HELENA - If you are a nonresident hunter and you want your shot at Montana's big game, you've got two options: You can hire an outfitter, pay $1,500 and you're guaranteed a hunting license.

Or you can pay $400, put your name in the hat and have about a 60 percent chance of drawing a tag.

Kurt Kephart thinks that is unfair, saying Montana's system of guaranteeing hunting licenses for outfitted hunters takes the state to the edge of privatizing and commercializing Montana's prized big game.

"It is Texas-privatized hunting at its best," said Kephart, a 52-year-old Billings man who has hunted in Montana for the last 40 years.

Kephart wants to change Montana law to do away with the system of "guaranteed" big-game licenses for outfitters. He received the go-ahead this week from state officials to begin gathering signatures for his Initiative 161, which would both end the outfitter set-aside license system and raise the price for all nonresident big game licenses to fund the popular, public hunting program known as block management.

Currently, most of the money for block management comes from the 5,500 big-game licenses set aside for outfitters. Block management is a program where landowners can enroll their land with the Fish, Wildlife and Parks program, which helps private landowners manage private hunter requests. The program has been credited with expanding and simplifying hunter access to private land in Montana.

Montana's wildlife belongs to the public, Kephart said, and is managed by the public FWP, which is funded mostly through money from hunters. Yet, rank-and-file hunters are having a harder and harder time finding places to hunt because of the expansion of guided hunts. Outfitters are paying landowners to close their land to public hunters and allow in only those hunters with enough money to hire an outfitter.

Hunting shouldn't be pay-to-play, he said.

"There's no sense giving the outfitting industry the tools they need to take our privileges and our opportunities away from us," he said.

But that's only part of the story, said Mac Minard, executive director of the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association, in Helena.

The set-aside tags give outfitters the stability they need to "close the deal on booking a hunt," Minard said.

Many rural economies depend on the infusion of money guided hunts bring to their area. What's more, he said, bad hunter behavior is also to blame for ranchers choosing to lease their land to outfitters rather than put up with the headache of private hunters.

"Many of these properties are the result of landowners just being fed up," Minard said.

Kephart agreed that some public hunters are bad actors and need to "shape up." But that still doesn't make the set-aside outfitter permit situation fair, he said.

As for creating stability, Kephart said the state doesn't owe anybody anything. The current system guarantees outfitters customers. After all, he said, they've got a guaranteed tag that can only be purchased by going through an outfitter. No other business gets a guaranteed customer base from the state.

The initiative is a long ways from becoming law. Kephart, who said he is so far acting alone in this effort, needs to gather more than 24,330 signatures to place the item on the 2010 ballot. And then, of course, voters would have to approve it.

Both Kephart and Minard said the issue is sure to kick up strong emotion.

Especially during big game season.