2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 James Weller and Officer Tamura as your point of contact locally and I can be contacted in Oahu for any issues. I want to make sure that we open the lines of communication between my office and your commission. There is a lot of issues going on statewide and I know one particular issue on the island — range development. There is no place for shooters to go and so I want to work closely with you. We have a meeting on Wednesday with some legislators and other admin staff from DLNR. We want to make sure that we're moving forward on range development so that hunters can have a place to go to practice good marksmanship and make a good, ethical, clean kill when they have an animal. RF: So that's a big priority for me. I know that's a big priority for you too and hopefully we can engage your help in moving that forward from all fronts. I think that's what we need to do is all get together — whether it's the county, the state or any other entity — we all need to be on the same page so we can move forward with range development. As far as access and things like that — those are a case-by-case basis. I know we have to work through some of the access problems here — I know it's a shrinking landscape — user conflicts are one of the biggest issues throughout the Hawaiian Islands. I think, there's 9 million visitors to the islands every year. There's a lot of user conflicts — whether it's stand up paddle boards against surfers or hunters against hikers — we all have to try and get together and make the best of what we have, so that's kind of my vision — we have a lot of things in DOCARE that need a little help including training for our officers coming in the door. We've made some significant changes on how people are hired and how they're going to be initially trained before they enter into the field. Then also ongoing training for some of our supervisors and managers. We're gonna try and get our guys up to speed with modern law enforcement training and techniques and get everybody on the same page. I'm looking for some consistency in training and among our troops but knowing that each island has significant issues that may be individual to that island. I'm looking forward to it. Our funding is pretty secure right now because of our vacancy rate — that's the only reason we have a little bit of excess funding right now, we have about 32 vacancies. That's pretty big for an agency that only has about 120 sworn officers. We're running at about twenty percent plus vacancy rate. The good news is, I can get my officers on the street with a little bit of overtime through salary savings but the bad news is I should have full time officers out there working. These guys can only work so much before they start to get burned out a little bit from working extra hours. Hopefully within the next year, we'll bring about some hiring changes where we can fill those vacancies. It's difficult, as you know, our officers make about $20,000.00 less per year, than their counterparts say at Honolulu Police Department. So a basic recruit 3