2018-01-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – January 29, 2018 RF: There’s a couple of slides - I’ll work through that really quick and then we’ll have some questions at the end. The authority where it resides is in the HRS. The Department has the ability to construct, operate, and maintain public outdoor and indoor target ranges. That’s in the HRS so that’s grounded in State law. In regard to what the program is – it’s specifically the Hunter Safety Program. So this would be very closely tied with Hunter Safety and one of the main motivations and the main reason that we are able to do this is to support the Hunter Safety Program. And then so within the HARs under definitions – when it talks about a public shooting range it means an area designated by the board – and that would be the Board of Land and Natural Resources – as a location where activities related to target, archery and firearm shooting may be conducted. So, again, the Board has the authority to designate a public shooting range. Once that range has been designated by the Board – physically – then there are certain rules that are already in place that apply. So that’s another good thing – we don’t have to develop a bunch of rules, we already have the authority within the HRS and we already have some HARs that apply and so, as part of that, the Department has the authority to negotiate and enter into agreements, concessions, or leases with an individual, private business, concessionaire and non-profit entity or other public or private organization to manage and operate public shooting ranges as may be authorized under Hawaii HRS – which is the one that we talked about earlier. So basically what this is talking about is our ability to enter into an agreement to have a gun club – almost anybody come to us with proposal – go before the board and look at agreements on how we might be able to develop and/or manage the operation of this public shooting range. Now this doesn’t have to occur – the Department can do management on its own, but we also have this ability which is really important if we want to engage with other entities to try and help us manage the range. It also allows us – the Department or its designated representative – may set criteria for the use of the public shooting range so in terms of setting hours or safety zones or other types of rules that may be needed at the range outside of the rules we’re gonna talk about – a little bit about later – the Department has the ability to enact those as well. This talks a little bit about some of the rules and this is in that same section that are already in place so you can see C is the one that we’re concerned about where it gives us an exception to the caliber but it also talks about some activities that are prohibited so if we designate it as a public shooting range – hunting would no longer be allowed in that specific area which kind of makes sense because you can see that you don’t want hunting to be occurring at the target range as well – that would create some enforcement issues and other things – no camping – possession of alcohol – all standard good things that you don’t want to have happening at a range – so here’s a quick diagram of what mile marker 16 and the site looks like – so the small square that you see at the bottom of the screen is the actual range area – so I wasn’t able to load the video up because it didn’t go over email but we have a good video that kinda shows what the range looks like but in 3