2018-01-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – January 29, 2018 RF: Thank you members of the GMAC for inviting me and allowing me to give you an update on what we talked about almost a year ago in terms of the things that we can do to help shooters and hunters on the Big Island to comply with our laws. My name is Robert Farrell, I’m the DOCARE Chief, I’ve been in there just a little over a year now and previously to that I did spend a little time on the Big Island working and as part of my duties - I patrolled and went up to mile marker 16 in particular and encountered and talking with the other officers we discussed what we’re going up there to enforce. We talked about the hunting rules and the shooting rules and how those were the shooters at these areas. Primarily target practice were being held to hunting rules – so in most cases that’s probably not a bad idea – a hunting license is a good thing to have if you’re gonna go out shooting – wearing orange – I don’t have much of a problem with that but then we got to the caliber issue and so I was told that the officers were writing tickets for people discharging a 22 and actually seizing the firearm, so I didn’t agree with that approach. As a retired game warden from California working my way through the ranks from warden to assistant chief of the California Department of Fish and Game – I had enough experience to call BS on that and so I thought to myself, that’s probably not a good ticket to write but why are we writing it? So we went through the rules, the regulations – talked about it a little bit more – and we found out there was really no legal place for these folks to go who wanted to shoot. Now that I’m the chief I think I can make some headway in that. We’ve identified a couple of areas that are good candidates for a public shooting range – we looked at some of the authorities and it appears to me that DLNR – has the authority – the board has the authority to designate certain areas as public shooting ranges and a couple of the areas are probably well known to a lot of folks here – mile marker 16 in Manuka. So I’ve abbreviated our presentation tonight to only include mile marker 16 and I did that for a particular reason in that Manuka may encompass part of a NARS which may or may not affect how we are able to move forward with that particular site and in addition - I need to do a little bit more research on the land ownership and how it got into DLNR’s possession – who it came from. We’re looking at working with the Land Division to understand how that came to us and what the exact boundaries are so we can identify it better. It may be that we have to delay that site a little bit until we complete that research but I’m hoping we can also designate that site as well as it’s already being used and one of the side benefits of both of these sites being designated as public shooting ranges will be to allow for some good clean up to occur and so both Manuka and mile marker 16 have suffered over the years in terms of people dropping off targets and things and not cleaning up their shells and that sort of thing. I will go through a very brief presentation and talk a little bit about these two sites – in particular mile marker 16 and where our authority comes from – how we can do this in the process that we’re gonna hopefully move forward with in designating at least one, if not both of these sites, as public shooting ranges. You guys ready? 2