Most of the licenses and permits of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) are issued through our Total Licensing System, which is managed by a private contract vendor. Due to circumstances out of the control of the FWC, the vendor's computer system that supports the Total Licensing System went down from about 10:20am until approximately 11:40am. We suspect many persons were frustrated by the system failure, and may have decided to try later. By 2:24pm the last permit was sold, and, after that time, many persons who had attempted to acquire a permit in the morning were left out. The demand for statewide alligator harvest permits was extremely high, with more than 1,250 permits sold per hour.

After discussing the situation with the license vendor, they indicated that the whole system was down statewide during the failure and that there were no situations where one purchasing method could issue permits while another method could not. Given this, we do not believe there was any discrimination about who could get permits and who could not get permits during this time. Those persons who stayed in line, on the computer, or on the phone until the computer system problems were resolved were more likely to be issued permits than those who walked away and tried to come back later.

The computer system glitches have been identified by the license vendor and fixes have been applied to prevent this problem from happening next year. Staff will also be evaluating permit sales to determine if any additional constraints on sales are necessary to ensure equal opportunities to those who are interested in participating.

It is unfortunate that some people were unable to get permits and others didn’t get the harvest areas they wanted. We regret that there are unsatisfied customers and we offer our apologies for the permit issuance problems. We sincerely promise that we will do our best to make sure the process goes smoothly next year.