GMAC Minutes 12.17.24 Final draft

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This pilot is designed—we would designate safe cat feeding areas and shelter areas within this defined project area to start. We are hoping that this is a pilot so that we can then spread and adopt off island. We would designate those locations strategically away from the most sensitive zones. We've been working with Jordan from Nene.org, I think we have a meeting this week or next with the monk seal group—to really understand those challenges and risks—and so we can how best mitigate and help preserve those species as well. We want to reduce the impacts of community cat population through humane on-going management practices. We believe this is gonna enhance the protection of local wildlife, particularly the Nene, with these targeted interventions. We want to strengthen our relationship with locals, businesses, and tourism industry by mitigating the cat-related concerns. Everyday businesses are upset because there are people feeding cats in a non-best practice way. And this is just creating all kinds of problems. We want to do all —something that we can repeat—a community cat program and event with a clear communication and education plan, like, I can't stress enough that this is probably 50-50 on the groundwork of actually trapping, managing the cat and 50%focus on the communication plan out to both the stakeholder groups and the broader public at-large. So, what are we gonna do?The first piece is establishing and implementing the best practices, so we want to collaborate with our stakeholders. We've been meeting with a lot of these groups to sort of define and standardize the humane management protocols for community cats. We have all these best practices from mainland groups and international groups. There are some unique considerations here in Hawaii and we want to make sure we understand those and manage them. We have started some engagement with stakeholders like I said, but really need to assume along targeted outreach strategy and involve—we've been talking to a targeted group of feeders out there to get feedback on the plans that we've been working with hotels like the Naniloa, in downtown Hilo, or in the Banyan Drive area and start to bring in the broader community and let them know about the project objective. Right now, we're in that sort of, prepare, for implementation phase, we're gathering resources, we're creating the educational materials that will be both for the broader public so we're gonna be creating play books that hotels can use to speak to their guests, their employees, for the feeders and, or the broader public. So, the plan involves —we are recommending implementation of a strategy that you can learn more about, they've implemented in Miami and that is, we would have a registration and, education that feeders, when I say feeders, I'm talking about volunteers in the community who are feeding community cats. These individuals right now they're doing a range of things and a lot of them really aren't great—they leave food in plastic bowls—they're putting it out in the park which creates litter and things that blow into the water where they are leaving food unattended and therefore Nene and other rodent like pests can eat up the food. And then, we overfeeding cat feeding like I had talked to a number of people who believe they are the only people feeding cats on Banyan Drive and I've talked to like six people who've said that and I'm like, you all are feeding. So, we're probably overfeeding which causes population explosion, it causes Nene to get to the food etcetera. So, what we would do is anyone who wants to feed community cats would need to go through specific training. That training then would offer them protection if 13