2020-12-15 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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our own Na Ala Hele Trail Advisory Council meetings – there’s one on each island and then there’s a statewide as well, so for this Island I help assist with the Hawai’i Island Advisory Council meetings – those happen about every couple of months or so. We used to meet in person – we would alternate locations between Hilo and Waimea. Now with the COVID restrictions we’ve been doing our meetings remotely and it’s been working well – Nani and some others have attended those and that’s really good to hear feedback from your constituency. Those are public meetings and it’s a great way for the public to interact with our agency to provide feedback, input, your two cents and at first asking the questions that you guys might have – that’s a great thing that’s built into the law that we provide and then kind of the other thing that we do – kind of reading between the lines of our mandate – is basically, just in a nutshell, keeping tabs on ancient trails and that does two things, you know, of course, the State Historic Preservation Division handles archaeological stuff, but we’re kind of the trail resource when it comes to that so we work in partner with them but we obviously focus on ancient trails and trying to kind of keep tabs on those – as you know the landscape is changing, lots of land use changes and so you want to make sure that these heritage sites and the associated features aren’t disappearing forever and also kind of the other side to that coin – not only from a heritage standpoint but also from an access standpoint – a lot of these trails still do belong to the government through and old law called The Highway’s Act of 1892 – and so that’s something that we assert and research as well so that we don’t abolish any potential access over these ancient trails – so even if the trail doesn’t exist archaeologically the alignment can still provide a benefit to the public. So that’s a lot of things that we do. I love Hawai’i. There’s just myself and I have one technician and when we’re lucky we can – right now we’re fortunate to have an intern with us as well. OK. That’s the program in a nutshell. th The updates that Nani wanted me to cover – back on October 9 Board of Natural Resources Meeting – the Board approved the transfer of five already existing trails that are within forest reserves – so already in DOFAW management – five trails were transferred over to the Na Ala Hele Program. The idea was, you know, we’re the trails program so it made sense, management wise, the trails would fall under our program. There’s several other trails out there, of course, but we can only take on so much – there’s again just myself and my technician. So these are the five that were doable. 3