2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 put my money into something, I would probably put my money into trying to get regular officers on the street. Not saying that volunteer officers aren't important. We have 32 vacancies so in order for me to spend training funds and also equipment money on volunteers when we don't currently have any minimum for them to volunteer with us. Most organizations have reserves or volunteers mandate like say 16 hours a month. I would be getting 16 hours a month at an expense to outfit and train that person when I could be getting 40 hours a week from someone who was coming in the door as an entry level officer. It's kind of my priority to fill the vacancies first, but the volunteer officer program is still on our books — it's still available — but you have to be basically a police officer trained. DY: I was a volunteer for over 20 years in Honolulu. When I moved here, I couldn't volunteer. RF: Thank you. We'll start again. There's a lot of policy work to be done with DOCARE. That's one of the areas that certainly needs to be revamped a little bit to make sure that we have qualified candidates and also make sure that they get the equipment and the training that they need. DY: OK... TL: We recently were part of a conversation about trespass rules where hunting was a part of it — but just general trespass situations and I'm led to understand that those are police responsibility as opposed to DOCARE primarily — is that correct? RF: There's a couple different angles on that one. For those of you who don't know — I retired as the assistant chief in California for the Department of Fish and Game. When I started to work, there's some nuance differences between the way we dealt with it there and the way we deal with it here. In my opinion, we need to fix the trespass rules — so appropriate signage doesn't mean anything to my officers, to the county officers, so that's really something in the law that needs to be fixed, right? So in normal trespass — in particular hunter trespass usually have some pretty solid parameters. It would be signs at ingress and egress and signs three to a mile — that's something we can enforce. Appropriate signage is a little bit fuzzier for my guys to enforce. But to answer your other question, I think what you're asking is — do the wildlife officers enforce trespass rules? If it's strictly a trespass rule — that's something that's better left to the county jurisdictions, however, if it's a hunting violation — then we're there to respond to that. So there's two things that happen in Hawaii that require our presence on private land. One they need a license and two they can't hunt at night. Some of the other seasonal issues if there 5