What’s going on with the DNR’s long-anticipated outdoor activity licensing app?

Minnesota anglers who want to fish anytime soon are still going to need paper licenses despite last year’s assurance by the Department of Natural Resources that outdoors licenses and registrations would go digital well before opening day.

The agency has been working on the $3.5 million project since 2021 and last year hired a former head of the DNR’s Fish and Wildlife Division to solve potential problems and provide leadership for the system’s final development. Still, the DNR and its project partners, Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) and PayIt Outdoors, a private vendor, failed to deliver by its March 4 deadline.

The two agencies have not announced a new timeline other than to say it’ll launch before 2026.

Digitizing millions of permissions a year for hunting, skiing, horseback riding, snowmobiling and other pursuits, will allow people to display licenses on their phones, even when out of cell phone range. The new system also is designed to provide faster titling of boats and recreational vehicles. People could buy licenses from home, register their harvest, sign up for safety training, fill out small game harvest surveys and keep track of their own hunting lottery applications.

If a family needs fishing licenses en route to a lake, for example, they could buy the permits on the go with the system’s mobile app.

MNIT last year identified DNR licensing as one of the state’s top five information technology projects.

According to the DNR, the system will immediately need to handle 2.3 million licenses and more than 500,000 boat and vehicle registrations a year. Together, those licenses and registrations generate more than $100 million a year for the agency.

A year ago, the DNR announced that the project was in the home stretch. The system was being tweaked, a manager said then, and would soon be demonstrated to licensing partners and publicly promoted.

“We have a robust plan to have this ready by March 1,” the DNR’s Jenifer Coleman, one of the project’s managers, told the Duluth News Tribune last March.

Despite the delay, DNR officials said they are working within the project’s budget.

Russ Francisco, owner of Marine General, a fishing goods store in Duluth, said retailers across the state who sell licenses for the DNR have only been told the system won’t be ready for the May 10 statewide fishing opener.

“All we are hearing right now is that the system didn’t work,” Francisco said. “We’ve been waiting for how many years now?

“They’ll eventually get to it, I’m sure,” he said. “In the meantime, we’ll be waiting.”

The DNR’s Kelly Straka, who was promoted to Fish and Wildlife Division director in early July 2024, said it was her call to pause the new system’s kickoff. She said she’s relatively new to the project.

Over the winter, many things were still being tested and refined and she lost confidence in meeting the deadline with a fully proven, functional system, she said.

“We ran up against the clock,” Straka said. “Are we racing to a finish line when we are not really feeling ready?”

Straka said the system will receive end-to-end testing for at least a month before it’s rolled out. It won’t go live for public use until it’s “100 percent lock-tight ready,” she said.

DNR spokeswoman Gail Nosek said the DNR and MNIT understand that a good first-time user experience may require launching the system outside of busy licensing times. The weeks and days ahead of the fishing opener, when half a million anglers are buying licenses and stamps, is one of the busiest licensing periods.

“That is also a factor that may influence the selection of our launch date,” Nosek said in an email.

The DNR did not answer questions seeking a more detailed explanation for the delay, including what factors are still holding the project up and what the agency could have done differently to meet its March 1 deadline.

The vibe was upbeat last April, when DNR officials were publicly previewing the new system’s features. State officials believed Minnesota was on the brink of discarding a system clearly behind most other states. “We were hearing [complaints] loudly,” former DNR Fish and Wildlife Chief Dave Olfelt said last April.

On June 3, DNR Commissioner Sarah Strommen announced Olfelt as the project’s leader. He retired from the top Fish and Wildlife job, but would stay on part time to solely focus on the licensing system’s final development.

“This position exists to ensure that a modern, high quality DNR Electronic Licensing System is delivered and operational by March 4, 2025,” Olfelt’s official job description states.

According to his employment agreement, obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune, the transformative electronic licensing system has high visibility and is “politically sensitive.” At the Capitol last year, lawmakers appropriated $2.6 million for the project’s completion.

Olfelt, whom Straka said is still working on the project, declined several requests to explain the project’s stumbling blocks. His counterpart at MNIT, Chief Business Technology Officer Jenna Covey, also declined an interview.

The duo has been working with at least three other state-employed managers to complete the project with PayIt Outdoors, the private company that in April 2023 signed a state contract to develop the system and run it for $1.05 per transaction.

Strommen placed some responsibility for the project’s delay on PayIt, based in Kansas City.

“We expect PayIt Outdoors, the state’s vendor, to be ready to launch the new system later this year,” she wrote in an email to the Star Tribune. “While PayIt Outdoors’ updated timeline is disappointing, it is essential that the new system fully meets the needs of its users when PayIt Outdoors delivers it to the state.”

Chris Willard, general manager of outdoors at PayIt, declined to be interviewed. He said in a statement that the company has been “partnering closely” with the DNR and MNIT to reschedule the launch. “When ready, the DNR will communicate our mutually agreed launch date.”

Straka said the DNR is “not expecting any additional budget” to cover state salaries and other project-related expenses. PayIt’s compensation will come from transaction fees.

PayIt has built similar systems in Ohio, Arkansas, Michigan and Kansas. The company specializes in IT projects for governments. Its website advertises speedy work: “Go live with PayIt in as little as 90 days.”

Once the system is running, PayIt will be responsible for operating and maintaining it, the DNR said.

Covey, of MNIT, said managers followed a state playbook for IT projects designed to avoid the yearslong delays and service disruptions encountered during the failed build-out of a new Minnesota motor vehicle licensing and registration system.

Covey said a major lesson from that debacle was not to build an electronic licensing system from scratch. Instead, the DNR shopped for an off-the-shelf system and settled on one from PayIt that could be configured for the state’s needs.

Jason Bahr of Tutt’s Bait & Tackle in Garrison, by Mille Lacs Lake, said he’s disappointed the new licensing system isn’t ready.

“The system we’re using now is ridiculously bad,” he said.