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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting
<br /> Minutes —October 27, 2014
<br /> from the US Fish and Wildlife Service they do a census every so many
<br /> years — it's not perfect— you know, it's very vague but you can see we got
<br /> they've estimate roughly 23,000 hunters. We only have 11,000 licensed
<br /> hunters in Hawaii, though. And, of course, you have the 50 million dollars
<br /> a year in total expenditures and it's a significant part of our economy, you
<br /> know, you go to a gas station, you buy gas, you go to [unclear], you buy
<br /> some arrows, whatever it is — get rid of these things and I'm pretty sure
<br /> that some people would not be afforded jobs anymore, where they are. So
<br /> it is a part of revenue, it is a part of recreation and you know economically
<br /> something maybe we can keep.
<br /> This is second to the last slide — I call it making magic—We've had a
<br /> meeting in Kona between DLNR — Bill Aila was there Lisa (Hadway) was
<br /> there, Steve was there. And you know the Chair asked me an interesting
<br /> question, he asked me, "Ryan! If you had a magic wand, what would you
<br /> want to do?" And I thought about this since then, because, you know, I
<br /> can complain about all the things I just complained about but how am I
<br /> gonna fix these problems, right? So one of the things is I thought of we —
<br /> the folks thought about—was the State Game Commission. Giving
<br /> hunters a formal say in our resources — these are public resources, they
<br /> belong to all of us — not just the Nature Conservancy, not just hunters, not
<br /> just hikers — they belong to all of us, so to have this formal say in a sense,
<br /> because we have an Endangered Species Commission, we have a NARS
<br /> Commission, we have Water Resource —we have all these other
<br /> commissions and apparently, I guess, our game is not that important or
<br /> maybe we can make it that way. A regular, comprehensive game
<br /> management plan, like we talked about having plans — that's self
<br /> explanatory, I believe. Placing a value on our game animals —we're gonna
<br /> do that—we're gonna have the tag fees and all those things where
<br /> hunters are actually going to be paying into a wildlife program that also
<br /> supports conservation and land management. Not too many places can
<br /> you just go and say, "Hey hiker-bird watcher, you gotta pay for your
<br /> permit." It's a very tough thing to sell because it's a non-consumptive
<br /> resource. So in hunting and fishing, this is an advantage I believe we
<br /> should take and move forward on. And, of course, community based
<br /> management has been pretty popular— I don't know if everyone follows —
<br /> but DLNR just passed that Kaula Community Fisheries Management thing
<br /> and it looks like that's the future — that people that live there — people that
<br /> are out there in the outdoors — are going to be most engaged in protecting
<br /> and conserving it and then moving toward community is a way to go there.
<br /> Also, transparent governmental decisions on making process in public
<br /> lands for knowing where things are happening, how they're happening —
<br /> Rainfall is the Forest, you know, are you guys part of it. Do we just phone
<br /> 700 people and just go off with that, you know? Let's not include anybody
<br /> else. So these, I don't know, we sure kinda left out in that sense. I think, I
<br /> think the public should demand better in that sense as well. And I said
<br /> public resources on publically owned lands belong to the people of Hawaii.
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