2014-02-24 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – February 24, 2014 design, the location and so on. So they’re has not been anything that has not been above board about the intention of building a public shooting range. Could the guests in attendance at the meeting here in Hilo, and I’m sure most of you know we do not have a public shooting range. We’ve had, over the past 10 years in excess of 24,000 firearm sales made or imported into the state of Hawaii. With a 70% growth rate over the last 5 years – if we continue down that path and do not have a safe place for our youth and our people to be shooting, practicing safe shooting skills, I don’t know – you can put 2 + 2 together and you’re gonna have some problems. You’re gonna have some accidents, you’re gonna have discharge of firearms on private land, you gonna have errant discharge and projectiles leaving property – so you can see where we’re headed if we do not make a public shooting range a priority. I think, Lisa (Hadway), you would love the fact that we could eventually move out of or quasi shooting area that we, we loving call the Manuka shooting area, which is actually a natural reserve area and close that place down eventually because it’s not a safe place to shoot, but unfortunately, it is a place because no one else has anywhere else to go shooting that they know of. So I support the range from the NRA perspective. I’ve had nothing but tremendous support at all levels of the NRA national to help with this process. We have great people working on the ground on this process. We encourage all of you to become involved and becoming involved may be a few months down the line when there’ll be more public hearings about the use of the land at Puuanahulu for the shooting range and we invite all of you to be there. Senator Solomon has asked that anybody that has a vested interest in the shooting range in the public attend her Waikoloa based public meeting which is this Wednesday at 5:30pm at Waikoloa Elementary School. We hope you’ll show up because that’s her meeting for the area and of course Puuanahulu is part of that Waikoloa district area in that ahupuaa. So we hope you’ll be there. The couple other comments and I’ll make it brief – on the NRA and hunting – the NRA operates a whole department on hunting. I’ve been to many, many states and been around a lot of meetings like this and hunters have an equal standing at the table, meaning that hunters are looked at as conservationists. In most of the states I’ve worked in – that means that everybody at that table that’s a hunter has a voice and everybody in conservation areas in the states that I’ve visited and gone to meetings at give them that level of standing. And I think that’s where we need to go with hunting in the state of Hawaii: that equal respect and looking at hunters as conservationists. Through a generous gift – Darren Lasonte who’s a foremost in hunting rights and the process of handling these things will be our guest this year in November at the Friends of the NRA meeting and dinner that we have. Darren is a dynamic guy – he’s a great guy to listen to – he is a hunter and he will give you a lot of insight about how other states have handled some of the issues that you’re going through right now and through a generous gift we’re gonna have Darren out and he is hunter. And that begs \[unclear\] the last question that I have and it’s a question, rather than a statement, and that is Lisa (Hadway) I know you’ve got some position descriptions out there and after looking at a lot of the folks in other states that have game management areas and who they hire – is there a line item in any of your job descriptions that puts 25