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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – October 24, 2016 but it’s really the other place that surprised me after working on these issues for years – is the level of impacts on our forests and plants and basically our ecosystems in the level of impacts on plants and also snails. So just an example of things. So looking at this and this has been discussed over a number of years on how to best approach this, um, one of the things that’s clear is there is no comprehensive resource available for land managers to evaluate methods for rodent and mongoose control and eradication in conservation areas. And the key thing is, you know, people are doing these efforts individually – in many cases we have people that may not know how to do things correctly or may be following labels – we want to make sure that this done in the safest, most effective manner possible. So when I think about the work that I’ve done with – in urban situations – in an agricultural situations in the past – you tend to have pretty broad manuals and training for folks. One of the things we want to do is to make sure that there’s consistency across individuals and entities doing this type of work for conservation and that the managers know the pros and cons of the different tools they may be choosing to do rodent control with. So this – this project has a broad range of agencies involved with it. The co-leads on this are the Fish & Wildlife Service and the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. We also have a number of cooperating agencies that include parts of the Department of Defense, ah, NOAA, Department of Hawaiian Homelands, um, USDA Wildlife Services, um, and EPA and the National Park Service. I think one of the things that a number of entities saw with this is – in particular the EPA – is the goal is to try to figure out how to do this safely and effectively. So what is the approach? And, so, I’m gonna review the NEPA a little bit and a little bit about the parallel process for the State of Hawaii and what we’re moving forward on. So, I think a number of people are familiar, at times, on the NEPA process – a key thing on the NEPA process is the goal of this is public disclosure of what federal agencies are doing. So a key thing for me as a federal employee is to ensure that you guys and any entity knows broadly what we’re planning on doing and the different things we’re doing. The State of Hawaii has a parallel process – the HIPA process – or HRS 342 – and so from a practical viewpoint these processes are parallel so this document will serve both NEPA and HIPA processes. So, if you look at the NEPA process, the first thing that we do is – both entities – is public scoping. So we had a public – we had two public meetings on the Big Island earlier this year in March – we had reasonable attendance at both Hilo and on the Kona side and we were on all islands in the Hawaiian Islands – at this point we ask the public to provide comment – we got 7,000 plus comments – so at this point what we are doing is we’re going through – we’re reading every single comment but the key thing for me is – we need to address the issues that the public has raised to us in a document that we’re working on and so that’s a key thing about public scoping. The next step in this process is the production of a draft programmatic EIS and that document will lay out what are the 7