Anyone who was waiting in line for a Lolo, Selway or Middle Fork tag on Wednesday evening and was issued a receipt or number to mark their place in line will be assured of having a tag available, said Commission chairman Fred Wood of Burley. The remainder of the tags for those zones will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. The quota on those tags remains in place.

"We're lifting the quota on the Boise River Zone in the interests of customer service," said Wood. "The computer system has failed twice on these door-buster sales and the planned sale of Boise River tags would have been the biggest. We can't trust the system, so we have avoided it by removing the quota."

Fish and Game wildlife chief Steve Huffkaker said the biological impact of removing the quota would be minimal. "The quota only reduced tag numbers by about nine hundred from what was sold last year and was a move toward slowing the harvest of adult bulls in the area. We'll take a look at it in our planning process and deal with it in next year's regulations."

Resident and nonresident B tags will both be available for the Boise River Zone. Quotas remain in place for the Lolo, Selway and Middle Fork zones.

On August 1, the first attempt was made to sell the tags via the new computer system. The point of sales machines (POSM) failed systemwide when as many as 900 transactions per minute were attempted at 10 a.m. Higher-than-capacity volume was cited as the reason for the shutdown by the company that provides licensing system services to Fish and Game.

This is the first year that a limit has been placed on the number of bull tags sold in the Boise River Zone (Unit 39), an extremely popular elk hunting zone located close to Boise. Caps on sales in the other zones have not caused system failure in previous years but lines were long at several major Treasure Valley vendors as well as Fish and Game offices in the area.