.
"Our attempt to integrate the
strategic plan into our budget has not been as successful as we would have hoped
due to our limited resources. For FY 2005-06 we built a zero-based budget based
on the strategic plan. As I recall, that budget came to around $81 to $83
million dollars. We had to reduce that budget to around $68 million.
"There was a lot of work that
went into the development of that zero based budget. We
traveled to each region and worked with the staffs to develop their budgets. We
worked with the bureaus to move towards a more programmatic approach to
budgeting. The result was that our workforce was frustrated after putting in all
the effort; they could not accomplish what they knew was needed to be done in
the strategic plan. They spent a lot of time and effort to tie the budget to the
strategic plan and in the end we did not have the resources to implement the
program in the manner identified by the regions and workforce.
"I have made a firm commitment
to integrate strategic planning into the daily operations of the agency. This
April, at our monthly staff meeting, the measurements from the strategic plan
will be reviewed so we can go through the exercise of making adjustments to the
budget during re-budget, based on what we accomplished the previous year. This
will not be a clean process the first time around, but I am confident it will
improve over time.
"We are intent on implementing the strategic plan and will do so within the resources we have."