Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture and Environment

Aloha kakou. Welcome to the Joint Committee hearing for the House Committee on Agriculture and Food Systems and the Senate Committee on Agriculture and environment. Today is January 17, 2025, at 2:01pm, and we're convening in Conference Room 325 at the Capitol. I'm Chair Kahaloa. I'm the new chair of the Agriculture Committee.

Before introducing our committee that's here and members today, I'm just going to do a few housekeeping roles and then we'll introduce the committees. Before we get started, I want to remind people this is an info briefing on biosecurity today and there is no public testimony.

In the event of any catastrophic network failure, it may cause the necessity to reschedule this info briefing. In that case, an appropriate notice will be posted. And on that note, today we have with us on the house side, we have Vice Chair Kusch, and we have with us Representative Matayoshi and Representative Marten.

And we are grateful to have the Senate here today. Senator Gabbard would like to have introductions by our house committee with what district or community represent. So, I represent district 6 on Hawaii island in Kona.

Good afternoon. Matthias Kusch representing district 1. That's Hilo, Hamakua and Kaumana.

Good afternoon, everyone. Rep. Matayoshi, I represent Kaneohe and Maunawili.

Aloha kakou. Lisa Marten, I represent Waimanalo and Kailua.

Aloha mai kakou. And mahalo for joining us. Hope that you're all doing well and welcome to you all as we do a deep dive into our invasive species problems that we have here in paradise. Mike Gabbard, representing district 21, Kapolei, Makakilo, Kalaeloa and parts of Ewa This will be my ninth year chairing the Agriculture Environment Committee.

And I'd like to introduce have my ADN members introduce themselves.

Thank you, Chair. Tim Richards, Vice Chair. I represent district four on the Big. Island, stretching from North Hilo through Hamakua. North, South Kohala and down into North Kona.

Afternoon, everyone. Karl Rhoads, representing District 13. You're in District 13 right now from. The harbor up to the top of the poly.

Aloha, everyone. Samantha DeCorte, representing the best side, the west side, Waianae Coast Senate, District 22. Happy to be here. Aloha.

Thank you. Any other legislators attending? Okay, so I'm going to turn this over to Chelsea Arnott, who is the Hawaii Invasive Species Council Program Manager, who will introduce our speakers and get us rolling. Thank you. Chelsea.

Mahalo, and please forgive my inability to do this quickly. I always feel on the spot when I'm doing the tech work here. So let me just transition to my presentation and get my zoom.

Chelsea, as you're setting up, I want to introduce another member who has just joined us. Representative Nicole Lowen from District 7 North Kona, Waikoloa.

Mahalo. Mahalo, Chairs Kahaloa, Gabbard, Vice Chairs, Kusch, Richards and members of the committee for coordinating this year's info briefing on biosecurity and invasive species. Once again, my name is Chelsea Arnott. I am program support with the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, and I'm also joined by my team members here today. Elizabeth Spieth.

Maybe you can just raise your hand as I call your name. Mason Russo, Chuck Chimera, and we have two members, a Kupu member and Jack Reiff that are not present today. I've helped coordinate the agenda with the help of the chair's office. Trying to keep presentations short and sweet to allow time for questions and discussion.

Each state department will be presenting and discussing their role in biosecurity, highlighting some of the work and needs and any specific requests coming through this session. Okay, just had to check. We are all here because invasive species are an ever-present problem across our state.

And I really appreciated each of the members of the committees discussing their district and their areas that they represent. And when you mention your areas, I think about what invasive species are in those areas. You're all impacted. We are all impacted by invasive species.

We have experienced the impacts of invasive species in every way by seeing the decimated coconut trees from coconut rhinoceros beetle to feeling the painful stings of little fire ant and in hearing the incessant calls of Koki frogs.

And though there are the synergistic effects of climate change and invasive species that we have all witnessed over the last few years, with hazardous Albizia trees that are falling during tropical storms, the increased frequency of wildfires across our landscapes and the extinction of our native forest birds due to mosquito borne diseases.

A recent report estimated that the globally - that globally invasive species cost 423 billion annually and this cost is set to quadruple every decade. Adequate resources, policy, public awareness and coordination are all critical to effectively addressing invasive species and improving biosecurity. The need for statewide coordination was addressed with the creation of the Hawaii Invasive species council in 2003.

The council is an autonomous forum that brings together leadership from the six state departments that have some jurisdiction in invasive species prevention and management. It is co-chaired by the directors of the Land and Natural Resources and Agriculture and has representation from Departments of Health, University of Hawaii, Transportation and Business and Economic Development.

These are some of the functions of the council and we'll soon have administrative rules that will allow the council, departments, counties and authorized agents to access private property for control and eradication of listed invasive species.

But one of the primary functions is the allocation of funding that supports interagency projects and programs each year, and this funding supports all areas of biosecurity from prevention of new pests, controlling existing pests, research, and outreach.

The Island Invasive Species Committee receive HISC funding every year for their operations because they have no stable funding source and are a critical piece of biosecurity. They are projects of the University of Hawaii, and their position allows them to work across sectors and landowner boundaries on targeted invasive species.

They tend to work on targets and in areas that no other agency is working, and their mission is to eradicate invasive species that are not widespread from their respective islands.

But they are also the ultimate collaborators, assisting and sometimes taking the lead on pests that are more widespread because the major impacts they pose, like Rapid Ohia Death, little fire ants and Koki frogs.

Most of these programs have been established since the early 2000s and now are an integral part of the island communities, regularly participating in community events, school presentations and developing curriculum, even joining parades, and putting on trainings to make sure the community is always aware and engaged.

The efforts of these programs led to the successful eradications of veiled chameleons on Maui, which is reportedly the first successful reptile eradication.

Albizia trees on Molokai, Axis deer from Hawaii island, and Miconia at Bay on Oahu and Kauai to just name a few and you can see the list, which also needs to be updated because there's more eradications.

And HISC funding also supports a variety of research projects that seek to enhance detection and management tools, understand a new pest species, economic studies and more. Senator Gabbard mentions the herbicide ballistic technology developed by Dr. James Leary, which was a game changer for addressing Miconia in hard-to-reach inaccessible areas.

A separate request for 500,000 is to support the Hawaii Ant Lab that's included in the executive budget, and they are critical to research and extension work for invasive ants and specifically for Little Fire Ant. Without the efforts of Hawaii Ant Lab, little fire ants would be established statewide at this point.

The program has not been adequately funded in the past few years, resulting in multiple furloughs, and we are seeing the impacts of decreased capacity with growing infestations, especially on Oahu. His funding is critical to improving biosecurity and the needs are growing due to overall higher costs but also spreading invasive species.

In the executive budget is the $4.25 million increase to his that would bring the baseline budget for his up to 10 million.

The additional funding would allow a much-needed increase to island invasive species committee operations, allow us to better invest in research and biocontrol, improve marine biosecurity pest surveillance at critical control points and increase staffing for his program support that could include data and a grants manager.

His funds are also really important to leveraging federal dollars for FY23 and 24. His secured 4.6 million from the REPI program to support a range of invasive species work across the state and that his funding provided 50% of that match requirement. And just to provide an overview of biosecurity.

When we look at biosecurity, it really is an interagency effort when it comes to prevention of new pest incursions. It's the agencies that have the regulatory authority to establish agreements, inspect, quarantine, enforce that are the leads.

That includes on the federal side: Customs and Border Protection, USDA, APHIS, and then on our state side the Hawaii Department of Agriculture.

But I also want to include Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Division of Aquatic Resources, because they're in charge of marine biosecurity and it's really important for them to be involved at all stages of our biosecurity system and to highlight that and they'll be talking a little bit more about that in detail.

We have HISC included at our borders, so our borders are the ports of entry because it does oversee a multi-agency monitoring project that enhances early detection capacity for high priority pests like Africanized honeybees and red imported fire ants. And for post border the things where we have existing pets - pests, not pets.

We have agencies and organizations that work across watersheds and properties to control those existing pests. One agency really cannot do it all and interagency response is necessary to be effective.

Our DLNR Director, Don Cheng, sums it up nicely that biosecurity is a kokua effort that requires not only government, but more importantly collaboration with communities, especially those directly impacted by invasive species. And I'll leave you with one success story of interagency response. And this is the response to coconut rhinoceros beetle in Maui in 2023.

The initial detection was reported by a local business owner who owns a tree trimming company and discovered CRB larva in a dead palm at one of the golf courses. He immediately reported to the Maui Invasive Species Committee who initiated rapid response.

The Hawaii Department of Agriculture confirmed the identification and on that same day the infested tree and 25 surrounding trees were removed with the assistance of the tree trimming company. The removed trees were chipped on site and fumigated by a local pest control company, preventing further spread of the pest.

Additional proactive measures were taken that have resulted in no additional CRB detections to date on Maui. This success was the collaborative efforts of the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle Response Team, Department of Agriculture, Maui Invasive Species Committee, the University of Hawaii, private companies and community members.

So, I'll leave you with that and happy to introduce our next panel of speakers to continue the conversation on biosecurity.

As we're transitioning, just for members of the committee that are committees that are here today, we're going to take questions in segments. So, after the Hawaii Department of Agriculture speaks, then we will open up for questions for both presentations. Mahalo.

So, our next speakers are going to be Director Sharon Hurd with the Hawaii Department of Agriculture and the Deputy Dean Matsukawa, also Department of Agriculture. Let's get this open.

And thank you, TLC and the his committees shout out to the staffs of both the departments of Agriculture, Departments of Health, departments of dlnr. His Misc. I mean, as Chelsea made a point of saying, it's interagency effort. And yes, I forgot how, but I meant they were in there. So thank you.

Let me start with our portion of it, which is the Hawaii Invasive Species Council Biosecurity overview as well. We're going to start with the good news. It's all good news, right? Okay. The Hawaii administrative rules 472 update. These rules have been. Was approved. Were approved by the board in February of 2022. No, 23.

And it's taken this while to go through the process and it was really. It's a long process that involves many different steps, but it's worth the tail end Monday, effective Monday at holiday January 20th, these rules go into effect. The revisions include permanent restrictions on the movement of crb.

The rule restrictions basically address the movement of infested material. And what it said was, you just can't do it. And it added CRB to the list of host material that you cannot move. It also designated the Department of Agriculture always had. Oh, let me introduce Dean Matsukawa, the new Deputy Director at the Department. Sorry about that, Dean.

I always forget that step. Okay. The other thing that it did is it established. It gave us the authority to use the big stick that we had. We were always like, we can go court order. We can knock on your door and say, hey, we know you're moving infested material.

This is, this new rule says we can go out there and just say, you can't do it anymore. You just stop movement. And the 3 and 4 portions of the rule change were always there. It's just a little bit more emphasis on it. Now. This rule change had the support of the community, the industry, all the legislators.

It's a rule that the. The industry really supports because they were all given challenges with those companies that were not following the rules. This gives us the authority to just stop sale. The second thing we want to bring attention to is the work that the Department of Agriculture does in prevention. The 2024 Import Activity Report.

There were actually 50,000 arrivals of ships and aircraft inspection and actually clearance of 20 million pieces quarantined. 16,000 interceptions of insects, diseases, microorganisms, animals, aquatics and plants was about 1,300 in the amnesty bins. We collected 1,200 mostly fruits and vegetables that were not eaten on the plane but inadvertently carried down.

