In a concession to budget cuts, Georgia's nine state-owned public fishing areas, including Evans County PFA near Daisy, will no longer open seven days a week.
    Beginning Monday, they will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources recently announced.
    Evans County Public Fishing Area encompasses 372 acres and includes three lakes measuring eight, 30 and 84 acres. Just south of U.S. Highway 280 and about nine miles east of Claxton, the site is equipped with fishing piers, concrete boat ramps, picnic tables, restrooms, a fish cleaning station and an office. It also offers primitive campsites for supervised groups such as scout troops.
    For years, two full-time state employees have worked overlapping schedules to keep the facility open every day, sunup to sundown.
    These employees will not see their hours reduced. Instead, they will be assigned on the closed days to take river samples or perform other state fisheries duties, filling gaps left by previous staffing cuts, said Ted Will, assistant chief of the Fisheries Management Section at the DNR Wildlife Resources Division headquarters in Social Circle.
    "Everybody's going through this. There is nothing more to really cut," Will said. "Every cut we receive from this point forward is going to have an impact on us and, unfortunately, our constituents."
    The alternative to closing all nine fishing areas two days a week, he said, would have been to close one of them altogether, something the agency is trying to avoid. Will, who worked with the Evans County PFA in an earlier role, said it would likely have been the site targeted for closure because it is one of the most lightly used.
    "Evans would probably have been the cut based on attendance and the dollar figure they were looking for," he said.
    The fiscal year 2012 state budget trimmed $91,960 from the Fisheries Section's funding. While that may look modest compared to other state line items, Will said it amounts to nearly the operating budget for a PFA.
    The Fisheries Section workforce, he estimates, has been reduced by about 20 positions over the past three fiscal years, to about 115 employees statewide.  Both state and federal funds, totaling about $11 million this year, go to operate Georgia's fisheries program. A large portion of the state funding comes from hunting and fishing license revenue, which has not been subject to cuts. The $91,960 cut was to the relatively small share of the funding that comes from state taxes.
    As for the choice of Mondays and Tuesdays for closing, the data showed that those are the days when the fewest people go fishing at PFAs.
    "We realize that some people do like to come on those days for that very reason, but given the cut and what we have to operate with, we feel that was the best balance to still provide a quality fishing opportunity five days a week now instead of seven," Will said.
    The other fishing areas affected are McDuffie County PFA, Big Lazer Creek PFA, Marben Farms PFA, Dodge County PFA, Flat Creek PFA, Hugh M. Gillis PFA, Paradise PFA, and Ocmulgee PFA. A tenth site, Rocky Mountain PFA north of Rome, will remain open seven days a week because it is operated under contract with Oglethorpe Power.