2018-11-13 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes 2

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – October 24, 2016 improve and facilitate rodent-mongoose control on federal, state, and private lands through applying IPM. One key goal is to establish standards and principals for rodent and mongoose control and eradication. There are many good projects currently that are doing rodent and mongoose control in the state, um, many of them are on small scales and people are doing things correctly but I think the key thing is making sure that everybody does it correctly. One of the things I look at is if it provides efficiencies for future site specific NEPA compliance documents. So this is gonna be a document that covers the entire state but if somebody goes and does an individual project in a site – they still are gonna have to do site specific compliance documentation. This isn’t gonna cover every site in the State of Hawaii – this is gonna be a resource that a manager can go back and say, “I’m gonna pick these tools out of this tool box,” and they can refer to that when they do the compliance document for the public but it’s not gonna cover them for everything. They have to do the site specific work with the communities individually. So what will this not do? It won’t provide project or site specific analysis permits or authorization. So if somebody wants to do specific work in an area, for instance, on the Big Island – this tool will not provide the individual site authorization. People will have to refer to this and do some level of paperwork to state they’re gonna do it but it’ll simplify things for the managers, um, it, it, it will not provide project specific compliance with laws and regulations for project level planning. So the key thing is, again, people for individual projects in – on the Big Island, for instance, they’re gonna have to do some level of things that – a planning for the individual site – and the third thing is it does not stop ongoing rodent and mongoose control eradication projects that are being conducted in compliance with current state and federal pesticide laws and regulations. So what we’re really trying to do is to bring up a set of standards for people to do things better and, as you can see, you don’t want to stop ongoing efforts as you’re trying to get things tighter and better done. So here are the methods that are being considered and again these are all being considered. None of them are final. They’re mechanical traps that are being considered – so they’re live traps – kill traps and multi-kill traps. And the rodenticides that are being considered are diphacinone and chlorophacinone and brodifacoum. So one of them currently is being used in the State of Hawaii and that’s diphacinone. Chlorophacinone is one that’s under consideration and brodifacoum really is only being used on off-shore islands. It’s really the sole use pattern where that chemical would be considered. Um, the application methods – bait stations, canopy baiting, hand broadcast and aerial broadcast are the application methods under consideration and again I need to stress that all these things are under consideration at this point and we’re weighing the pros and cons of things as we’re getting information from people and then seeing what the feasibility is. 10