Now that number the interceptions thanks to the 44 positions given to us through Act 231. When we fill those positions we fully expect the interceptions to go up pointing out the aquatics that we intercept. Working in conjunction with DLNR, the aquatics are just become a real.

We find more and more people bringing in aquatic pets for their aquariums. And we just had the Don't Let it Loose Campaign in conjunction with DLNR. What happens is they release these invasives into the ocean and now we have invasive corals and they create. It's just a catastrophic effect.

Act 231 update out of the program side 65% of the funding has been obligated, 52% has been encumbered. By the end of the fiscal year we expect to have all 100% of the funds in at least obligated or encumbered which means they will not lapse. Regarding personnel, the 44 positions. This is a little bit more challenging.

So far none of the funding has been expended because in order to expend the funds you have to pay and we don't have anybody in places yet. We do expect to have the jobs posted by the end of the fiscal the stat. The particular place we are in the process is about midway called the classifier review.

They have to look at each position and make sure that the classification and the work that's done is consistent statewide. That nobody in a class is making or doing more work or getting more money than the similar person in the class. Whoopsie. LFA surveys.

We wanted to point out that the LFA surveys that we're doing right now, those are the dots that you see on Oahu. 387 positives, 10,383 negative sticks. During the Christmas season we don't. Because we're doing a Christmas tree type work and checking more packages. We did less positives. I mean more. We collected more samples but.

I'm sorry, we collected less samples but we had more positives. That's for elephant. And the next slide shows you some of the work we're doing in public spaces. The zoo. That's a picture of the zoo. Every green.is where we put a stick. And the stick, if it was red it would be a detection.

The Honolulu Zoo was surveyed on February 20th. No detections. Went back on the 27th. No detections. So the public space is protected and no LFA there for when your children or family or tourists go. There is not going to be an incident of a bite. CRB response is a big deal.

CRB response is in Multi agency Kailua, Wailua, Kihei, Waikalua and Senator Ducourt. I'm a West sider too. That's a picture of Waikale. We do treatments, CRB injection. We want to show you that we do have these injectors and how they're applied systemically. On my right is a picture of the work that's being done and the training.

And in the middle is once a tree is treated it's tagged so that the public knows that that tree is not to be harvested from because the systemic treatment does make the fruit inedible. Coqui frogs. Those are the detections on Oahu. They've been treated. We had a real big outbreak in Mililani. That's now we knock on Wood.

Eradicated after three visits. We have no detections. PQ vacancies the total vacancies within the Department now not considering the wonderful act. 44 positions total vacancies. We have 17 of the total 87 positions. Seven are currently filled with temporary assignments and we're in the process to fill SR11 we have three vacancies. And SR9 we have two vacancies.

Now these five positions are being redescribed because the work that's done is really. It's very high level. It's intensive technical work but the pay is really quite. Not competitive. Very difficult to. To attract retain people. So then the five in active recruitment currently filled with 89 day and if you total that up five, it's 17.

So we're an active filling of the 17 positions and deputy Matsukawa has volunteered to be the point of contact if you have a. If you're interested in filling one of these positions or one of the 44. This. That's his direct number. Thank you, Dean. Okay, so the biocontrol research.

I want to point out that biosecurity as we all know here is an. We're in an emergency situation. It is a all hands on deck. Every agency is working on it. What would really be helpful is the ability to have an emergency proclamation that we can deploy when we have something like H5N1.

The emergency proclamation will be waiving the rule that will help us hire people. It would be for recruitment of people. The other rule that we would ask to be waived through the emergency proclamation is the 103D-53 which is the need for certification. Hawaii Compliance Express. Recently we had a RFP for community driven CRB response in on Oahu.

$25,000 to each applicant. We had some really good applications statewide we couldn't fulfill some of them because they were not Kuwait compliance, express compliant. So if we can waive that rule, we'd be able to Fund all the, all the proposals that come in.

It's a good rule, but for the purpose of an emergency, we should be able to Fund, you know, everyone that wants to help us in the community, biocontrol research. We currently have bugs. We have real good potential biocontrol. Wasps or insects that can control fireweed. We currently have control agents for fireweed.

But our agent Mohsen says when you have a weed as strong as fireweed, you really need to find agents that will attack the flower, the seed, the leaves, the stem. And he has them, but he just needs the research facility to bring them in. The next picture is for fountain grass. Now, fountain grass.

Imagine diamond head on fire. Diamond head is. Both sides have fountain grass on it and he has a biocontrol agent to control it, but he can't bring it in because we don't have the permits currently. And then there's holoscale. So that is the extent of our presentation. Thank you for the time.

I would have more information on Act 231 welcoming questions before we move on to questions Committee.

I just thank you, Chair Hurd, for your presentation. We also are going to be available for questions to the Hawaii Invasive Species Council in this segment. So it can be for either organization. Thank you, Chelsea. We're going to ping pong between the House and Senate Committee starting with the House House Members. Any questions, Representative Lohan?

Sure. For Department of, of Agriculture. So of the. The funding you got last year, and I think you said this in your presentation, none of it's been encumbered and no positions have been filled.

But the positions, you're right. You mean the 44 positions? Yeah. The money is encumbered because it's part of the budget. But we haven't expended any because in order to expend, you have to pay somebody and we don't have bodies yet.

And for the other funding. So not the funding for the positions.

Okay, for that funding, we have 63. Well, the. Let me go to the chart here. Sorry, you already went past my slide. No, no, no. Let me just go. I have it. I want to be. 65% is obligated. By obligated, we mean that we've done an RFP, we've given an award. So the funding is tied up.

Nobody else can get it. It belongs to HTM for CRB, belongs to Terminix for LFA so that's 1.1. 1.1, but so the 65% is obligated. The other 52% of that obligated funding is encumbered, which means the contract is being done. The big chunk that wasn't included in here was we had $800,000 that was awarded by Act 231.

It was for the green waste hauling. You know, you identify where the green waste is and then you haul it away. There was a flaw in RFP that we didn't add loading into the RFP. So the proposal that we got said they would identify and they would haul, but they wouldn't load.

So because the RFP was flawed, we had to retract it. So the $800,000 that was budgeted was originally obligated, but we had to put it, pull it out and we should have that RFP reposted in February and it should be obligated.

Okay, and the. Sorry, is it okay, I'll, I'll have one follow up and then I'll let other people have a turn. I might have more after you said 1.1 for LFA and 1.1 for CRB. That's of that 10 million.

Yes, but like with LFA, you, you actually gave us a 1.5. The 400,000 we have in Reserve for our work with nurseries, private residences, training biochemicals. So 1.1 is what we awarded to Terminix to actually treat the residences.

And where are they going? Where are they going?

They have, I think it was. One moment, let me pull up the exact number so I don't make a mistake. Okay.

580 residential properties on Oahu and 290 residential properties on Hawaii, Hawaii island and then for the counties of Maui and Kauai, because currently they, they're just going to treat, they're going to go survey, they're going to see what kinds of responses they're getting and do outreach like actually show the people. If you see this, do that.

Yeah, I'm familiar. Well, how do you pick which homes get subsidies? Good question. Other homes don't.

That's already been reported to us either voluntarily by the homeowner or by the, you know, the different ISCs and agencies and our own guys have detected it. So we have a list of people, Terminix, in fact, we just talked to them today.

They asked us when can they get the list and we said we would make it available to them.

No, but I mean like there's more than that number of homes that have LFA problems on just in my district probably. Right. So how do you choose who gets state money versus who has to pay for it themselves?

We're going to leave it up to Terminix because we have the. Well, because Terminix will say, okay, we have, they have the chemicals to treat like the reason we're using Terminix is they have the professional, you know, they have the liability and if you have young children in your house, they're going to use this.

But how you choose them, I mean. There has to be some process for deciding who gets subsidized.

I'm going to have to ask Terminix and get back to you because the.

Why would it be up to Terminix to decide?

Well, because the contract isn't done yet. We have to, we have the scope and we're going. Well, how would you like us to decide?

I mean there's all kinds of different ways you could approach it. I guess you could look at income, you could look at need of which communities have I guess greater opportunity for prevention or preventing it from spreading or where there's been more consistent problems where the most claims have been. I mean there's a ton of different ways.

I mean I already additionally have questions. Why I know the answer but it's frustrating. Why so much more on Oahu than Hawaii island where we have a huge problem. And of those 200 you mentioned, are they Hilo or Kona or where are they?

One of the things they're doing is remember those dots I had on the map? Okay. What they want to do is determine what is the best way to move in and actually attack the problem there. So they might, they're likely. Again I'd like the time to talk determine but if there's a section here.

Should be deciding, I mean Terminix, if, if that's part of what they get to do under their contract is determine how state funds are expended like distributed to citizens. There probably should have some. Well, actually the plant. I've talked for too long already.

Okay, the plant quarantine branch will be involved. So depending on where the dots are, how can we best eradicate in that section? You know, we're not going to do this thing. We're going to like work our way inwards and then. But it's going to be something that we have to talk to them about.

I just had the question today. What if a Hawaii island detection. Detection is a three acre farm, a residence, but it's a three acre farm versus a house on Hawaii Island. That's 10,000 square feet.

So we said, well let's get together and talk about how we handle that because the expense for either it would depend on where the farm is, how can we control that area. And there's hopefully this particular funding this year will be shepherded through the conference and we can do another one.

We can continue the work that we've done and attack the other circles.

Well, I'm going to follow up but please someone else. Thank you.

Representative Lone we are going to move to the Senate.

But just to summarize, Chair Hurd, I think what she's saying is in the contract the state on behalf of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture can direct how those funds are utilized and should take leadership in the utilization of those funds and prioritize and make that plan and contract accordingly.

So I just wanted to summarize her comments that that that is what the recommendation is and what is the prioritization of the list you're handing to Terminix of how did you prioritize it? What order are they going to do and move along. Thank you. So to summarize and we'll move to the Senate. Thank you. Chair Gabbard.

On the I'll start off for the Senate. You know, the funding from Act 231 was that used to support the is the Invasive Species Councils as well as HAL, Hawaiian Ant Lab.

We worked together on it. The funding that was given, I don't, I can't say that the ISCs are getting any dollars. Let me think back. But I can get back to you on that.

But I Did you coordinate with them?

We asked the HAL the way Ant Lab to submit a proposal and you know, I threw out a number that maybe they can submit a proposal for $75,000. We recently got a proposal from the University of Hawaii at 150. So we're looking at funding that we have not yet begun the process. We just recently got the proposal.

So yeah, we're working with them. Thinking back on the other funding pockets. CRB.

If you could get back to me with the amounts. Okay, sure. Okay, sure. Back to you House Members.

Representative Marten Sorry.

So my understanding, I have some real concerns that Terminix was the the entity awarded. Right.

When we have far more experienced entities like Hawaii Ant Lab that have done some very small amount of training for places like Terminix but definitely haven't shared all of their deep knowledge and are already housed on the Big island and a little bit on Oahu and are doing a lot of the work here and they were not able to even apply for the RFP because you limited it to private pest control companies.

