Access and Habitat board member sought for Southwest Oregon

CENTRAL POINT, Ore. – ODFW is looking for a landowner representative to serve on the Access and Habitat (A&H) Program's Southwest Region Council. This position is voluntary with a four-year term and an option to be reappointed to a second term.

Interested applicants can find the regional application packet at https://www.dfw.state.or.us/lands/ah/ Here, the current statewide board meetings and project deadlines, project applications, regional board members, as well as overviews of current and past projects can also be viewed.

Applications need to be received by Sunday May 31, 2026 in order to be reviewed by the current council before the A&H Board meets in Salem this July.

The Southwest Region covers Douglas, Coos, Curry, Jackson, and Josephine counties and applicants should live or work in these counties. Council members participate in up to four public meetings yearly in various communities in this region. Landowners with an interest and experience in forestry, agriculture or ranching, and hunting or wildlife conservation are encouraged to apply.

At the meetings, council members help develop and review A&H project proposals for statewide A&H Board funding considerations, while also sharing their regional wildlife, hunting, public access, and conservation updates from their various perspectives and areas. A&H projects open private land to hunting access or improve wildlife habitat for game animals.

The Southwest Region Council oversees a number of A&H projects, with new ones in constant development.

The Jackson Cooperative Travel Management Area shows how access payments and dedicated Oregon State Police game trooper enforcement hours within its boundary helps offset landowner costs of private road maintenance and clean-ups of illegal dumping/camping. It also helps reduce poaching and resource damage and improves blacktail deer winter range conditions with seasonal road closures. In exchange, hunters get continued regulated public access during hunting seasons while safeguarding recreational access to landlocked public lands.

The Southwest Region Council also oversees projects that increase special youth hunting opportunities on private lands such as the Territorial Youth Deer Hunt (620T2) in which a security guard is funded to allow hunter access to gated 4,500 acres of industrial timberlands with match funding support coming from regional Oregon Hunters Association chapters. Access Payments recommended by the Southwest Region Council opens up "Hunting by Permission" at the New River Access Area throughout the waterfowl season and helps a few south coast ranchers offset damage to their agricultural pasture caused by thousands of migrating Aleutian geese each fall and spring.

New projects like the Rogue River Preserve Turkey Hunt and Habitat Project enables a regional land conservancy to increase the scale of its wildlife habitat enhancement projects while providing an amazing opportunity for spring turkey hunters to have a large preserve to themselves in the hopes of filling their turkey tags.

"These projects and others really do help the program meet its intended goal of landowners and hunters, together for wildlife, and as a SW Regional Council member, you would have direct input in helping shape these projects", according to Ryan Battleson, the A&H Southwest Regional Council Coordinator.

"We are in an exciting time with an engaged regional council and a number of new projects on the horizon that will help both create unique public hunting opportunities especially for youth hunters and improve habitat quality on some really neat private properties that have a conservation focus.

The A&H Program is funded by a $4 surcharge on hunting licenses and the sale of deer and elk raffle entries and auction tags. Deer and elk rafle tags are still for sale this year through 10 a.m. May 26, 2026 online at Http://odfw.huntfishoregon.com or at any license agent. Over the years, the A&H program has opened millions of acres of private land to hunting and has improved thousands of acres of game animal habitat.

For more information, contact Ryan Battleson, A&H Southwest Council Regional Coordinator at 541-857-2408. Find A&H properties available to hunt at http://oregonhuntingmap.com/#/map