My BIL and I have been the lease managers for my FIL's place over the years and have had some real 'classy' folks in the past. Due to some of their actions that weren't necessarily pointed out in the lease agreement, we've just continued to add more (common sense) lease rules, to the point it's gotten a bit ridiculous and overly long. Luckily we've never had any real doosies to date.

I'm looking to re-write our lease agreement and cleaning it up a good bit. If anyone is willing to share your MLDP lease agreement with me, it would greatly be appreciated. I'm looking to use it as sort of an example to help recreate ours.

If you're willing please shoot me a PM and I can send my email address to you. Thanks.

Are you talking about general lease rules that aren't being followed that you have to keep amending or is it not following the harvest rules as proposed by the biologist for the MLDP program? The first thing I expect from my lease members is signing off on an agreement that they have read and understand the rules and breaking these rules could lead to immediate termination of their lease membership. That way they can't blame me for being kicked off the lease- blame themselves because they knew the consequences of not following the rules and willfully broke them.

My lease agreement was with the land owner with his wishes and rules which is the most important. If ya draw up a lease agreement for your hunters you may have some problems getting an agreement among your hunters. My rules was not written down but simply follow the Texas laws and county laws. If you write yours for the lease you must back up those laws. That is hard to do as you will find your hunters will not always follow them and when they don't you must have a punishment and for all hunters the same treatment ..even your best friend. So if you make rules that make sense and simple to understand and say exactly what you want to say it will be easy to hand out the punishment. You will have to be hard on some rules and others give one and only one warning. Running a lease is not easy.

Common sense eventually has to overrule writing every rule to control every situation. That is the reason I got off of a lease previous to the one I am on now. Lease agreement went from 2 pages to 11 pages and most of it was in lawyer lingo. I couldn't afford the lease and a lawyer to read the lease agreement, so I got off.

A lot of it also has to do with what you are trying to accomplish as a lease- is it a trophy lease with strict age/harvest guidelines or a lease that is less stringent. None of my leases are really large enough to manage other than your personal goals so the state bag limits are what we follow. Also, I get a lot of newbies to hunting without a lot of experience so I don't want to make things too difficult in the beginning. I have found that over time, guys learn what they should and shouldn't shoot based on conversations we have at the camp. Trail cameras, IMHO, have helped with this "education"- new guys on a lease might tend to shoot the first decent buck they see but if they know there is something better in the area they tend to hold off. I have timber company leases so we already have rules that have to be followed or there is a chance of losing it.

I have also learned that trust plays a big part- once your guys know the rules, sometimes you just have to trust they will follow, once the display that they can be trusted. The guy making the rules can't always be around to make sure they are being followed. True example: one year I get a call from a member who had his young son hunting with him on a Friday night. He called to say that his son had killed a buck and didn't think it was legal and wanted me to call the game warden to report it- wanted his son to learn what the right thing to do was. Once he verified that it indeed was under 13" I called the game warden to meet me to go to our camp. When I met the game warden and explained the situation, his response was that he hated to give a kid a ticket. When I told him that my lease member appeared to be more concerned that I would kick him off the lease than he was in paying a fine the warden asked if I was going to boot him. I told him absolutely not- he is from the Houston area and could have easily quartered him, throw him in a cooler, leave, and keep his mouth shut. I wasn't going to boot someone from my lease who realized that a mistake was made and owned up to it. I think that helped the game warden make the decision he made, plus the fact that the dad had me call the warden about it, to not ticket the boy, but used it as a teaching moment for both the son and his dad- showed him how to fill out the tag correctly and marked it as his 13" buck on the tag.

A little back story to why we've added so many dumb little rules...one of the guys we used to have on the place had ADHD worse than anyone I know. He would move his blinds and feeders around in his hunt area almost every other time he was out there. So we made fairly common sense rule to not be changing everything up during the season. Get your blinds and feeders where you want them and leave them at the start of season.

He'd also take off work during the week and would drive all over the ranch when no one else was out there. He'd drive his utv in and out of the other lease guys hunting areas and be all over their cameras. The other guys didn't like that so I talked to him about it and "well it's not in the lease". Another rule pointing directly to him. I mean he paid his lease dues, was pretty new to hunting, and generally a nice guy but was not the brightest when it came to lease etiquette. We gave him the benefit of the doubt for a while but eventually he was let go. We even gave him an aging on the foot poster that he put in his blind lol.

Our harvest guidelines are pretty solid. Our "CYA" wording is pretty solid but still dumbed down for the average Joe. What I'm more curious about is what are some of the other rules, or lack there of, are others using.

Up until about 9 or 10 years ago we didn't have a paper agreement. It was all just a handshake deal. With getting new lease members over time we all figured something in paper would be a good plan to cover my FIL in case something were to happen. People these days are too sue-happy.

same reason McDonalds puts warning labels on a cup of coffee that it's hot and might burn you ... Common Sense isn't as common these days, actually it's rather rare from what I've seen.

Exactly. And you know exactly why we did it and who it was for ha!

My opinion but if you have already added a few of nit picky rules because people were not using common sense, and are looking to add more because those rules were not enough to stop the rule breaking, then you are wasting your energy trying to make more rules. Somewhat analogous to gun regulation...

I would spend more time on having a foundational set of rules that is maybe 10-15 items max...the deer lease commandments....Rules on guests, harvest, camp rules (firearms, alcohol, etc). Otherwise you will end up with so many rules you won't even remember them all. The guy you mentioned on the UTV did not need more rules...he either needed some education or shown the door. A guy doesn't have to break a written rule to be shown the gate...you just might owe them some $ depending on the contract and when you showed them the gate...

My intentions are to not add new rules but more or less clean up our current lease agreement, a lot. I didn't initially write our current agreement and it has gotten too nit picky over the years. I've been thinking of rewriting it a couple of years now but get too busy and never get around to it.

I started this tread to see if anyone was willing to share theirs to where I could use it as an example for when I rewrite ours. I don't want to copy it but see if I'm on the right page. Hope that makes sense.