So I'm just super concerned that we are leaving the experts behind who are trying to serve the public interest and instead asking for profit companies with very little experience and expertise to not only do the job, but then even makes policy decisions about who gets the benefits and who does not.

So I just, I wanted you to help share how that decision was made.

The decision was made basically due to liability. The pest control operators have the licenses, the business, the registrations and the insurance needed, and they have the, the training on application.

So the main concern we had was for kupuna allergies, those that want only organic treatments, the different treatments for the size of the house, the size of, you know, the limitations of what they can do for ranches versus, you know, people that have gardens in their backyard. They had the.

I think the most important thing when we had our discussions was the liability that they know what they're doing in terms of health and welfare of the people that they're serving.

So you're suggesting that they know more than the people that trained them?

No, I'm suggesting they have more insurance and they have more access to the chemicals and they have it on probably in the warehouse and the equipment. But, you know, there's another bucket of funding coming, hopefully, and then we'll expand it out of this. We'll learn from this and save for this size house and that number of people.

And this is the amount of money that we need for that. Yeah. And in fact, we just had our discussion, like I said today, and we asked them if, you know, would they welcome plant quarantine? Well, our staff is going to be with them in every, in every visit. But would they welcome additional. And they said, sure.

They said, we do have, you know, HAL has already done some training and they're really, they're welcome to see it, see them tag along. And we asked them would it be okay to have them along. They said, sure, we welcome them.

So we're working in the next round maybe to actually require it, but this was our first foray at it and it's. We'll see how many we can do. But would HAL be paid for that service? Sure.

Okay.

As long as it wasn't part of their original, you know, we don't double dip. And that's something we really have to worry about.

Thank you, Senator Richards.

Thank you, Chair. Actually, couple of questions on both sides. Chelsea, could you come up? We'll start with you. Quick question concerning the CRB on Maui. That Was eradicated. Was any work done to identify how that got there?

Mahalo for the question. Chelsea Arnott, with Hawaii Invasive Species Council, Department of Agriculture is typically the entity that's in charge of doing trace backs, trace forwards and understanding pathways. I don't know if that was done from my synopsis of the response effort, I don't know if I can.

Okay, so I'm going to flop that over to Director Hurd.

I would have to get back to you on that. Unless I can call up maybe. I don't think the people that did the work are in the room today.

Okay, so. Because I'd like to.

It was a golf course, so it could have been a hitchhiker in a golf bag.

But part of our biosecurity is knowing the pathway, so. Right. So yeah, I'd like you to fill in on that. So I got that Chell. So, coming back to you, Director, the treatments that you showed concerning treatment of the trees for CRB, what specifically is the chemical?

Chemical Arbor Arb. I don't. Well, I do have a. I know it starts with an A, but it's arbor Jet is the system Arbor.

Do we have someone in the room that.

Jonathan.

I know it was an imitrix, but. We just need you on the microphone, Jonathan. So we'll slide that over.

Good afternoon. Chairs. Vice chairs. Jonathan Ho, Plant Quarantine Branch Manager. So pesticides matter too. So there are a bunch of chemicals. The ones that Chair her heard referenced are systemic injectables. So there are two arbor, Jet and Imaget. They're basically imidacloprid. And they push them in and then the trees pick them up.

So it's imidacloprid is the active ingredients that what you're saying? Yes. Okay. And then for the. What is the withdrawal for consumption of the coconut? What is the timeline between treatment and fill? Can use the.

The quarantine is a year on the tag do not eat free and it's dated.

Okay. All right, so I got that. And then finally, the electronic information for people coming in to the ag form. Ag forms. Where are we with that? That was supposed to be a pilot project.

Good question. Slated to roll out in early spring.

So we haven't rolled it out at all.

Yes, we have not rolled it. We've done pilots, but we've not rolled it out.

Okay. I haven't seen any pilots, so. Okay, I know we are short on time, so.

Thank you, Chair, Members of the house. Oh, Vice Chair Kusch.

Chair. Thank you. I don't wanna Beleaguer the issue on LFA too much. But after listening to my fellow reps and our discussions in finance earlier. I. Get the distinct feeling, and I'm just wondering, do you guys have any data that you're acting off of for Hawaii Island? I mean, Oahu? I've seen several times and it's been referenced.

You have data points and so you have target areas. But has that happened on Hawaii Island?

That's a very timely question. Part of the funding that was given in Act 231 is called Tech Upgrades. There's $800,000 in that. The reason that none of it has been encumbered or expended is because the state currently pays for the GIS ESRI system through ETS.

So we're holding onto it because in the event that the software and the hardware, the software really that we have needs upgrading to do exactly what you're saying, we have the data, so when we upload it, then everyone will see where the LFA is. But we're not going to reveal addresses.

We're going to reveal like white for detected, then yellow, red, green.

So you've done surveys then?

Oh, definitely. We've done many surveys.

Mr. Ho.

On Hawaii Island?

Hawaii Island?

No.

Okay, so essentially this $1.1 million and the Terminix contract is just kind of a fishing expedition.

Well, so the, the, the contract is primarily focused on Oahu. That's where the bulk of the money is. And then I'm going to the other counties.

And one of the goals with the contract is to really get a baseline idea of how much can you really get done with a particular set of money through, through a commercial, at this point, a commercial standpoint. And ultimately you can then take that number and then extrapolate it, you know, again, against like all of Hilo.

I don't, whatever the, the extent of the infestation is, and obviously what it would take on Maui or on Kauai, Oahu will be different, obviously, because the infestations are different. But having like a hard and fast number that can be used to then go over time.

So, for example, if we can get $1.1 million and we can do 520 houses in a year on Oahu, there are 20,000 properties. It's going to take you that many years with that same amount of funding.

It quantifies the treatment. But again, we have different size houses, different size conditions, customers. But at least we have a quantifier that we can say to treat the rest of Oahu or the rest of The Big Island. We should expect X number of dollars just based on the research we've done here.

And I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you were asking specifically for LFA. I should have realized it. We do have surveys for the other pests for the different islands that we can upload to the website.

Correct. One of the challenges, particularly with the Act 231 data, the displaying of the data, is the individual pests and their distribution and the ability to detect is different for each island. And the staffing available to do that work is, again, different on each island and centralizing all of that information.

As Chelsea said, there's a lot of work, a lot of people doing it, and everybody's trying to fill as many gaps as possible. So coming up with, like a centralized place for all of that information to be stored and then managed and distributed. We're really kind of working through that because we've been.

Everybody's been kind of doing their own thing to try to get this stuff done because there's so much to do. And I think with the Act 231 funds and that big pot that was given to us, we. We have a real good opportunity to kind of start kind of really coalescing and pushing forward.

All right. Okay, thank you. Questions from the Senate.

Questions. Okay. We have Senator Keohokalole from District 24. Keohokalole.

Thank you. Chairs. Thank you for your latitude. Director, you said that the Terminix contract for lfa, that you're still. What I wrote down, you said is the contract isn't done yet. You're still negotiating the scope of it so that you can figure out a plan.

I'm sorry if I.

That's what you said I wrote down. So how can you encumber money on a contract that's not done yet?

The contract is in DAGS right now. It's ready to produce.

But.

So you don't actually have a plan for how to distribute, for how this private contractor is going to allocate the funds to do treatment, Even though the ISCs, especially on Oahu, in coordination with the ant lab, have a pretty standardized protocol for how to treat infestations that has proven successful on Maui, in Mililani, and it is underway in at least 10 of the 66 sites on Oahu.

You are aware of that, right? Can you pull up the slide from your presentation about the encumbrances, please?

Director, did you intend to mislead the Legislature on how well you're doing on Act 231?

If I did, it was an intention.

Of encumbrances because I heard another Member say, and you haven't disputed it even in the, even in the budget briefings, that of the 44 positions that were allocated from the money that the Governor released to your Department for Act 231, you are owe for 44 on hiring and those funds lapse on June 30th.

Correct.

And then you also told Wham. Well, here it says 52% encumbered.

Yes. I can tell you what is encumbered.

Okay, go ahead.

Okay. There's a pest management systems contract that not contract proposal that we're working on with the University of Hawaii. So that to me is considered encumbered because the money is.

Okay. Considered encumbered or encumbered because if it's encumbered and registered with the Department of Accounting and General Services as encumbered, then the money won't lapse on June 30. Is that what you intend to. Is that what you intend when you see on your slide 52% encumbered?

So, Director, I'm holding an email from Keith Regan, the comptroller and the Director of the Department of Accounting and General services from 11.29am today.

Right.

And what it says is that you have actually encumbered to date $1.1 million of Act 231 funding, that the full 10 million was released to your Department and that you have spent $0 of that money to date.

And we're six months in and every dollar of Act 231 money that is not spent by June 30 lapses back into the General Fund.

Depends on.

Correct.

Well, let's define spent. If we release the contract at 1.1 million, that money to me is encumbered. But there's another word that I should.

Have used, Director, I had here from the DAGS Comptroller, Keith Regan. Nothing spent against them yet. PO. Encumbrances are intact. Allotted the entire $10 million appropriation, 1.1 million encumbered. Nothing spent against the account yet. Are you. Did you intend to mislead the Legislature on how well you're actually.

No, not my intention. When you encumber the funds is what we're doing with the contract. It's encumbered. Okay. Somebody has been awarded the funds. Let's say lfa.

LFA is not registered as encumbered. Well, it's According to the Department of. Accounting and General services.

It's in Dags right now. It's in Dags right Now.

Director, this email is from 11:29am What Dags has.

Keith Regan, comptroller is correct.

Would you like to correct the record that you testified to in the Ways and Means and Finance Committee last year and that's on the board right now?

Senator, Encumbered in the. There's encumbered, there's obligated and there's expended. Expended is spent. If I give. If we issue a contract for $1.1 million, they can send us their first invoice when they have their contract number. The contract number comes from DAGs, Director.

Unless it's encumbered, it'll lapse on June 30th.

It will. It will not lapse.

If it's incumbent, it will lapse on.

Senator, I'm sorry, respectfully, sir. If I encumber funds, it's encumbered. The only funds that don't that lapse.

The only funds that are encumbered are 1.1 million 10% of the Act 231 monies. And we are halfway through the year. You're over 44 on your positions and you've turned over four of your five managers that are responsible for invasive species in the last year. The only one that hasn't turned over is still on probation.

Things are going backwards right now. Was it your intention to mislead the Legislature about how well you're doing because you're at risk of lapsing 90% of the Act 231 monies last year?

Senator, I had no intention of misleading anyone. I think it's by way of definition encumber obligate award expend.

Encumber means it won't lapse on June 30th.

Encumber means it will not lapse on June 30th.

Obligate means nothing. It means you think you know where you want it to go.

Obligate means.

Or it means they know that you think you know where it wants to go and it's supposed to go to them.

I'll go with that.

Yeah. Encumber means the money will not lapse in a year where you're coming back to ask for 28 million more.

The money encumber means it will not lapse. We will have the funds encumbered by the end of the fiscal year. The personnel funds. We can't.

Who's responsible for the encumbrances?

Isn't it.

The plant industry division Director.

The plant industry. It's all of us that's responsible for the encumbrances, sir.

It's definitely you.

Yep. Right.

Yeah. I just have trouble with the community having confidence in your ability to allocate and encumber and get all this money out the door when what we're being told on this slide right now is not being validated by the Department of Accounting and General Services.

