2019-10-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – October 29, 2019 thing to do is have Beyond Pesticides go out there and tell us what our soil is before we actually do the work – that way when we put the soil back down we’ll know how to take care of that without the use of herbicides, um, Hilo Soccer Field #4 – the reason we put that one out there is because it retains a lot water so we want to try areas that are dry – areas that are hard as a rock some places – areas that have a lot of clay in ‘em and the last one is the football field of Old A’s in Kona – so as soon as we can get the proper paperwork through County Council and the resolution gets passed we’ll start working with those guys to have ‘em come and do the pilot project. They’ll also be coming and training our park maintenance workers on how to care for fields without the use of herbicides, um, now all of that does come at a cost so we would need to in our budget we’d have to bring in more staff, more weed eaters, more trucks, more gas – to try to take care of the fields in this manner. We’re still reviewing Bill 101 and we look forward to seeing what the final bill is going to look like before we have much comment on that – but we are working with all the council members and identifying our funding sources and the budgetary increases that we think that we’re gonna incur and are there any questions? TN: Where in your project are you using other than herbicides the grazing of goats and sheep in your test project or pilot project – where are the natural remedy of using goats and sheep? MM: So we did the pilot project with 3C Goat Grazing – we needed to get that pilot project done to 1) see how the animals interacted in a setting to where we had soccer – we had kids around – we had other animals around – it worked out perfectly with 3C Goat Grazing the way they used the sheep and goats and Mark – you can correct me if I’m wrong on this – but goats are kind of picky eaters – sheep from what I understand are more of a grazing stock – I hope I don’t have that backwards – and so once the pilot project was finished we were able to use all o f those perimeters to put together and RFP that is currently right now with the Finance Department and once they get finished reviewing it we’re gonna put out a request for bid for a certain amount of goats for a certain – what we learned is that 3C Goat Grazing can do about an acre in a day and that’s kind of the perimeters that we’re looking at because that means we can get ‘em on a field and get ‘em off of field without shutting the field down too long. Certain areas – like when we put ‘em at Hilo Soccer Field it was the back area where there was a lot of grass growing and they exposed a lot of what the homeless were doing in the area and so we had a lot of trash afterwards and things like that and we didn’t receive one complaint for the week that 3C Goat Grazing was out there – nothing but the most positive comments. I think the Mayor visiting two or three times – a lot of different people came out and saw what it was about so it worked out pretty good. So that’s where we are. As soon as we can get it back from Finance we’re gonna make it public that we’re looking for bids for a certain amount of 4