2016-06-20 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — June 20, 2016 meeting — which was the community element of the meeting and then he was side -kicked with Mr. Tarnas and Mr. Dave Tarnas at the time was instrumental in passing the law to bring in the Marine Protected Areas in Kona. So we had two vested interests. We never saw — we saw Mr. Walsh moving his hat from basically being a cheer leader for Marine Protected Areas to being Mr. Science and Mr. Science had perhaps the most trouble with the people in the crowd when Mr. Walsh -Scientist said the [unclear — sounds like the toppy) do no damage. That the fact that there's no fishermen there and the fisherman — are taking invasively — will not be taking invasives out of the water is no problem because there's — because taape are essentially harmless. That — that part — and that may or may not be true but what we saw was — we then crossed over — we left Dr. Walsh - Scientist and then we crossed over into the formal regulation side of the meeting — it was hard to tell what the science — what was going on — and I bring that into, as a journalist, when we had the scuba -fishing ban — fisherfolk on the Kona side were making accusations — like they're making accusations today — that the public policy was flawed — that it was skewed — that the public testimony in fact was not wanted and was manipulated to not be gotten and it became clear that in fact that the clear provisos of the how the Council for the West Hawaii Fisheries Resource Management Area is to be run have in fact not been run and one of the main points was that the chairperson never stepped down — where it called for a two-year term — but that was the least of the harmful of the accusations — the most harmful accusations were that in fact, fishermen were not wanted on the Council and when they got there they were not made to feel comfortable and in fact were driven off, which were harsh statements — I don't know if that was true or not, but clearly, that's what the statements were. I think the other thing too is — Mr. Reed Shook — it came to my attention that Mr. Reed Shook, as a biologist — was working on a study and that study, in fact, had been, canned, because the results were not in fact what was being looked for in the Marine Reserve and quite frankly, I think that that's something that, would be of interest to find out. Finally, DLNR has a major problem and we're seeing it in the TMT case — that the landowner and developer of the State of Hawaii is also masquerading as the Natural Resource Protection agents and what we find that they are doing is in fact mitigating development in industrial processes by saddling up with environmental groups to make themselves feel good. They are towing — there's nowhere else in the United States where the Fish and Wildlife Commission is run by the land developer of that state and it may very well be time to call for a breaking up of DLNR. VII. DISCUSSION 7