Let me get back to you on that because I can talk to Keith. And he knows that the encumbered funds mean that they are contracted. These funds are in the contract process. We should have contracts done for at least 52% of them in the next three weeks.

And we will have all the other funds expended by the end of the fiscal. No, no, no. Not expended, encumbered or obligated, which means they will not lapse.

Okay.

To be continued. I just have real problems with the community's ability to have confidence in this money getting out the door. And I'll leave it there. Thank you, chairs.

Thank you. We're going to move on to Representative Matayoshi.

Thank you, Chair. You know, I'm going to be honest, I'll be honest. I'm pretty irritated. And you can hear the irritation from the Legislature, too, and I'm certainly part of that. This process has been going way too slow.

I have no idea why Terminex was the or why you did not allow Hawaii Ant Lab to bid on the RFP for little fire ants. But to say that it's liability is very confusing to me. As far as I know, Hawaii Ant Lab has been treating and has the equipment and the expertise to do it.

Unless you're saying that they've been treating this whole time without proper insurance or liability and they've been risking that the entire time, then I'm not sure where your liability argument is coming from. Is that what you're saying, that Hawaii should not have been treating this whole time?

I think what I'm saying is what we wanted to do was maximize the liability or minimize the liability to the state by working with PCO, CPCOs, pesticide operators that have business licenses, that have liability insurance.

So you're saying that we are minimizing the liability to the state by going to an outside company who is not properly, who's literally being trained by Hawaiian Lab. That, that, that seems like you're maximizing liability.

Well, that's your opinion.

Why wouldn't you use the trainers that are ready and willing, ready and willing to go for this thing, the pest.

The pest control operators have training. Hawaii Ant Lab was assist gave them specific directions but they can do the job. They can do the job. And they had the. Did you want to say something? Do you mind if I turn it over?

Well, I'm being told that Hawaii Ant Lab can do it at about 10% of the cost too. I mean this is not only a huge waste of state funds in my opinion, but also just not using our own guys to treat.

I mean, I understand sometimes we contract out when we don't have the personnel to treat, but here we're literally ignoring the people under that are government employees to do this. It doesn't make any sense and we're paying 10 times the amount in order to do it.

And to me, not only is that government waste, but that means we're not treating to the extent that we could by a very large margin. And when you have the kind of infestations like in our communities, we need every house we can get to be treated.

So this kind of waste is very, very disturbing to me and it's a lot slower. I think Yan Lab is ready to go. I'm not sure why. We have Terminix and they're trying to spin up and they're asking for advice and they're trying to get their things in order in order to go out and treat when.

When we have someone who's actively treating in the community right now and needs the resources to expand that. So please.

So Representative. So one of the things particularly I guess when you have the commercial operator as chair said, you have the liability issue. And I think one of the things I think we're kind of missing and it's clearly not to state that Hawaiian Lab doesn't have expertise. That's not the question.

I think one of the issues really was the ability to kind of hit the ground running with the limited time and the money. So termnext is this very large company. They have the people and once a contract is issued and they're trained, we provide them with sites. They can start immediately. Hal, unfortunately. Right. They are small.

They don't have the funds right now and they would need to also do a little bit of ramping up.

So moving up again, moving forward, we'll get the ability to get that baseline and secondarily with additional funding there is that opportunity to then potentially transfer over when you have that cost analysis comparison again, again the commercial versus again, I'm not sure how much it costs specifically for a particular person at RCUH and all that.

So I'm not a. I'm not a.

I don't think I'm ever going to buy the liability portion of it. I'm going to be honest with you. I. That argument seems like a very manufactured argument to me. It sounds like the RFP with Terminix is faulty too. Perhaps there seems to be. I mean, and Rep.

Lohan pointed this out, but there seem to be things missing from it, like which ones to prioritize. I mean, there seems to be some disconnects here that need to be worked out. I know you pulled the other RFP you discussed earlier because it you forgot to put in loading, had to reissue it.

If it's a matter of reissuing this, it seems like you have grounds here to reissue the RFP and broaden it to allow people like or organizations like Hawaii at lab to bid.

I am very interested to see what their bid is going to come in at because I've been hearing, I've been hearing they're probably going to blow Terminix out of the water.

And honestly, I'd rather use our guys who have been doing it, who have been in our communities and are actively treating, than hire another company that we have no idea how they're going to do it or how effective they're going to be.

So can you pull the RFP and reissue it based on certain faults or flaws that seem to be apparent through this info briefing?

In this case, there is no reason to pull the rfp. There's nothing wrong with the rfp. The proposal that came in was vetted by the Committee at procurement office and they met every term of the, you know, every piece of scope of the RFP said, why would we pull it?

And they had the equipment, they had the chemicals, they had the staff. They can do. I think he said 12 to 15 houses a day statewide. So you're right. In Hawaii island, when I said statewide, I mean Hawaii island, they can deploy them. They can deploy them and they have all the equipment.

So it sounded like a good idea. I don't have any reason to pull the rfp.

I think there might be a scope issue with the RFP. But regardless, 12 to 15 houses a day seems like. Not one. I'm sorry, one.

One agent. I'm sorry, one agent can do 12 to 15 houses a day.

How many agents are they providing for this under their rfp?

Well, I'm going to have to get back to you on that. But they have one year to do their scope of services, which was 580 residences on the island of Oahu so that's minimum. That's minimum. That's their minimum number.

Good afternoon, chairs and vice chairs, Members of the Committee, Greg Takeshima Pesticides Program Manager so to give you folks a little bit more information, the main reason we actually did go, one of the other reasons actually we chose to use a structural pest control operator, a licensed structural pest control operator.

The company is actually known as Rent to Kill Terminix. Rent to Kill Purchase Terminix. So that's just a business name thing.

But the main reason that we did choose that and we chose to go with a structural pest control company is because they have the capacity, they have a lot of employees who are ready and are trained to use structural pest control chemicals safely in a large scale project such as this. Right.

580, as Chair said, they can do a large number. They have, I think they have on the order of hundreds of staff to be available. That is where HAL does not have the capacity.

Are they going to be available? I mean, you're talking about Terminix, a huge company. They're not pulling all their employees to do this. No. But at least how many employees are they going to actually dedicate to this? That I do not know.

And I think it's a little unfair because Huawei LF has been getting defunded this whole time and to compare them now to this kind of diminished version of Hawaiian lab versus Terminix and who knows how many people they can pull, I think is a little unfair of a comparison.

I'd actually like to hear from Hawaii an lab or HISC if possible because they're who I've been hearing this from. Can I hear from you folks personally?

Of course. Chelsea Arnott with Hawaii Invasive Species Council. Just to clarify is the question regarding kind of furloughing and the funding for the Hawaii Ant Lab, if you could.

Briefly touch on that. But I think that's pretty well known. Well, I hope that's pretty well known. But Hawaii Ant Lab's ability to if they were to bid on the rfp, would they be how much more effective would they be? I guess how many more houses could they do? How much cheaper would it be?

Would they be able to hit the ground running immediately?

That's a great question. And you've seen the work of the Hawaii Ant Lab and worked very closely in your communities with staff from the Hawaii Ant Lab and also the Oahu Invasive Species Committee. At this current time, Hawaii Ant Lab I think has one and a half employees dedicated to Oahu.

The majority of their staff is over located in Hilo, Hawaii, and they move across the islands to help support the different community and little fire ant mitigation efforts across the state. So can they hit the ground running? Of course. They're the ones that developed the monitoring and treatment protocols that are effective for Little Fire Ant today.

So they definitely are the ones and the experts in the field that know this system and have been assisting not just communities, but state agencies and other organizations on how to implement this themselves.

Because they have limited staff, they've been developing community action programs, which Representative Martin is very familiar with, to help enhance their capabilities and just increase capacity. So I think this is a great solution, especially for.

For islands where we do see wider spread of Little Fire Ant like on Hawaii Island, getting the communities to be involved and implement these programs. But also we do need to increase the capacity of the Hawaii Ant lab in General so they can work more effectively across the state.

So to answer your question, yes, they can hit the ground running. What the cost would be compared to the Terminix, I'm not exactly sure, but we could get back to you on some estimates. I mean, their program runs about 1.3 million per year for around 16 staff Members. And that includes equipment, General operations, overhead.

So that's in working across the state. So we could do a comparison and work with the manager over there to see, you know, what the cost would be.

All right, any other. Thank you. I had one quick one here and that was in some of our budget briefings. We've heard the public call the 643pest hotline, but they, they don't get a response. So who is oversees the hotline?

The planned quarantine branch.

Planned Quarantine branch, yes.

Okay, thank you, Representative Lohan.

Thanks. So sorry. Coming back to the LFA question, I know things are different on Oahu versus Big Island. We've had LFA on Big island for a long time and homeowners have been responsible for the most part for paying for their own treatment.

And the work that Hawaii Ant Lab does with the outreach workers is working with communities, working in neighborhoods, educating, doing outreach. And that's been pretty effective, although it's always under resourced. I have really serious concerns and a lot of questions about how the decision was made to do this RFP to treat X number of homes.

Because you said 200 something for Big island, that is a drop in the bucket. It will not move us forward whatsoever on controlling the problem long term. And while it's taking some money, you know, it's taking some responsibility to pay for it off the hands of a few homeowners. We're already concerned that's not being distributed equitably.

And, you know, why was the RFP not crafted in order for Hawaii Ant Lab to be able to bid into it and be able to look at having more of those outreach workers, more capacity for community outreach, more capacity for research into better control methods, which seems to me like a way, a better long term approach and a better use of the funds.

And I mean, I'd like to hear your answer, but also maybe if Chelsea wants to weigh in on that.

One of the. Thank you for the question. One of the things we tried to do, and I don't want to get too chatty on this, but we needed to quantify the cost of controlling LFA in the state.

And the reason was we had an earmark going on and it was ready to be funded to do the, to quantify the amount. Okay.

But it didn't get funded. I get quarterly updates from Kyoshi or, you know, it's been a while, but you know, on how many, how much outreach they've done, how many people they've talked to, how many reports they've had and all this stuff. So Hawaii Ant Lab is doing that work.

All I can do is echo the reason the experts of the Department that put together the rfp, we all got together, we said we need to get going. We need to have people that have boots on the ground, have the equipment, have the cars.

This idea of the state coming in and paying to pay for the treatment for each homeowner who has an LFA infestation is great. If it would have existed, you know, a decade ago or five years ago for Hawaii Island.

And I understand you want to try to like nip it in the bud when we have a new infestation on a new island. Absolutely. You know, but, but it's also for Hawaii island, it's widespread and that's not a long term solution. And 200 some homes, that's nothing. And what's the plan?

Are they, I mean, because as you well know, I'm sure you're very familiar, LFA treatment's not a one time thing. It's ongoing treatments over months and, you know, perpetuity. So how, so this, this program, this RFP is going to come do it for how long? How many treatments?

How are they going to quantify if it was even sort of successful in wiping out that colony? It just feels like throwing away taxpayer dollars for a short term, throw some money at people through a private company instead of investing it in long term solutions to treat these problems.

Part of the reason we have the RFP is to educate the public. So when the treatments are done, the.

