The recommendation is for council to remove its moratorium on deer trapping effective Jan. 1, and apply for a placeholder permit from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department for the "Trap, Transport and Transfer," or TTT, program to relocate deer to ranches in West Texas.
If all components of the WAC recommendation are passed during the Dec. 16 meeting, the action from council would also authorize Interim City Manager Julie Oakley and WAC chairperson Dennis Hogan to negotiate a contract with a trapper to commence trapping operations on Feb. 1. The program would include help from law enforcement, according to city information.
The TTT recommendation is seen by proponents as a more humane version of an earlier program called Trap, Transfer and Process, or TTP, which resulted in the ultimate termination of caught deer.
The WAC approved the action Dec. 12 in a 4-2 vote. Some Lakeway residents are already coming out against the recommendation and vocalizing their hopes that council will postpone action.-
Rita Cross, president of the local animal rights group Citizen Advocates for Animals, told Community Impact Newspaper Sunday, Dec. 15, that due to a recent deer census showing a stable population, there is no valid reason for deer removal.
“We are hopeful Mayor [Sandy] Cox will realize this and will table a vote until after the citizen survey is completed,” she said. “Of course, this will interfere with the plan for TTT.”
Cross and Lakeway resident Carolyn Kelly stated they would like for the WAC to send out a survey to Lakeway residents that was approved during an Aug. 19 City Council meeting as part of a deer management program.
The WAC held open house events Nov. 14 and 15 at the Lakeway Activity Center that sought citizen input on the city’s deer population, but a survey has not yet been sent out to Lakeway residents.
“Some sort of survey will be going out, but council has to agree on what type of survey and what date that will occur,” Lakeway City Council Member Louis Mastrangelo said Dec. 15.
Mayor Sandy Cox said Nov. 14 that the two WAC open house events comprised the city’s first attempts to educate the community on the deer population issue in Lakeway, as well as to seek input from residents.
“We want to get a feel from the community how they feel about our deer population and how it’s being managed and so forth,” Cox said, adding the WAC would gather resident feedback from the open house events and online comments, as well as from three deer population censuses conducted over the last year, draw conclusions and then make a recommendation to council.
Information from Lakeway City Council’s Dec. 16 agenda includes results from a deer population census conducted by Kolbe Ranches & Wildlife, LLC. The census was composed of three spotlight surveys conducted from Nov. 19-Dec. 3.
Notes from that survey conclude the white-tailed deer population density in Lakeway is estimated at one deer per 5.37 acres.
“From the literature and past research on native rural range habitat, a deer per **10-25** acres is recommended in the Edwards Plateau ecoregion of Texas,” the survey states, but also notes that no significant growth in the deer population has occurred from 2018 to 2019.
Mastrangelo said one reason the WAC felt an urgency to recommend applying for the TTT permit is because TPWD recently made the program available due to an anthrax outbreak in south and west Texas that decimated local white tail deer populations, and the department’s deadlines state permits must be submitted by Jan. 2, 2020.
Mastrangelo also made clear that he does not know what council will decide during the Dec. 16 meeting, but there are a number of possibilities.
“Just because we get a permit doesn’t mean that later we have to act on it,” Mastrangelo said. “If council determines later that there is no reason to trap deer, we do not have to. If we didn’t get the permit, then we wouldn’t be able to take action, if we had to, until 2021. That also doesn’t mean that we won’t consider other methods besides this or in conjunction with this. The initial idea was for this to be a placeholder.”
