2019-10-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – October 29, 2019 PRESENTATION: a. Hawai’i County Parks and Recreation Deputy Director Maurice Messina report on alternate ways the Department of Parks & Recreation have been using to treat weeds in Hawai’i County Parks without Pesticides. NP: Thank you so much for coming. MM: Maurice Messina, Deputy Director of Parks & Recreation. I was asked to come in and talk a little bit about our department and what we’re doing to reduce the use of herbicides in our parks. Start off with a little bit of the budget – we have in about the last five years we have our budget for herbicide use weed management has dropped about 45 percent, um, put that in real numbers, the fiscal year 2014-15 we had budgeted about $54,000 dollars for our vegetation control and for our 2019-2020 budget we put that down to $29,677 dollars. One of the reasons behind that is we’re using – we’re deploying different methods such as trying to bring on board things like what Mark Crivello is doing with 3C Goat Grazing. We are using Friends of the Park Agreements which is kind of like Adopt-a-Highway for our parks and what we do is we bring these guys in who want to adopt as section of our park to take care of it without the use of herbicides. They’ll bring in volunteer groups and we’ll do a Friends of the Park agreement with them and whatever specific area they want to work on we ensure no herbicides are sprayed in that area. We also don’t use herbicides in any of our – near our playground equipment, um, we really, really restrict the use of any herbicides on our ball fields and I think it was Act 45 that was signed by the Governor last year which also speaks about restricting use of herbicides within 100 feet from a public school. So we also make sure that we do that as well. Different things that we’ve tried like at the Honokaa Park Complex where we have the walking track where people walk with their dogs and everything – we don’t use any herbicides on that – we try either burn it with propane or we try to use salt water on it. We’ve tried vinegar on it – we’ve tried whatever we can to basically keep the herbicides away from that, um, we’ve also – we also have people that come in and talk to us about different chemicals that they use that are eco-friendly – pet friendly – family friendly and our park planner and I – what we do is we take those things home and we use ‘em - we try ‘em on our driveways and stuff like that to actually see if they work or not, um, we’re gonna be starting a pilot project with Beyond Pesticides where we’ve identified four of our parks for them to come in and do soil testing – the soil testing isn’t about chemicals in the soil or anything like that – it’s to test the soil and see what is the best way to protect the soil and to build the soil and the grass without using herbicides or pesticides, um, the pilot project we’re gonna be working on are the fields in Waikoloa, Pahoa fields, um, specifically the Pahoa Fields because we used that as a shelter during the lava and the fields got really, really messed up and we’re gonna be using FEMA funds to resurface those fields, dig ‘em up, put sod back down and we figure the best 3