Follow Hawaii Ant Lab is doing the work of educating the public. And I get that maybe on Oahu an RFP to treat individual homes might be better. I don't know. But I know that's not for Hawaii Island. Not at all. Okay. Okay.

We might as well distribute money.

Entire neighborhoods to eradicate it already with the community.

You ready? If I could just add to that. There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle. There's not just one solution or like I was saying in my presentation, it can't just be one agency that does it all. And we've recognized that there does need to be a role for private pest control companies.

And Hawaii Ant Lab has been actively training Even before the Act 231 funding has come in line. They've been making sure that they've been training private pest control companies on little fire ant treatment. So that definitely can be a piece of the puzzle.

But I think the bigger story is Hawaii Ant Lab is a critical piece of not just little fire ant mitigation, but other invasive ants. And they are soft funded like the Island Invasive Species Committees. And we're really trying to find a way to institutionalize them, just give them that long term stable funding.

Because as you all mentioned, this is really a long term management issue and we really do have a chance of eradicating it in some areas and in other areas it's to be long term management and just minimizing the impact to our communities, agricultural producers and all that. So there definitely needs to be a bigger picture.

But you know, the 500,000 that we're looking for for little fire ant Hawaii Ant Lab would really help support that program, especially if we came General recurring funding for them.

And I think Chelsea is the, I mean, was Hawaii Ant Lab consulted in determining if there was an area where it made sense for state funds to pay for the treatment? For whatever reason, it would seem like Hawai'I Ant Lab would be the ones to ask if that kind of approach made sense.

Yes, there is a collective Department of Agriculture, Hawaii Ant Lab and the Island Invasive Species Committees that work together.

And I think Jonathan talked about it through the memorandum of understanding that we established back in April of 2024 that really has put together this forum where we are communicating on priority pests on a regular basis and developing responsibility county response plans for little fire ant, coconut, rhinoceros beetle and Koki frogs.

And so it really is a collective and it's not just Hawaii Ant Lab, but there's other agencies that are involved.

That didn't really answer my question about. This rfp, but I know they could contribute.

Apologies. Yeah, they could contribute to that data, definitely.

I'd like to add that the funding that we have given the Hoy Ant Lab has total about just over $3 million. And this is from the period from 2014-20 to 2021. After 2021, the COVID kind of like made everybody stay home and everything. But we have been working with Hawaiian Lab. Well, when they were in Hawaii island.

This is actually from the cargo fee as I recall. Yeah, so we've shared the funding from 2014, $3 million. So we have been collaborative funding each other. We're giving another try. We're trying something different.

Sounded like the best way to go out there with the equipment, the expertise, if you have an organic need or you have a child at home with an allergy. Terminix was the one that we thought would be the best to respond to those. But yeah, with $3.1 million during that period was awarded.

That means you acknowledge it's not a long term solution.

No, I'm saying this. I'm sorry, I'm sorry if I said that. What I'm saying is we have a solution. We're going to quantify it, we're going to prioritize LFA. Hopefully we'll get another 1.5 million and then we'll apply that with what we've learned with this contract and deploy another rfp.

By no way am I saying this is a short term effort. It's an emergency. It's a biosecurity emergency. Do you think it's the best use. Of these particular funds for this go around? For this go around? Well, as I said, we gave 3 million from 2014 to 2021. That was the best use of the funds then.

Thank you, Chair Hurd.

We're going to move on to the next section and be cognizant of the other departments who are waiting in the wings for to present to us. But if there are further questions, we will come back to you towards the end of the next set of session questions. Thank you.

Yeah. Mahalo chairs and Committee Members for the discussion. Next up we are going to have Department of Land and Natural Resources. We have the Deputy Director, Ryan Kanakaole. We also have the administrators for Division of Aquatic Resources, Brian Nielsen and Division of Forestry and Wildlife, Dave Smith to help with any questions.

And support, so let me just pull that up.

Aloha.

Good afternoon. Chairs, Vice chairs, Members of the committees. My name is Ryan Kanaka'ole. I'm the first deputy for the Department of Land and Natural Resources. And I see that my time is up. So mahalo. I'm gonna in the essence of time, I'm gonna be presenting on behalf of DLNR for both DOFAW and DAR.

I'm gonna be providing an overview of our efforts in ecosystem and native species protection within the context of biosecurity, particularly focusing on the initiatives led by DOFAW as well as DAR represented as mentioned by Chelsea. Representatives of DAR and DOFAW are here with me to answer any questions.

Questions as discussed previously, Borrow Security covers a spectrum of activities that can be generally broken down into three areas. That's pre border, border and post border activities we touch on depending on the modality, whether it's land or water, we touch on all three on the land.

DOFAW focuses predominantly on post border activities within the lands under its stewardship. That's over a million acres across Hawaii, which is roughly 25% of the state's land area. I tried to think about that on like what island is that size?

And you'd have to add Oahu and Maui together and you'd still be short like a couple 100,000 acres. It's a lot of land. In addition, DOFAW partners with landowners in its effort to facilitate landscape scale, cross jurisdictional resource management.

DLNR also has jurisdiction over all state marine waters extending from shoreline to 3 miles offshore, and that is approximately 3 million acres. DLNR manages these waters through various divisions. DAR specifically focuses on the conservation and management of both our marine resources and freshwater resources.

With respect to biosecurity, DAR takes on a holistic role addressing pre border, border and post border challenges, focusing on prevention and rapid response to new introductions to minimize invasive species impact to the environment as well as the economy. That's a high level. Now I'm going to delve a little bit deeper into each program. Pretty picture.

In our ongoing battle against invasive species and their impacts, DOFAW's efforts in watershed protection are paramount. Our native forests are not just natural treasures, are natural treasures, not national, natural. But they should be national treasures too. They are vital for water security, climate resilience and cultural heritage.

Protecting these forests is crucial for maintaining our freshwater sources, which benefits both our land as well as our marine environments. Relevant to today's discussion, watershed protection through fencing and ungulate removal under DOFAWS programs is a priority action item within the HISC biosecurity plan.

But also it's a cross cutting domain and it is a top priority action item in plans related to resilience against natural disaster, climate change adaptation, greenhouse gas sequestration, water security and coral reef health. This is a picture of our 30x30 watershed plan and our progress towards it.

The State of Hawaii has committed to protecting 30% of priority keyword priority watershed forest by 2030. That equates to 253 acres of our highest priority areas. Currently, 22% of these lands are safeguarded and our goal is to extend this protection significantly over the next decade.

To this end, we requested $5 million annually in CIP funding for both federal fiscal years 2026 and 2027 to continue our effort and keep pace with our 2030 commitment. This is the same level of funding as the current fiscal year.

This funding is critical for constructing fences to exclude invasive hooved animals as well as the initial phase of ungulate removal in these newly protected areas. The funds will help protect approximately 20,000 acres of priority watershed and add it to our progress. Fence locations are cited with these funds are cited statewide.

These CIP funds also provide the opportunity for matches to non state grants. Previous years funds for the watershed initiative has brought in over $80 million in non state leveraged funds since February fiscal year 2013. The CIP funds in our current request will also be used to amplify our work through these matching grant funds.

Looking back, we can see the impact of leverage funds and CIP funding from the Legislature. So back in 2011 there was only 10% of watersheds that were protected. Now today we have 22%. So we've doubled our protected forests.

So with our watershed partners, DOFAW's efforts not only protect the source of Hawaii's fresh water, but also combat the spread of invasive species and diseases like Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death, ROD. New research highlights the effectiveness of our fencing and removal strategies.

Areas protected by fencing, as you can see up there, shows 69 times less ROD mortality compared to unfenced regions. By creating barriers for ungulates to move throughout the forest system, we are able to effectively guard against the proliferation of Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death (ROD). That type of protection has a visible impact on our landscape.

So by allowing if ungulates are allowed to move freely within the forest, Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death is spread rapidly and results in the wipeout of entire forests. This is just the picture shown is just one decade of ROD progression in an unfenced area.

This is why our efforts are the cornerstone of our landscape level strategy to reduce this type of decimation. So skipping over to our wildfire prevention, response and restoration efforts that go hand in hand with our fencing projects.

DOFAW is also on the forefront of preventing and when it comes to it, battling wildfire that not only threaten our landscapes and our communities, but also compromise our biosecurity. Wildfires accelerate the spread of invasive fire prone vegetation and degrade our ecosystems even further and therefore again accelerate the spread of more invasive vegetation.

In Hawaii, fire prone vegetation like Guinea Grass, Fountain grass, Halequa that covers about a quarter of our landscape, creating fuel loads that significantly increase our fire risk and therefore allowing the cycle to continue. Fire prone species dominate the landscape, escalate fire risk and then hinder recovery of native ecosystems.

This session we are seeking 22 permanent positions for DOFAW that were actually approved by the Legislature last session. These positions are intended to augment our forest management capacity and also our fire and emergency response capacity. Because our foresters, they wear two hats. Yeah. By conducting.

So the work that will be done and the augmented capacity be will go towards conducting vegetation management, fuels mitigation work, restoration of areas damaged after the fires if there is a fire, as well as reversing ecosystem degradation through our ungulate fencing and removal initiatives as well as and assisting in emergency response.

Like I mentioned before, we're also seeking an increase to DOFAW's operational budget to go towards this type of work in expanding and managing resilient landscapes. Our Executive budget ask is currently $4 million in recurring funds. However our need is more than that. It's more of along the lines of 7.45 million.

These funds would go towards what we traditionally think in terms of firefighting, the response suppression side of things. But also it would go towards the other sides of the spectrum.

The pre fire work and prevention and pre suppression effort like outreach, education as well as the fields management component and then also the post firework in restoration and recovery, the reforestation, clearing invasives, protecting forests from ungulates.

So shifting over to the water side of things. Our DAR, Division of Aquatic Resources they're the lead agency in preventing and responding to aquatic invasive species introductions in Hawaii. This year has been. This past year has been one of the busiest years for rapid response for DAR. There's been numerous outbreaks of particularly invasive soft corals and anemones.

DAR continues to manage established invasive species through its long term monitoring and biocontrol. However, dar's work on prevention and rapid response to new introductions largely minimized environmental and economic impact of aquatic invasive species. Preventing new introduction is critical to our work. Ballast water and hull fouling are the leading cause of new aquatic species introductions in Hawaii.

However, through the through the Federal Vessel Incidental Discharge Act. Sorry, it's just a mouthful. That is expected to go into effect at the end of 2026.

It provides the State of Hawaii, our Division of Aquatic Resources, an opportunity to actually coenforce the new legislation with the US Coast Guard to supplement ballast water and hull falling inspections as a way of preventing new invasive species arrivals. However big, however, DAR currently lacks a team to perform these types of inspections.

This gap in capacity is particularly concerning for us because there is a growing continuing threat of Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease. SCTLD, another mouthful, which is a devastating coral disease currently present in the Caribbean, but has been responsible for 50% declines in coral cover in Florida, southeast Florida since 2015.

A boat traveling from these affected areas could easily introduce that disease to Hawaii. And we know now that Hawaiian corals are susceptible to that disease. Since 2020, DAR has responded to 20 reports of new introduced species in the state in state waters and has removed nine of those species with no new detections.

Of the 20 new species, 14 were likely aquarium trade introductions. This is a concerning new trend DAR is working to address. One example of species introduced to Hawaii by aquarium release is an invasive soft coral known as.

