2019 02-12 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – February 12, 2019 State level legislatively where people have tried to – these environmental groups have came in and they’ve tried to ban the fishery. It’s been largely unsuccessful because of all the management that’s been put into place – it’s the most studied fishery in the State of Hawaii – it’s got more data and research on a federal and a state level than any other fishery within the state and so legislatively these environmental groups have had – and these are mostly mainland environmental groups such as Earth Justice and things like that – collaborating with local partners – they’ve – they haven’t had a whole lot of success at the legislature and so what they did was about four or five years ago they went to circuit court and they tried to get the fisheries shut – they wanted an environmental review – HIPA – what’s known as HIPA – it’s like an impact statement or an environmental analysis done – at the first court they got shut down – the second court – the appellate court – it got shut down – finally got kicked up to the supreme court – the supreme court, you know, the Attorney General of this state – he didn’t feel that the permit – the way that the structure of the permitting that was done for the state that HIPA applied – I actually agree with him – I do not think it should apply – I think that that’s quite alarming for any fishery or any permitted resource extraction – whether you’re talking aquarium fishing or any - your commercial marine license. TN: Where are you folks at with the EIS study? EK: That’s what I’m getting to – so basically what’s going on is the supreme court issued the injunction and they said that we needed to be HIPA compliant so they applied HIPA to a fishery – a regulated managed fishery from – that’s already overseen by the state – they made us do it so what we did was partnered up with a group actually from the mainland that was gonna help co- fund – it’s a very expensive process to do this and very time consuming – so we teamed up with a group called PIJAC – which is the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council – they’re based out of Washington, DC – and we began doing the HIPA process right, I think, January or February of 2018. The first thing that we did was we did, you know, there’s kind of a chain of command – you’ve got to do through the HIPA process. Step one is what’s known as your EA – your environmental Analysis – so that was the first thing that we did through most of 2018 – we had the – there was like some public hearing stuff on it and then ultimately Chair Case from DLNR – she thought that it would be more proper to do a full environmental impact statement – so she denied the EA and asked for us to do the EIS. So what we did was we agreed to do – we had to come up with more money from our stakeholders to do it and now we’re doing the EIS. The only difference between and EIS and an EA – all your scientific analysis and data and your measuring of impact is done within the EA document pretty much what’s left to do is what’s known as a CIS – a cultural impact statement – that’s pretty much what makes the difference between an EA and an EIS. So currently, that’s where we sit today. We’re working on – we’ve hired a company that’s based in Hilo and basically what 25