Comm No 0005.01 - GMAC Legislative HIstory - Sept 14 2018

Home

» Chairman, can I just ask for a brief, brief discussion? » Have we lost Pahoa? » We lost Pahoa (inaudible) » Okay, let's take a brief recess. » (Gavel pounds.) Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. The Hawai'i County Council is now reconvened. Council members, at this time we actually have a motion to bifurcate the Bill 260 and 261. I'm going to ask Mr. Pilago to withdraw that motion and also withdraw the motion to approve both Bill 260 and 261. We'll leave live on the floor Communication 731 so we can have the presentation and then we'll come back for the motion for Bill 261. Thank you, Ms. Smart. » You're welcome. » Okay... Mr. Pilago. » Thank you, Mr. Chair. We're... we're willing to comply. We at this time withdraw the motion to bifurcate. » Thank you. » And subsequent to that we withdraw the motion to approve both Bill 260 and 261 » Which we're on. Thank you very much. So what 's live on the floor is Communication 731.1. The motion is to close file. And that is a presentation by Mr. Tony Silvester so sir, please take it away. Thank you very much. » Okay, I'll start over. First of all I'll thank all of you and everyone that came here today and it's been a long day. Okay. I'm basing this as pono, balance and dialogue. I think this is a lot of what's been missing with like our State agencies and hunters and stuff so... you know first of all to me pono and... is doing the right thing, yuh. And balance. Balance is where... you know... the word's been tossed around a lot lately. You know taking everything into consideration. And this is what we really need to do. In our beautiful aina, hunting opportunities... family bonding... sustenance... our culture... our environment... food for the palila... and species survival. Okay, one of the main facts I'd like to point out here is that... you know before the arrival of modern man to the Hawaiian Islands, large flightless birds foraged around the forest floor... on Native plants. They kept the underbrush maintained... just as the pig, sheep and goats do today. You don't see too much record of this because most of these birds were extinct by the time... I guess botanists got in the forest. But I work up on Mauna Kea and I've visited many caves where in some caves it's over three feet deep of these birds' bones. So they ranged all the way up to twelve thousand feet at one time. Okay... dialogue. I think dialogue is the biggest part and that's the most trouble that I've had over the past year with the DLNR. Is... you know... trying to get together with them and trying to express some of the concerns that us as hunters and gatherers have. You know... and for mainly I'm going to talk with the threats to the survival of the palila. You know and a lot of the problems that face the palila bird extinction... its blaming about the sheep and the reduction of its habitat, although as you can on these figures here, that a lot of this stuff here is you know... predation... even the cat scat... sixty-eight percent was found to have bird parts in it. And I don't like to use the word feral because anything born in the wild is a wild animal. It's not a feral animal. It's not your house cat that escaped or whatever. Once an animal is born in the wild, it's a wild animal. So we talk about sheep. They're not feral sheep, they're wild sheep. Okay... this is a video... it's a short clip. This is 2