2019-04-15 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – April 15, 2019 7. B. SHOOTING RANGE UPDATES BKK: Thank you. So what we’ll do then is combine 7b with 8d, which is the Shooting Range Working Group, so, um, Nani that’s you again. NP: Yeah, so I’d like to introduce Tom Lodge – our former Chair – to give a presentation on our shooting range development that we’ve been working so hard – mainly Tom. TL: Tom Lodge, you know we all the popularity of shooting sports and back in 2016 we talked about gun range at the Commission and in January 2017 we had a meeting in GMAC – we adopted a resolution for a gun range, which then went to the County of Hawaii and in August of 2017, the County of Hawaii adopted Resolution 246-17, which created a working group for a gun range and that was in August and in November of that year we talked to Bob Masuda about one of the areas that we were looking at. That was in November and this is Puu Kaohe, which we’ll talk about here in a minute – that’s with Deputy Director Masuda. Right after that letter that we sent to him – the State came out and approved an area – Robert Farrell spoke to the Commission several times from the DLNR – DOCARE. DOCARE is responsible for gun ranges or the Hunter Ed program, which is DOCARE. They approved the 16-Mile, which is not 16-Mile for Hunter Safety so the Marino \[sp?\] Camp Trail – those of you that hunt up there are familiar with it – it’s off Saddle Road by 16-Miles. So what came out of that adoption is that we then went back to the County, wrote letters to each of the County Council and said, hey, we need to have somebody run this program for the County – so – a government agency – so what the Council did is they mulled it over. We wrote a letter – Nani actually wrote this letter to Harry Kim and it was that letter that stimulated Parks and Rec to take over lead in the gun range. Now we had follow-up meetings with Parks on April 17 – we had on who was gonna lead this thing – they left it up to GMAC working group to bird dog this thing and then they would follow-up with this. We’ve been kinda doing that ever since, ah, in May we follow-up meetings on the site discussion and we’ll get in to the original site that we started off with – I wish Jim O’Keefe was here this evening – he could speak to his outline that he has but we went through the site and we were looking into the process – we did this on November 15, with Joey Mello and GMAC – we met with Parks as to where we go and the feasibility. The feasibility came back to bite us, so to speak, here shortly. This is the original site – now this is on the military side of Puu Kaohe and the military actually came to us about this site – and so we were working in conjunction with the military at that time. And it was pretty – it was a good site and we had access – everything about that site – there was nothing really bad about that site – it was potentially available – it’s currently utilized for exercise – military bought in – no bad – the problem with it is that for it to be given to the County would require a major renegotiation of the lease with PTA and they’re coming up with a lease situation right now – they 26