2021-07-20 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes (2)

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Chair Abraham Antonio, welcomes anyone that may want to say something regarding an agenda item may do so anytime throughout the meeting. 5. PRESENTATION: a. West Hawai’i DOFAW Wildlife Biologist Kanalu Sprout will explain fire break expansion plans. Kanalu – I do not have too much of a presentation myself. I would just review really quick I’ve already presented this to you guys’ couple years ago. I actually did a site visit with Teresa (Nakama, former GMAC member) up into the area. I just do a quick review of what we are planning on doing as far as, road break, firebreak, and road expansion, in the Palila critical habitat area for fire protection. As a quick note: the fires they are fighting right now, started in PTA, moved up into the GMA, but the fire breaks we are maintaining in the firebreak 1 and especially firebreak 3 the one that kind of go around past that water unit, goes down to the other water unit at the bottom near the Daniel Inouye highway. That firebreak stopped the fire from going further up the mountain. That is one that we already maintain pretty well. Even though we plan to expand it with the rest of them. That mountain would be burning pretty hard if it wasn’t for those firebreak. We’re just planning on to expanding out about 10 meters from the existing road. Rosen firebreaks taking vegetation down. We’ve had comments from the Fish and Wildlife Service asking us not to cut like heritage trees, like older more matured Mamane, so I’m going to incorporate them into the proposal. But other than those larger mamane trees, we are going to take the vegetation down to nothing, very short. That’s all the way up to R-1 all the way to where it connects to the skyline, and all of the other R-13, R-14, and Firebreak 1 - Firebreak 3, so we’re just expanding cutting everything down, and widening to about 10 meters (30 ft.) So, I can take any questions. Abraham – Kanalu, you presented this in May 14, 2019. But the thing is now we have new members now from back then. Kanalu – When they sent you the letter, did they not give you a copy of the plan? Abraham – Yeah, we shared it at the last meeting to everybody. 2