State officials have taken another step toward hosting a grizzly bear hunt later this year.

On Thursday, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission directed the department’s Wildlife Division to develop regulations for a grizzly hunting season this fall.

“The sportsmen of Wyoming have spent about $50 million to help recover the grizzly,” said commissioner Patrick Crank, of Cheyenne, adding, “We’ve recovered the grizzly bear. It’s an amazing success story. I think it’s time we move forward with the department drafting regulations [for hunting].”

Brian Nesvik, chief of the Wildlife Division and chief game warden, presented a report on the department’s work to discuss the issue with the public, pointing to support for the hunts.

“Overall, there was support across the state for a hunting season. Certainly, there were views on both sides of the issue, but there is a population right now that is robust and healthy enough to be able to support a conservative, regulated hunting season,” Nesvik said at the meeting in Douglas.

Immediately following the report, and without questions, commission president Keith Culver asked if there was a

consensus to develop hunting regulations; his colleagues voted unanimously to do so.

The issue has been well discussed since Wyoming won the right to manage grizzly populations last year.

The department spent the past several months listening to the public, including eight scoping meetings across the state, individual meetings with stakeholder groups including conservation and sportsman groups, and a Facebook Live session that could be viewed around the world and which reached more than 35,000 people.

While support for hunting grizzlies outside of Yellowstone National Park is high within the state, many around the country — including numerous conservation groups and tribes in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — oppose hunting the iconic species. Several lawsuits are pending in attempts to stop hunts.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been considering whether a recent appellate court ruling — which found that the agency was wrong to manage wolves in segmented populations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — could apply to grizzly bears as well.

Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead has worked to have grizzlies and wolves delisted in the ecosystem and would like to see updates made to the ESA, which was passed in 1973, and the endangered species list.

“Since [1973], of all species listed, only about 2 percent have ever been taken off the list,” Mead said Friday during a Wyoming Press Association luncheon in Casper. “We’re not doing a good job taking care of species and we’re not doing a good job procedurally with [the ESA].”

Mead thinks the state needs to do a better job educating those outside the state about managing the large carnivore.

“For those people that write from out of the state, I think there is nothing that would ever justify the killing of a wolf or grizzly bear [for them],” he said. “It’s a good thing for Wyoming to have grizzly bears. It’s a good thing for Wyoming to have wolves. It’s part of the ecosystem and it’s part of the balance. But when you don’t have an ability to manage wildlife which belong to the State of Wyoming, that is not a good deal. You create imbalance. You create problems in the northwest corner of the state.”

Mead supports hunts as a more humane way to manage large carnivores. Prior to state management of the species, federal wildlife managers were killing wolves in unsporting ways, including gassing dens, Mead said. Since taking over management, the state is still forced to kill both species in conflict management cases. But in the first year of wolf hunting, the lethal removal of wolves by the state dropped by about half.

“It’s a long-term education process. I understand well people are passionate about grizzly bears and wolves. I think the message from the State of Wyoming is, we’re glad we have [bears and wolves]. It’s a wonderful thing for tourism and provides balance for the ecosystem,” Mead said. “But we in the state need to have the ability to manage them and we can do it in a responsible way.”

It’s feared the suits and corresponding campaigns aimed at their constituents around the country — possible tourists — may cause backlash against the state. Mead personally has received threatening letters, some wishing death to his entire family, as well as contacts from tourists from out of state.

Combined with a proposal that would more than double Yellowstone National Park’s entrance fees, local communities are watching closely to see how attendance is affected. Yellowstone’s visitation in 2017 was off slightly from the previous year when more than 4.2 million visitors entered the park, a record. Last year was the second highest in the park’s history.

The Game and Fish Department’s large carnivore team, led by Dan Thompson, plans to deliver a report on the feedback and is working on ways to implement many of the ideas. Educating the public and sharing more information are part of their plans, Nesvik said.

“Our feedback has been extremely positive and we learned a lot that we can use in other issues,” Nesvik said.

Work is being done to develop new grizzly population estimates as the current estimates are known to be low/conservative, Nesvik said. The current recommendation is a $600 license fee for resident hunters and $6,000 for nonresidents. Thompson has said that, if a hunt had been held last year, the quota in Wyoming would have been limited to 10 grizzlies. New population estimates could raise that number for a season later this year.