And this is not the coral, sorry on the picture, but there's a soft coral known as Pulse Coral or Eunomia that spread to 80 acres. 8 0, sorry pigeon, 80 acres of sea floor in Pearl Harbor.

While that invasion is outside of the state's jurisdiction and is in federal waters, DAR is monitoring for spread outside of those federal waters and encroachment into state waters. So the photo that we have on is an invasive anemone. So I can't pronounce this. Is it Majano? Majano in Kaneohe Bay.

So this was discovered in 2024 in Kaneohe Bay at a site that was associated with an other aquarium release. This anemone is high concern because it's been observed growing on native coral and it has the potential to smother the coral reef.

DAR has been working with its stakeholders to develop a strategy for the removal of this specific species and funding is needed for rapid intervention to prevent further spread. Now let's turn to a slightly, happy or success story? Slightly. The key to maintaining Low levels of invasive algae in our waters is the presence of native herbivores.

To that end, native Hawaiian collector urchins are spawned and raised in DAR's Nue Nui Fisheries Research Center. They are propagated as a tool to fight the invasive alien seaweeds. In most situations, the algae is removed by hand or by mechanical means from the trouble area. The trouble spots.

But without then reintroducing our native urchins, they will grow back. The algae will grow back. So after the seaweed algae is removed, the urchins are brought in for the maintenance work. And in 2024, DAR treated over 17.5 acres of invasive algae affected reef with urchins grown at our hatchery.

Increasing the capacity for our DAR aquatic invasive species team, especially in our leadership roles, will allow for the team to continue and improve upon the prevention and rapid response efforts.

So we have a Legislator introduced bill, Senate Bill 19 that would establish an aquatic biologist 5 position which would help oversee or will oversee the aquatic invasive species team within the division of Aquatic Resources to help prevent and respond to these emerging threats. Hey, I got them. The time is good to conclude our presentation.

On behalf of DLNR, I just wanted to extend my gratitude to all of you for sitting here listening to our presentation. And we're here to answer any questions.

Thank you, Members. We're going to take questions after two more presentations. The first one from Department of Health. Yes, mahalo.

Good afternoon. My name is Matthew Carano. I'm the division administrator for the Environmental Health Services Division and we're part of the environmental, Environmental Health Administration under the Department of Health. Thank you, Chair, both Chairs, Vice Chairs and Members of the Committee.

I look forward to being able to kind of just share a very brief kind of aspect of invasive species and why it's so important from a public health perspective, which is, I think, well known among the public health community.

But sometimes just, you know, it gets lost in over time that really in Hawaii we have a long history of diseases that were spread by invasive species. In fact, all of the diseases that are vector borne, vector borne diseases are spread by invasive species, particularly mosquitoes.

And I think Hawaii has a history of rats with, you know, spreading plague and through the ticks and the fleas of the rats, we have absolutely these diseases coming to our shores. Because Hawaii is a wonderful place.

And whether our residents go and visit other places and bring it home or visitors bring it to us, we have to be very concerned that these diseases that are spread through these invasive species are coming to us.

And if you have the disease coming to us, and if you have the invasive species that can spread it, then you create this very dangerous mixture that could create another outbreak.

So the Department of Health has a really strong interest in preventing the importation of further invasive species and we have a role in monitoring for the ones that we know are here. And then of course, when we do have a detection of vector borne disease, then it's obviously our job to go out there and contain it.

What is particularly of concern to us is of course the intersection of climate change into this as a threat multiplier. So this graphic that's on the screen is shared by our leadership and is based on a CDC framework of different aspects of the threats that climate change and how it impacts us.

And while they're in nice separate colors, I wish we could organize all of our problems so easily and check them off one by one, but they often overlap. But we do have a section that's recognized about the spread of vector borne diseases and those are spread by mosquitoes in particular in Hawaii.

That's what we have to be concerned about as a primary risk factor.

But I am sure that nobody here wants the risks of Lyme disease, spread by deer ticks and other types of diseases that are very common in other parts of the world and increasing on the continental United States particularly again because of the stressors of climate change to come to Hawaii.

So I just want to talk a little bit about climate change and how it impacts us and how we have to think a little bit differently. There are direct impacts of climate change, meaning more extreme weather events and during extreme weather events.

And actually as soon as extreme weather events pass, that's when we see opportunities for the proliferation of invasive species which can lose containment. And whether that's mosquitoes that spread disease or you know, whether that's the extreme events that are just more frequent.

So while we are effective most of the time, as a virtue of just by the numbers, we are not effective sometimes because just too many, right? Nobody bats a thousand. We get really concerned about this increase in frequency.

So then things like early detection, more sophisticated methodologies, more aggressive outreach and community involvements are becoming ultimately even more important. But biosecurity in and of itself is incredibly important because if the diseases are coming to us, because people are moving around, if the vector isn't there, then our risks are really Low.

If it can't bite you, it can't spread it, right? So biosecurity is very important.

And I think some of this, you know, highlights that all of our different departments, while we have different missions, this is very cross cutting this invasive species and why it's so important for us all to be at the table and how our partners, well funded and open dialogue between all of us to leverage each person's actually Core mission to create that network or that net to prevent and respond to, sadly.

Right. It's not just, I would love to say we can always prevent, but to respond to when we get these incursions. The last kind of part, because I really do want to be respectful of my five minutes that was pointed out. I see Chelsea's eyes looking at me. It's just highlighting. We're not.

We're not asking for very much from a Department of Health, from Invasive Species ask this year. In fact, our vector program is asking for a single position, really, to increase outreach and potentially enforcement.

But I want to say what we're doing kind of with the existing resources, because the vector program, over the years, through the generosity and wisdom of the Legislature, has brought this program back. And now it's time to really start getting smart.

Some of the questions are like, do you know what you have where so that you can best address it? And what I mean by what, where is the bad things? So do we know where our Aedes Aegypti, the, the biggest culprit of the spread of dengue fever is?

And some of those questions we haven't revisited for a while because we didn't have staff and didn't have planning. So we are absolutely doing that, you know, and I think the development of new public outreach materials, I think that is so critical.

I think there was a history, you know, in times long past that the public wasn't necessarily a partner. They were more, you know, someone we served.

But I think now we absolutely understand, especially with how both pervasive and how fast information can spread, that they have to be a huge partner every step of the way before the crisis, really. And so we want to really start bringing that to light. And it's a very cool story, frankly.

When we go to schools and talk to kids, bugs are neat. And then, you know, everyone's very conscious of the spread of disease. Bugs are neat. Bugs are neat. So it takes all kinds. So I think. In summary.

In summary, while the department's role is a little more narrow when it comes to human health, we have a very strong desire to be part of the team and to really support and to impress upon everyone the importance of preventing invasive species. Hawaii is paradise.

The things that are invasive to us are the things that damage the economy, our way of life. And the bigger idea of what health and wellness and happiness is. It's not just getting sick, but it's being healthy. Hawaii is healthy for its people, too, and invasive species are a significant threat to that.

And climate change is absolutely a threat multiplier, and we want to be cognizant of that. And I want to just kind of share that. Those are some of our stories of what we have to be concerned about going forward, but also things that we're thinking about with what we have today. So thank you.

I'm here for any questions.

Thank you. Moving on to our final set of presentations, we have the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture. And I'm going to say this wrong now, Human resilience. And then we have the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle Response Team.

Thank you for having us here today. Thank you chairs and vice chairs and members of the committee. We appreciate this opportunity to share with what CTAHR does in this particular area. This is a very, very important aspect for CTAHR to work on. CTAHR's work spans from early detection all the way to developing effective long term control methods.

One particular department where we have number of experts is this particular department which is Plant and Environment Protection Sciences. Currently the three most important pests that we all talk about, we are working on two of them. Unfortunately, we have no expertise right now on Koki frog. After Dr. Arnold Hara retired, we do not have anybody on that yet. But on rhinoceros beetle, we have a substantial program and that you will hear a little bit more from Mike here.

But we look at chemical controls, we develop biocontrols; we also develop methods of treating these pests, because some of these pests could be up there in the trees, and the new methods of application of these biocontrols or pesticides are needed. And a small project that Mike probably will share that they are developing on the fire ants.

To me, prevention is better than cure, as they say in the health field. But prevention is also highly cost effective, if we look at it. I will present a little bit of a data later on that.

But our researchers are able to travel to places where there are these highly important, significant pests of crops that are important to us. So, they go over there and develop new methods of detection so that we can do early detection, so that we can alert everybody that those pests could be eliminated.

And that is a significant piece of work, and at least two researchers are focusing on that particular piece. We also have significant funding that is actually run that project we call CAPS project, which is nationally funded project that focuses on early detection. These are surveys that are conducted each year.

There is a focus on a particular pest because the way the survey is done, the traps and all of those are pest specific. Therefore, it has to be altered, the approach has to be altered. And that is being done on an annual basis. Early detection does help a lot.

Currently, Hawaii and Arizona are free from this very, very deadly disease of citrus called citrus greening. And this particular disease can really have wrecked the entire industry. And this is what it has done to Florida because this disease is so, so deadly. So early detection is the best way to go on that.

Recently CTAHR has developed an internal small research grants competition. And within that, one group of faculty propose this particular project focused on training middle school and high school students to detect new pests, new plants, new pathogens, new invasive species of sorts.

And this is what the project they are developing so that we have a future workforce and create interest in these kinds of things. But you never know where a, a child and a parent might be detecting a new pest as soon as possible, where we might not be present.

So that I thought was very exciting project the faculty came up with. So we funded that internally. This is what I mean by the cost of prevention versus the cost of management later. This is very telling.

Nationally these data have been compiled that if we focus more on prevention, early detection, and then secondly, I will focus on eradication. You had asked number of questions early on about the eradication process. And we definitely need a great strategy that we can nip the evil in the bud. So rapid response, calling can help with that.

It does help through our IR4 program where as soon as a pest is detected, we know that it is here. Now we need to have bio controls or pesticides registered for that.

If they are not here yet, we need to demonstrate that they can work and they are safe in terms of the material that would be eatable, edible, and so on. So that program really helps in providing the tools very, very early. And thereafter, we also work on long term management.

That is the research that needs to go into developing methods of control that could include new pesticides, new biocontrols. It could also include biocontrols that are traditional biocontrols, long term control methods. You know, multiple examples of long-term pest management. But one thing that we do need here is, you know, proper biocontrol facilities.

One facility wouldn't do it because we need facilities on say different islands. We also need small scale facilities that could be moved around, that could simultaneously. We could work on multiple problems. So, it is very important, and we also need a coordinated approach among all our entities to do this kind of work.

And again, I would emphasize the research is what CTAHR would be. The lane of CTAHR would be the research piece going back to education. Our researchers, our faculty got a $7 million grant two years ago, again through a national competition, and that is to train next generation biosecurity professionals.

This one includes students from high school to graduate level. So, the projects vary from identification methods, molecular tools to identify pests, pathogens, but also what type of control methods are used and developed. And lastly, we also provide coordination role in terms of learning, holding conferences. One of our extension agents, working with other agencies, developed invasive pest conferences.

