HILO — Now that a grant-funded county program to combat little fire ants has wrapped, Hawaii County invasive species specialists and legislative representatives once again are hoping to secure state funding to address the issue.
HILO — Now that a grant-funded county program to combat little fire ants has wrapped, Hawaii County invasive species specialists and legislative representatives once again are hoping to secure state funding to address the issue.
The county program ended Friday. The program provided voucher coupons for the cost of one year’s worth of ant treatment to residents who completed a training session for how to apply the pesticide. Glenn Sako, Hawaii County Research and Development specialist, said 1,600 vouchers were given out.
Sako has been busy the past week fulfilling vendor reimbursement requests.
“We had a last-minute surge in the vouchers, as expected,” he said.
The department also is collecting responses from a survey to determine the impact of the program, which began in November.
“We’ve had very good comments from the majority of people,” Sako said. “A lot of them would like to see it continue or happen again, but this being a grant, we don’t know what will happen.”
The $96,584 grant came from the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, a joint effort of the state departments of Land and Natural Resources, Agriculture, Health, Transportation, Business, Economic Development and Tourism, and the University of Hawaii.
Training sessions were provided by the Hawaii Ant Lab and the Big Island Invasive Species Committee. The Ant Lab offers monthly trainings, all of which were at capacity during the voucher program.
More than 700 people attended the BIISC sessions since November. BIISC also works with 23 neighborhood groups around the island.
“From our perspective, we were run a little ragged because we had so much demand,” said BIISC communications specialist Franny Kinslow Brewer. “A lot of people got those vouchers in their hands.”
That demand was something BIISC conveyed to Hawaii’s state representatives.
“I definitely feel like there’s continued interest and the people really want to try this,” Kinslow Brewer said.
For the third consecutive year, Rep. Richard Onishi, D-Hilo, Keaau, Kurtistown, Volcano, introduced a bill to the Legislature that would create a similar voucher program within the state Department of Agriculture. House Bill 481 crossed over to the Senate but has yet to be scheduled for its final hearing.
“The deadline’s next week, so we’re hopeful that it’ll come up,” Onishi said.
He said he also would be in favor of updating the bill so the DOA could “piggyback” on the success of the county program rather than implementing its own separate vouchers.
“I would support expanding the county’s program, but I would like to see some additional funding go toward helping with administrative costs,” Onishi said. “The processing of reimbursements, review and consolidation of the surveys.”
There are infestations of little fire ants, considered to be among the worst invasive species in the world, on Oahu, Maui and Kauai, but nothing of the same extent as those on Hawaii Island. The ants were first noted here in 1999.
“People don’t have the same experience or the same concern with regards to the problem,” Onishi said. “It’s troubling in the fact that when these problems surface not enough attention is put to them, so they begin to proliferate within an island, and then it moves from one island to the next.
“On Maui, they have it in places where there’s a lot of water, and we don’t have an effective treatment near waterways,” he said. “So it’s limited in terms of what can be done, and we know that the ants can travel in the water.”
Grant funding, as opposed to budget line items, makes up the bulk of resources for little fire ant research, management and outreach.
“Right now we rely on soft funds,” said Hawaii Ant Lab research specialist Michelle Montogomery. “So every year we have to go and play the funding game and make sure we have enough funding to keep all of our employees.”
The Ant Lab receives most of its current funding from HISC, the same source as the county voucher grant. Other grantors include the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service. Hawaii County also provides funding.
A bill to appropriate funding for the Ant Lab, House Bill 1006, passed its final hearing Thursday. If it clears conferencing, the next step in the legislative process, it would provide “some kind of security as far as stable funding,” Montgomery said.
This year, the lab plans to focus its work more on research, particularly in finding new pesticide options for people to use.
“That has to do with working with the companies manufacturing the products and getting special labeling for use in Hawaii,” Montgomery said. “That’s our primary goal. We’re going to try to work with more organic products.”
Kinslow Brewer said BIISC had started returning to many of its neighborhoods that it first started working with six months ago, before the voucher program began.
“(We’re) consistently hearing people saying they had significant reductions in ants,” she said. In some places, the ants have been eliminated entirely thanks to regular treatments.
“We have a lot of people who still have ants,” Kinslow Brewer said. “But they’re saying (the ants) aren’t coming in the house anymore, they can go in the garden again, they can be in their yards. We’re pretty encouraged by that.”
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.