2018-01-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – January 29, 2018 several other DOFAW representatives that were up there and while I don’t know if Joy was with us at that meeting up in Waimea and we were talking about game management and how do we get a game management plan and we wanted to look into a game management plan for the Big Island, primarily, and the idea is to request a plan to manage your State game resources and, so, in 2008, it was agreed that we would get a working group together to start this and this was comprised of DLNR and Island hunters – we developed a leadership strategy and we designed the scope of the plan and it would be limited to his island, so, it would be fairly simple and – now as part of the working group – one of the criticisms that we have gotten on this plan is that it wasn’t a plan that DLNR could or wasn’t comfortable with – and there were some comments that were made about that and one of the things that I would like to acknowledge in the facts are exactly who some of these members were of this game management plan group and besides myself and Dick Hoeflinger there were and Johnson, who’s passed away, Tim Ohashi, John Polhemus – many of you know – Roku Kanakuni – many of you know – Alan Nakagawa – Jon Sabati, the West Hawai’i - Hawaii State Game Management representative – by the way, we have Ryan Kohatsu – the East Hawaii Game Management representative here with us this evening, as well, Hans Sin, who’s now in California – but there’s many others that participate in this – Ron Walker, a retired wildlife biologist – dozens of people – many hunters that many of you may know – Shane DeMattos, another DOFAW guy from Maui – Mark Fox from – Bruce Faulkner from Maui – Mark Fox from TNC – Nature Conservancy – John Giffin, used to be – just numbers of these people and so we had not only hunters – we also had DLNR as a part of this working group putting together this plan and that’s how this plan came to be and in 2008 this basic outline was established – we developed it through individual sections – we went bird by bird – habitat by habitat – an area of the Island – and we held 12 review meetings to discuss what we had gone over and in April 2010 we had completed a 175 page plan, which is basically a five-year-plan for the management of Hawaii game animals and this was submitted to the DLNR. Now, once we submitted that plan – it sat there and it sat there for 7 years and, so, in 2015, we got this plan back from DLNR and what they did was – and I’m not a educator or an academic – but if I compare two documents I like to compare the original document with the document that’s been corrected or modified and that’s what we expected from DLNR when they sent this back to us – what we got was a hodge podge of a lot of new stuff that they put in there – a lot of it had to do with – they made a lot of changes – and we couldn’t keep track of it – I’m gonna have Dick come up here – my thought processes are – but maybe I could invite you back up here for a minute – no? You’re not coming? OK, he’s not coming. Um... But they made extensive modifications to this plan and rather than putting them in the order that we had them in – what they did was – they plastered them all over that documents and one of the problems that we had with that was that you could not compare the plan – you could not see what they did, how did it relate, what were the changes that they had done to that plan as to what we had 15