2016-06-20 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — June 20, 2016 the — it started quite a long time ago, but, ah, probably about six or seven years ago the idea really came out of people in the community who were from the Kaupulehu area, of having a moratorium or what they called a "try wait,", that was their slogan — a period of ten years in which, essentially, there'd be no fishing in the shallow waters — up to 20 fathoms — there's no fishing — no take in the reef areas and some restriction in the deeper water areas, this, was worked on and formulated — it was not a DLNR initiative, but the people who were in favor of it worked with DLNR people, the formal part of this came, began around November 2014, a proposal came to the Board to go out for public hearing with a set of rules — that would do this — and the Board voted to put these out for public hearing in November 2014, it went to public hearing in February 2015 and, were voted on essentially in the same form that went to public hearing on May 27th of 2016. 1 might have said — no, I think it was — they went to public — the Board voted in November 2015 to go to public hearing and the public hearing was February 2016 — I might have said 15 by mistake. So what is the idea behind this and again, you know, the Board voted for it — I voted for it. There were four votes in favor, two against, one, no, I believe, no — four votes in favor, one against and, ah, one person recused and one person absent out of the seven members and the Board, but this came out of a group of people affiliated with the lands in question, and their motive is to restore what they saw as the abundance of fish in the area in times when they were younger, when they growing up. It's not a proposal for a permanent Marine Protected Area - like a marine life conservation district like we have — we have a few of those on the west side of the island. It's a proposal for temporary closure of the fishing to try to restore an abundance that these folks describe from their youth in many cases, some of them, I think the one gentleman — Francis Ruddle — was 75 years old, said that, just eyeballing would be there was 1/7th as many fish as when he was a youngster, he is a kamaaina of the area. So for details and, people have talked about the science and the studies — there was quite a bit of documentation of this, the two things that I would suggest for people who want to have more details to look at would be the materials that were submitted as part of a board's action and that's about 30 pages and that's available on-line at the DLNR website — that's the staff submittal in favor of this administrative rule and then the group that put this together has something called the administrative record and that is also available on- line. We can make arrangements — I'm not, um, hip enough to tell you exactly how to get it, but it is available through the DLNR office and that consists of about five hundred pages. That has information about the research and the science that was behind this proposal. So the last thing I'd want to say about this is that we — I think the people who were in favor of this are people who like to fish and who say that they enjoyed — this was a big part of their lives. They feel that something drastic like this needed to be done to take care of the decline that they had experienced, it's a different world then, say 100 years ago, people, even 50 years ago, I