Lancaster County Treasurer Craig Ebersole is seeing pink this week.

Since Monday morning, most flat surfaces — including the floor — in the treasurer's office in the county courthouse have been littered with stacks of pink envelopes.

The envelopes contain applications from hunters for Pennsylvania antlerless deer licenses for the 2009-10 hunting season.

And thanks to a new system introduced this year for processing those applications, Ebersole's office is on track to handle more of them than ever before.

"Nobody knew how many we would get, and it turns out we are getting a lot," Ebersole said.

Treasurer's offices across the state on Monday began processing antlerless license applications — checking to make sure they are properly filled out and payment is enclosed, then printing out doe tags to mail back to the hunters.

Through Wednesday morning, Ebersole's office had received about 11,000 application envelopes, some of which contained up to three applications.

And the period from Monday through Aug. 2 is only the first round of antlerless license sales.

There are two more rounds through late August.

"We've already got 11,000 envelopes, and we've got two more big pushes yet to come," Ebersole said.

Through the entire application period last year, Ebersole's office processed about 18,000 applications.

The most applications the county treasurer's office ever processed was 23,000 in 2004.

Ebersole said his office is seeing a big increase in volume this year because the Pennsylvania Game Commission recently instituted an electronic system for selling its hunting licenses.

Previously, hunters filled out paper forms to buy their general hunting licenses and a variety of stamps allowing them to hunt different game animals with different weapons.

Now, all those forms are processed electronically, including applications for antlerless deer licenses, commonly called "doe tags."

The Game Commission each year regulates the number of doe tags sold as part of its deer management program. Specific allocations of tags are set for each of the state's 22 wildlife management units (WMU).

Hunters essentially compete for those tags in a first-come, first-served lottery, which is divided into three rounds.

Although you can buy a general hunting license at a host of locations, including sporting goods, hardware and big-box stores, county treasurers' offices are the only locations allowed to sell and distribute antlerless deer licenses in Pennsylvania. An office gets to keep $1 for every tag it sells.

Previously, hunters had to apply to treasurers' offices in the areas of the state where they wanted to hunt for doe.

Lancaster County is in WMU 5B, so the treasurer's office here only sold tags for that unit.

With the new electronic licensing system, however, hunters this year can apply to any treasurer's office in the state for doe tags allocated for any WMU in the state.

"One of the variables we looked at was, would the hunter apply where he or she lived, or would the hunter apply where they want to hunt? Nobody knew," Ebersole said. "And for the most part, they're applying where they live."

Of the estimated 11,000 envelopes the county treasurer's office had received through Wednesday morning, Ebersole figured about 90 percent were sent by Lancaster County residents "looking to hunt all over the state," he said.

And while he admitted his office has been flooded with applications this week, Ebersole said the staff is methodically wading through them.

As he does every year, Ebersole called in two of his seasonal, part-time workers this week to do nothing but help six full-time office workers process doe-tag applications.

Both part-timers are retirees from the office, so they are no strangers to the system.

"I retired three years ago, so counting the 16 years I worked here, this is my 19th year dealing with doe tags," Donna Becker said.

How does Ebersole rate the new doe-tag distribution system so far?

He doesn't.

"We'll wait until we've been through the whole thing and then we'll evaluate how it went," he said.

E-mail: preilly@lnpnews.com