After the pandemic, they kind of went back to more of a zoom approach. And now they gather multiple times together at the college level. I have also pulled all our faculty together to develop a think tank on invasive species because, early on, I got alerted here that this is a major, major issue for Hawaii.

So, I asked all our faculty to think about what more we can do here. How can we bring our internal resources to impact this particular issue. So that group, first it was internal conversation, then quickly moved into this particular coordination type of role with everyone else. And Chelsea has been part of that group as well.

So that said, our next portion would be on CRB and I'm happy to answer any questions about maybe afterwards. Okay, maybe.

Good afternoon, chairs and committee members. My name is Michael Melzer. I'm a researcher at the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. And my program is an agricultural biosecurity program. One of the projects that's within that program is the coconut rhinoceros' fetal response.

And so, Chelsea asked me to give a bit of an update on that and where we are with coconut rhinoceros beetle. This program started in 2014. The beetle was discovered in 2013, but basically a multi-agency program was established soon after the discovery. It was actually discovered through one of those cooperative agricultural pest surveys by a predecessor.

But this is a multi-agency program that is now currently housed at CTHAR. Our funding is primarily federal, as you can see. USDA is responsible for the lion's share, and they also provide guidance and guardrails as to what we can do with their funds. These are emergency funds and they're typically for eradication.

And so, there are some, again some guardrails that we work with across functional working group as to decide how those funds get spent. But we also are supported, especially initially from HISC. They had some crucial finding early on and we have some Department of Defense funding specifically for military properties. So, the current status: Oahu is dire.

It is basically island wide now. We're obviously, we know there's some areas that have tremendous damage where we're getting dramatic losses in trees or coconut palms. We're going to start seeing it in the urban areas soon. We are starting to catch urban areas have been largely unaffected, particularly in Honolulu and East Oahu.

But we're starting to see that now or should say East Honolulu. But unfortunately, I think we're going to start seeing much more damage there. Eradication has been unfeasible on Oahu for about the last three years.

And part of our guide, our guardrails was we had to pull back from activities on Oahu because eradication was no longer an option. So, our activities on Oahu remain trapping. We still, we have a shadow of what we used to have for trapping, but most of our work is going through treatments at ports of exit.

So, we have a tier system. Most of our work is being done at the airport, Honolulu Harbor, and up at Wheeler as well. Basically, airfields and seaports is where we're doing most of our work. So, we've been bouncing between Wheeler Air Force Base, Honolulu Airport, and the Foreign Trade Zone recently.

Fortunately, we did receive funding from DLNR and that's going to allow us to, well, that is allowing us to do things that we can't do with our federal funding. And so that includes some of our other island work as well as some work on Oahu that we currently cannot use our federal funds for.

Unfortunately, Kauai is also a not too far behind Oahu, but it's following the same trend. CRB is basically widespread at this point and most estimates are is that eradication is not feasible. And I say that with our current tools, we don't have the tools for eradication at this point.

Our program is basically limited to the harbor and so we don't really do a lot of work there because that's not where the problem is at the harbor and airport in Lihue. We have done some work with the LNR funds, aerial applications, and other folks and we're working on different, with different property over on Kauai with some of those deal in our funds. We heard about Maui, so we don't need to get into that. That's the lone good news I'd say we have. Well, one of the good news at this point where we haven't had a detection since. And again, on these other: on our other islands we're basically relying on other agencies. So that's HDOA, the ISSCS and other partners, including private landowners as well. So, we have been over. We are allowed to do education on other islands. We're just not allowed to do treatments with our federal funds as of yet. But that's I think soon going to change.

Big island: we still have a nascent population in Waikoloa. Every once in a while, we'll find a beetle over there. We have a bunch of camera traps set up there. Plus, we have a pretty good network of traps serviced by our partner agencies over there. And so, we are using our DLNR funds.

We're actually sending people over next week to work with Hawaii Department of Agriculture for treatments in Waikoloa. And so, we have a good chance at eradication, I think, in Waikoloa. The other good news, Molokai and Lanai. We have no CRB detections at this time. There's a robust trapping system over there.

We've helped set some of up, we've up with education, but we're largely relying on Maui County and private landowners to do the work over there. And yeah. Where we're going with research, we're basically our lab is working on - so, USDA is allowing us to do so.

Their funds are basically response operational fund, but they are allowing us to do some applied research. So, we are continuing with catalyst chemical and cultural control methods: importantly chemical. We had the question about not being able to consume coconuts that are treated with imidacloprid.

We also use acephate in our injections as well as well as a fungicide as part of our injection regime. But we are exploring some similar chemicals that are labeled for coconut that could be used for coconut in production. We're just testing the efficacy.

We're starting once we basically realized a few years ago that eradication is not the issue. Biocontrol is probably our best chance at diminishing the damage caused by this beetle. We're currently retrofitting some laboratory space in our buildings so that it can serve as makeshift. Hopefully it'll get proper containment permitting from both the state and federal partners.

And so that is basically ongoing at this point as we await permits. The good news is that the U.S. Forest Service: I think we have a good chance at getting funding to bring these agents in the foreign exploration to bring in some of these biocontrol agents for our program.

But one thing that's important is what USDA really wants to do. CRB is not a Hawaii problem. It is a Pacific problem. There are islands in much worse situation than us. These are islands that depend on coconut for the economy.

I look at the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Marshall Islands, Majuro, where CRB first arrived about a year and a bit ago. Their economy is based on coconut. So, they're in a much more dire situation than us. And a lot of them are looking to Hawaii to be the Center for Research and Management.

And so, we're hoping to provide that. You know, we've been told we need to start diversifying our funding from USDA, start looking at national grants, international grants, because this is becoming a major issue throughout the Pacific. Food security is and economic security is paramount. And that's all I have.

Okay. Any questions? Senator Rhoads?

I'm not really sure. Who I ne- is this this group or just any group?

So, I'm not really sure who to ask the question of, but there's a number of areas that we're involved in, of course, as a state where we're trying to keep stuff out, illegal drugs, fireworks, all the biosecurity stuff that we've talked about today.

To what extent is it feasible and or do you already do cooperation with the other agencies that are trying to stop other things from coming in?

We, I can speak from the college perspective because we are not at the front end, but we provide methodology, detection methods and workforce, for that matter, trained people who could be participating in that. So that's what I would say from the prevention side.

Are there others who can speak to this?

Jonathan, possibly, Ho: Department of Agriculture.

Mic, please, John.

Yes, Jonathan Ho, Plant Quarantine Branch Manager. So, plant quarantine does have the ability to do administrative inspections for specific classes of goods. So basically plants, plant parts in the raw natural state, so cut flowers, fresh fruit and vegetables, dry forage, non-domestic animals, known cultures of microorganisms and soil.

So those things coming into the state are subject to inspection prior to release. So, during the course of the administrative inspections, other contraband can and has been found and basically, we refer those goods to the proper authorities

And the other way around, if-

Yes, so one of the good things is so the department does a lot of work with other regulatory agencies. So, we work with USDA, we work with Customs and Border Protection, Department of Health in limited circumstances, the pesticides branch. Regulatory work for everyone is a challenge because not everyone is everywhere.

And when we hear about issues or know about issues and we have the ability to work with another agency to address them, we will. So, for example, we were recently working actually the department's pesticide branch, one of the inspectors was out doing an inspection. He got a referral about somebody smuggling in dragon fruit into the state.

He referred it to us that regulation is actually a federal one. We referred it to the feds and then we've been working with them to basically close this pathway for the smuggling of dragon fruit into the state.

It's not - it's not a state function, but it's one of those things where everybody's kind of everywhere and if you know who to talk to, you have the ability to kind of like try to nip it in the bud because there's just so much movement of goods.

All right, thanks, chairs.

Members, House Representative Perruso.

Quick question for CTAR on the CRB response.

So, I noticed of course like your reliance on federal funding and I'm wondering if that is a result of the federal research grants that you sought or if that's different federal funding and then follow up or you know I would also be wondering how you feel about the continuity of that funding in under a new administration.

Okay. Yes. So, to go back to the first funding. Well maybe I'll answer the second one; first is, well, these are one year. So, it's through - these are not research grants. These are emergency response cooperative agreements. I should say.

So, we do, we do not have research grants with the federal government on coconut rhinoceros' beetles because you know coconut is not a nationally important. You know I would say, you know I think you know we're never going to get an IFA grant to work on coconut rhinoceros beetle chemical control or biocontrol.

So, our funding comes from the Plant Protection Act which is sort of now distanced from the Farm Bill. This is one year funding that we basically have to apply for every year. Our current funding is under review right now that will continue this program past August 31st of this year.

And we had our cross functional working group this call this week and there's maybe a bit of concern about. So, our funds come from the executive director as emergency response funds and there might be concern not getting those out before the change in administration. So, we do not have solid Fund.

We don't know what's happening next year I guess sort of thing and sorry, is that everything or was there anything else?

I'm going to ask you a follow up because it tacks on before we move back to the Senate. Can you share a little bit about what your state funding has looked like in the last several years?

I don't know if there's an average number. And then how when you talked about the opportunity to get more national funding or expand, how would a potential - how would state funds be looked at to help you leverage more national dollars?

That's a fantastic question. So, our state funds. So HISC was fantastic right at the beginning; we received because our federal funds in 2014, you know basically they just had what was left in the bottom of their wallet to give us.

Because it was at the end of the fiscal year, HISC stepped up and really got the response going before we could start getting these larger Plant Protection Act funds or formerly Farm Bill, in terms of having a state match then we can start competing with. We can start applying for research funding.

So most recently, well, basically after the HISC funding we were well supported by federal dollars, so we never asked for state funding. That changed when our cross functional working group decided we had to pull back on what we could do on Oahu and just work in certain areas.

And so last year DLNR supported us with about $250,000 to do some of these activities that we couldn't do with our federal funds. But the importance of state funds are there because, for example, that forest service grant that we applied for the biocontrol had - it basically needed a match, a cost fund match.

Fortunately, they think they gave us a waiver. They felt bad and realized this is an important project, so they waived that. But that's not always the case. So having matching state funds is critical for pursuing some of those federal funds. So, thank you for the question.

Thank you. And the-

Thank you, chair. Couple of quick, quick questions here. Dean, you spoke about facilities needing for the investigation. Specifically, you said one on each island. How big a facility and what kind of number are you talking about from a cost standpoint?

There is actually a project right now, a study that is being conducted to look at where the facilities would be best served and how much they will cost. We are talking about because these are facilities that are protected, called BSL2. Mostly we might not need a BL3 for most of the work. And those tend to be costly.

They could run into one million dollars for just a smaller small facility.

So total are we looking four or five million dollars for small-

For a small scale. But for larger scale they could run into 20 million. And so, because some of the places, like Kansas State, have, you know, high end national level biosecurity facilities. Those are 20 to 35 million dollars. That's how they set it up.

Okay, thank you. And then coming back to the CRB funding, you talked about looking at your numbers. 16, probably around total, 16 million from the feds. A couple million dollars more. So, looks like about $17 million from the feds or 75% from the feds.

What I don't understand is when you couldn't go after eradication, you had to fall back and not expend the money, and why did it have to be kept on Oahu?

Oh, sorry. Perhaps I apologize if I didn't explain myself. Well. So that's funding from Project Inception and I would say it's probably closer to 90% is federal from USD- or Department of Defense. Basically, these are eradication funds.

