2017-06-27 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – June 27, 2017 JO: I was talking with Stanley. I was saying one of the things you do is you start by – if you identify a neighborhood – an area that you think is good the first thing you do is you go and talk to the neighbors and see what their feeling is. If it’s something you’ll find a lot of folks around here support the shooting sports – the buyer that tried to chase us out of Hakalau went and tried to get a community association to stop hunting, ATVs, any kind of noise generating stuff and basically they told that buyer to go jump in a lake. So there are a lot of folks that were very supportive of what we did but were not supportive of that so – but it can take one just to bring things up. But I would go and talk to the neighbors – if there’s something that looks very promising – say this is what we’re considering and these are the kind of things we do to minimize the noise impacts – you know these are the kind of hours we’re going to operate an see if we’d have support. TL: There’s a number of steps to go through. Why don’t you share those steps with us here? In order to have an understanding of what we need to do as far as moving forward with a gun range, you started touching on it - talking to the neighbors – community support and water and... JO: Certainly. Noise isn’t the only issue that has to be addressed. Water, if there’s water on the property – running water – or a steep hillside that could cause a lot of runoff then you’ve got an issue that you have to have a very good lead management plan – you have to have that anywhere but it becomes more difficult to do in those kinds of environments because the EPA is now involved in that, you know, if you have runoff into streams you’ve created a situation – noise is certainly one of them – safety, suitable backstops, building up berms. At Puuanahulu, we dealt with – we did an EA – an environmental assessment and we had hydrologists, we had people that came in and studied the wind patterns so they could predict what would be carried where sound and dust from construction – things like that – a cultural specialist came in and took a look at the property to see that we weren’t going to be impacting any culturally sensitive sites. Fortunately, it was a large, fairly recent lava flow so there was little to worry about and the safety issues and, of course, the safety’s probably the easiest thing to deal with because it’s something that all gun ranges have to do and there’s a lot of good knowledge and standards to work from so – those are the main things that we have to deal with, of course, property if it’s a government, a state, a county that you can get to provide it for public use at no or a nominal fee – that’s great. Sometimes you have to do it on private property – that may be the next thing we have to take a look at if there’s not a county or state parcel that’s suitable for it so that may be and sometimes you can get donations for that. A lot of ranges around the country are founded on donated lands so... 21