2014-10-27 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes —October 27, 2014 continue down this path all the time everywhere, which is potentially what we're facing in this area. I'll pick another one, we're still in Puuwaawaa — it require a lot of work— like I said —this is herbicides to suppress down the kikuyu grass so it doesn't choke out the native hibiscus up there. These are herbicides you can't just buy over the shelf - I mean I don't know— I'm not a herbicide specialist. But these herbicides we spray are in our watersheds — maybe it's something to ask— maybe it's not harmful, I don't know, I do know we find pesticides in our water wells already. But is this something — maybe this is the way we need to do it. But it's gonna require a lot of work. I took a bunch of other pictures there — this was an area that the cub scouts or someone volunteered to plant— obviously if you neglect planting you don't get any plants — they die. So we got a lot of, we got a lot of flags here with no plants in it— actually there's some got a really tiny — I don't know what it is — maybe a mamni inside of there — but they're being choked out requires a lot of work. That's my basis of argument there. And still talking about Puuwaawaa and maybe I'm just using example of how it relates to our hunting and stuff like that. We just had the administrative rules go through so maybe we'll have a hunting program back at Puuwaawaa — but right now you are currently— everybody that hunts there — you're currently hunting under a damage control program. It's not hunting — it's damage control. So we're viewed as people who control animals — not so much as hunters — it's also under the building of a habitat conservation plan, which is supposed to protect endangered species but also give us an incidental take license so we can keep our sheep there. These things were done — these funds were allocated a very long time ago, as far as I understand it— and we're still sitting here today without it. All of these other plans and fences and things have happened over this time — but the hunters have been neglected. The largest user base at Puuwaawaa as you can see just this last season we had 412 applicants and 401 in the season. Some of those are just user based there — people that care about the land are being neglected and this is in my view kind of unacceptable. Of course we just had the administrative rules I talked about— they would cite the appellate court ruling as a reason why we can't charge for tags, we can't change our rules. That's partially true — it got rid of everything that was unlawfully done, but it is not all that true in that we could change our rules if we still went through the public process. So instead what you did was you had a big stack of papers — three hundred something pages — whatever it was — you guys have a few months, few weeks to read on it and then they vote on it. That's pretty unacceptable way to do business and in a conservation system where our situations are changing annually. So Tony will talk about a State Game Commission which I believe should alleviate that problem. It's something I think a lot of hunters should support and hopefully our department supports as well to get hunter involvement in these things. They have a five year recreation plan — I just saw that 11