2015-03-16 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes--March 16, 2015 DOFAW fall into that. And then working with Hans or his replacement on what units we might be able to put in place but it's something that we need to look at and we really need to start with that cooperative game management plan with the state. Q. How can the community be involved? How do you plan to engage the community in this process? A. Well, first and foremost is this online survey that we're putting out. The feedback that we get from that, I think, is gonna be valuable in tenfold. Aside from that, we've got Steve Hurtz folks coming up in a few weekends here to do a little maintenance work on some of the game bird guzzlers. I know that a lot of people have approached Brian over the last six month or so asking about volunteer opportunities and we'd like to outlay as many off the shelf projects as we can —to have those in place and ready to go if people step up and want to come out and help out. Basically just—your feedback during the process of developing this program is gonna be probably some of the most valuable input—from my standpoint, from my task at hand. Q: Do you anticipate having a work group with the community to draft up this stuff? A: Not a work group, utilizing the survey -the response is from the survey and categorizing responses and things like that. It's really general market research approach - like I said more of a business approach to the product that we're trying to develop. Q. What's your timetable? A. (JP) Hopefully the survey will be released to the public beginning of April — probably run it for about a month online to make sure that enough people have enough time. Survey takes about 10-15 minutes. Don't know exactly when the draft regulations will be completed. These initiatives on the administrative side probably roll out sometime in 2016. (BM): A lot of what's been going on out there is me talking to hunters or other persons in the public and then taking those ideas to the Commander. So a lot of what I presented to John are not my ideas —they come straight from the community. Are we able to use all of them? Probably not. Can we tweek 'em a little bit? Certainly, but a lot of what I've passed on as far as historical use of the land, where the hunters go, what's available, some of the animals patterns —those are coming from the community and they're — right now is a —we're at a tipping point where the community is gonna buy into this program as far as ownership —and I think that's what's really gonna move us forward and that survey I think is gonna get us, you know, a lot of bang for our buck. 7