Rescuing people in New Hampshire’s back country is so expensive, costing $2,000 on average and up to $60,000 in extreme cases involving a helicopter, that the day it can be covered by fees from ATVs or hunters is long past, and it’s unlikely the shortfall can be covered just by charging the people who get rescued.
This message will likely be coming out Thursday when the Legislature once again takes up the issue of paying for rescues, a cost that routinely exceeds the state Fish and Game Department budget by six figures.
“We have made 12 separate attempts for bills over 21 years to fund this,” said Maj. Kevin Jordan of the Fish and Game Department’s Law Enforcement Division, in a recent interview.
The latest attempt will be the subject of a hearing Thursday in Concord. A major topic of the hearing is likely to be how much, and when, to charge people who are rescued.
Such charges has been allowed in New Hampshire since the late 1990s, but only become prevalent after 2008, when state law was changed so that people could be charged by rescue officials if they were judged to have been merely negligent, rather than “reckless.”
Over the past six years, Fish and Game has billed people who were rescued 38 times, Jordan said. That’s about 4 percent of the total 957 Fish and Game search and rescue missions over that period.![]()
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