Basically this Is the funding dedicated to trying to eradicate something and once they decide they just didn't want this to turn into a money pit in terms of, yeah, we could spend a lot of money treating, you know, or doing whatever activities we're doing and it's not going to move the bar enough and they'd rather see those funds go for someone somewhere else.

So basically, we had our funding got reduced and we had to scale back activities largely on Oahu. And basically, at this point, we are trying to prevent spread to other islands through hitchhiking and basically keeping the airports and seaports as free of CRB as possible to reduce the possibility of hitchhiking.

And then the use of the imidacloprid, that is a - is that an investigation use or is that an approved use?

That's an approved use for ornamentals only at this point.

All right, thank you, chair.

Representative Marten.

Aloha. I have some questions for Dr. Meltzer. Thank you for being here. So, I'm very interested in - I appreciate the work that the federal government has been funding, but I'm interested in what the state could do to help us manage our problem here on Oahu with CRB until such a time that there is a better biocontrol.

And I understand that you folks have, on a very small scale, been doing training for tree trimmers.

And I wanted, we have a bill, and I wanted you to share with us a little bit about the possibilities there of getting people to appropriately treat, you know, biding our time, how you folks might be able to help with that. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, no, thank you very much for the question. Yeah. So, our, let me - where do I want to start with this one? I guess. Yes, I think there's an opportunity. Well, first of all, in terms of training, in the last year, I think we've had 276 landscaping, arborist and so forth, training trainees come through our program.

So, what we're trying to do is our 10 or 12 staff basically can't do everything. And what we need is the people who are up in the trees every day. We don't have lift trucks. We don't have things where we can do work up in the canopy.

But the landscapers and arborists are the people who are up there. We would love to see basically when after doing a trim, do a treatment and we'll, we have a pretty good idea of what's going to work in those canopies and different ways for application.

And I could see that for ornamentals that would be a landscape scale way of approaching CRB management and basically just suppressing populations until we do get the longer-term better tools. And we have seen where those treatments have taken place.

I wouldn't call them the nicest looking palms in the world, but they're still alive compared to the ones that I drive by them every day going up to North Shore and I can spot the ones that we did some of those treatments and are still alive, whereas the ones that weren't treated are no longer allowed.

We would love to see basically tree trimming contracts. Be part of the contract with those arborist or tree trimming companies is after you do the trimming, you do a treatment and, and you know, for a very few dollars you could probably get that done.

And we have had expressed interest from some of the leaders in the landscaping industry. We've discussed that with some of our partners. Part of the issue is more bureaucratic because some of these contracts, they don't expire for a little while. So, they don't know how to renew these contracts.

We're having discussions with other large property owners about doing that as well. We've been approached by several property owners to do treatments, but our suggestion is typically it'll be much more cost effective if the people who are trimming your trees are also doing a treatment once they're done. And we could really suppress some population.

We could suppress the population quite well with that approach.

Very brief follow up? So, for I understand that you're focused on larger trees, there are also some - I have a project, we have younger palm trees that we can reach without that kind of equipment.

And we had talked about the possibility of helping with materials with the supplies for those that want to treat it themselves, whether they're on a farm or nursery or private landowners. And what is the cost for just the materials? Assuming that people are using their own labor?

Probably under $5 a palm, I would; think probably significantly less. Some chemicals are just inherently more expensive than others depending on what formulation you have. But there is a range. But yeah, you could probably do fairly good treatments. Probably about 4,5,6 dollars per tree, depending on chemistry.

But then you multiply that maybe about three applications a year to protect. So, it's relatively low expense. The expense in most cases is getting it up in the canopy.

Thank you very much. Thank you chair.

You're welcome. Anyone else from the Senate?

Another cooperation question: so, I think I forget which one you said that coconut rhinoceros beetle is now a Pacific problem and the Marshall Islands, for example, are in hurting badly. Do they have - do you cooperate with their authorities too? Do they have somebody in Honolulu looking at stuff, looking at cargo on flights before it goes?

I don't know how, I don't know how it, you know what the vector is. But do they have somebody here or is California worried about coconut rhinoceros beetles and do they have somebody here? Is there cooperation that way too?

Thank you. Thank you for the question. I think I can answer that in terms of the Pacific. So, first of all, I hope I didn't overstate; in Republic of Marshall Islands, it is not dire yet because it's only been a year, but it's going to be dire over there.

They're 10 years behind us, so everything still looks okay there. But since a third of their canopy is palm trees, it's going to be dire. In terms of that, yes

As soon as we found out we were alerted, and we sent including myself down a down to basically advise their government on an approach and basically wrote up a response plan for them so they could apply for funding. For the continental U.S., I suspect that's a major reason why we're continuing to get funding at this point.

The date palm industry would be very nervous about this in California; however, this beetle has been tentatively identified in Mexico, I think Veracruz perhaps. So somehow it got over there. So now they're going to be looking at it on two fronts at this point. Basically, from us as well as coming up from the southern border.

And back to your other question. There was concern about whether the beetles, because we do have a direct flight from Honolulu to Majuro, there was concern that the beetle came from Oahu, but genetic tests suggest that it did not.

I'm not going to name the island that they think it came from, but fortunately it didn't start with an O.

Tagged on to that. How about Samoa and American Samoa?

American Samoa is...we visited there in 2018. I believe they're under biocontrol. So, it's a problem, but it's not a major problem. They had a virus released decades ago and it's keeping the beetle under control. You'll see damage, but it's nothing like what you see elsewhere where the virus is not present.

Samoa: I think they're in a bit more trouble. But I've never personally, I've never left the airport, so I haven't seen what's happening elsewhere. But my understanding in speaking with colleagues there is it's maybe becoming a worsening problem. But it's still not dire yet.

Thank you.

Vice Chair Kusch.

Thank you, chair. I had a couple questions. You had talked about CRB tools that were needed and you just mentioned in, I think it was Samoa that, they have some bio controls and were those tools needed biocontrols? And can you just elaborate on that and what's - where are we at in Hawaii on that progress?

Yes. Yeah, thank you for the question. Yes. You know, I see pesticides as a short-term solution before we can get a long-term solution. And biocontrol is, it's proven itself to be effective against CRB elsewhere in the Pacific. It's just a bit more troublesome in Hawaii.

First of all, you know we have very good regulations to protect just bring bringing in most other Pacific islands. Basically, people just show up with the beetle, release it and that's all there is to it.

We have to be much more judicious probably just also because we have native insects that could also be potentially affected by bio controls. So that's one of our first things that we're starting right now is rearing our native stag beetle from Kauai.

We want to make sure that this, any biocontrol agent that we bring in is not going to impact that insector or have minimal impact. But yeah, I would say at this point we need to either have landscape level approaches, as Representative Martin mentioned, where we have larger scale treatments, and we have shown that in the past.

We did do large scale treatments at Iroquois Point several years ago and for several years those look - palms actually look quite nice. So that is one way to address the situation. But honestly that just is the stopgap until we get biocontrol, I believe.

Do you have any? I'm sorry, chair. Follow up: do you have any timelines? I remember with the Wiliwili gall wasp, where the native Wiliwili trees and I think it's Erythrina or something to that effect, species were all impacted pretty heavily, and they fast tracked another kind of wasp and it was pretty miraculous. The turnaround time.

Do you have a timeline with CRB for any kind of biocontrol?

So, we would for, CRB biocontrol, obviously there's the potential arthropod aspect in bringing an insect in. Although I don't think any are well identified as a good biocontrol agent for coconut rhinoceros beetle. I'd probably be approaching it from the pathogen world. So, our first instinct is to bring in the virus that's been used elsewhere.

There's a group in New Zealand that is working on this. And we met with them in Solomon Islands last summer where they have had successful releases against beetles that are genetically similar to the ones we have in Hawaii.

So, there is a potential that this; there are some virus isolates that will be helpful against the ones in Hawaii. So, we want, that's the approach. And I'm a virologist, so that's clear to, you know, that's my preference as well. And I'm more comfortable working with subcellular biocontrol agents. But yeah, so that.

And part of our foreign exploration will be there's probably more than one virus or pathogen affects this in the native range. And since most foreign exploration has been, you know, insect or arthropod focused, looking at it from a pathogen side might be helpful as well.

And so that would be my component of this foreign exploration is to: are there additional viruses? Because it could be not just one virus but maybe two of them that might really suppress this population.

Okay, any ballpark on top of-

Sorry, timeline. I think this will sort of be a, this is somewhat, if I'm not mistaken, new territory for the state for pathogen biocontrol. It's not a common approach, I believe, especially viral biocontrol.

Our first step, we're just taking it step at a time and we're just waiting for our permits right now from the state and federal authorities to basically inspect, make sure we have proper containment where we propose to do the work.

But ultimately, we could be on a plane probably this summer to collect and start doing our host range tests later this year. It's not up to us to decide. That would be a regulatory authority to decide whether something is suitable for release. But at least we can do the background research.

So best case, worst case.

How about best case in three years? Worst case eight years. But this is sort of uncharted territory for me.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Probably the people behind me could answer that better.

Thank you, I appreciate it. Got a question for Ryan from DLNR. Ryan, in your briefing you mentioned the stony coral tissue loss disease and the possibility of it infecting Hawaiian corals. And so, I just wanted to get an idea.

What are the potential pathways for that disease to get to Hawaiian and what's the department going to do about it?

I'm going to ask Lizzy to come here, but short answer via ship.

Hi, good afternoon. Lizzy Monahan. I'm a biologist with the DAR Aquatic Invasive Species team. So yeah, we mentioned about stony coral tissue loss disease in the briefing, and this is a disease that's been shown to travel in the ballast water of vessels, and it also can travel via hole fouling.

And it's been shown recently that widely used methods of sterilization of ballast water are ineffective against the disease. In short, the number one way that stony coral tissue loss disease could come to Hawaii is via a vessel traveling between Hawaii and an affected area.

There was a new report of stony coral tissue loss disease quite close to the Panama Canal in 2024, so that increases the chances that a vessel might travel through the Panama Canal to Hawaii and spread the disease.

Okay, and what are you guys doing to address the.

Yeah. So, we've been working closely with the EPA and the US Coast Guard to raise and address this issue under the 2018 Vessel Incidental Discharge Act, as finalizations are made to this rule and enforcement guidelines are developed.

So, with robust ballast water and other vessel discharge rules, some of the threat of this disease traveling to Hawaii could be mitigated. We're also working at a national level on this issue with the U.S. Corps Weave Task Force to develop a plan and also receive training for if this disease does arrive in Hawaii.

We've also been increasing our outreach to ocean users to train them on recognizing coral disease, to try to build a network of early detection. And then we also recently hired a contract position through our REPI Challenge funding, and this position will act as a coordinator for coral disease outbreaks.

Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

We do want to make sure we let commit the committees know that we're opening up to all presenters now before we close our info briefing. So, house members, any questions?

Over here?

Vice Chair Kusch.

I just want to not pepper you with questions, but I just want to say that DLNR has done a great job in upscaling their efforts, especially on the terrestrial end. DOFAW, and we can see the results. I mean, it's a mountain that you're chipping away at.

But I just want to just say thank you for your efforts on the ground.