2019-10-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – October 29, 2019 a slide coming up a little bit later. We needed to have an environmental assessment. A contract for that was awarded by the state by DLNR to PBR Hawaii, which is a big environmental consultant here – a public works consulting agency and we held two shooting range public information meetings in there that were extremely well attended – standing room only – both of those and those meetings were completely, 100% for the range. We had every shooter in the county, I think showed up for those and it was very supportive so... Let’s see. OK. We spoke with the Board DLNR Board – have an agreement in principal for a curatorship – in other words it will allow On Target as a 501 (c) 3 to help administer and oversee the range, you know, when it comes to fruition. We also decided to do a second test as part of the draft environmental assessment. We needed to do that – it’s part of the environmental assessment – the 2012 sound test was done by Taha Consultants – we came out with large Four Rifles and one Grand Thirty Ought 6 - .50 Cal. BMG. We had shotguns. We went out to where the proposed range locations were fired those again – no announcement to the public but we had representatives from the resort complex present. We recorded data at 6 sampling locations for them in the resort complex and again the gun fire was unmeasurable at any of the remote locations. OK. So after that we heard that the resort association was pushing back on several things – part of it was, you know, they were concerned about safety- they were worried about bullets flying backwards because they didn’t really know in advance what direction the ranges were and when we assured them that no, they don’t do that – only in cartoons – the ranges are pointing uphill away from you, ah, seemed to have mollified that but I think that’s still stuck in the back of the sound issue became a real sticking point for them, even though we’ve done two sound tests and they had passed with flying colors so... We had a sound assessment working group and I may get Richard up to give a little background on that but the upshot was the resort association just dig its heels in and said no we don’t want it – we don’t care what the tests show, you know, they wanted to argue about we measured it and what the two different sound consultants used to verify this and I’ll show some of that in a bit – so we did a third gunfire test – sound test – OK – and with it an analytical sound assessment and you’ll see the models here coming up – this was done by Censeo Consultants, again On Target provided the personnel, the rifles, the ammunition, the shotguns to be able to conduct another sound test. This one we did announce in advance and the public was well represented at the various areas in the resort – golf courses and things – we did it with and without sound mitigations device so that we could give the sound consultant the ability to measure just how much, you know, reducing the amount of sound could be accomplished – fairly simply and inexpensively and what that would mean for the overall result. We recorded the gun fire sound at the range site and then the consultant went and recorded background sound at the resort sites later on and recorded that data was used in the analytical sound assessment. Now the sound assessment is – we took a conservative approach – we assumed worst case conditions – we wanted to use the 18