In Hawaii, land is power — and unless gatekeepers remain vigilant to ensure equity in the public interest, Hawaii’s precious land and natural resources are fated to fall into the hands of the well connected.
It’s happened at the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) and at the state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR).
At both of these acreage-rich agencies, the “temporary” revocable permit has been chronically misused. These are, ostensibly, short-term permits to use public lands or resources. Instead, some of these leases have stretched into years — even decades — with little question, oversight or bidding competition and with stagnant low rents. This all has shortchanged the taxpayer.
That’s why the Board of Land and Natural Resources’ recent, unanimous approval of sweeping changes to its revocable permit (RP) process is welcome, and bodes well for a more orderly, open process with oversight to reduce favoritism.
“There’s a lot of irregular things going on with revocable permits, and I think this would straighten a lot of them out,” said board member Thomas Oi, a former state land agent on Kauai. He’s spot on.
DLNR has more than 300 revocable permits out, generating roughly $2 million in yearly rent.
In January, needed light was cast on the department’s lax RP process when a judge invalidated revocable permits that had allowed Alexander &Baldwin Inc.
to divert, for more than a decade, millions of gallons of water daily from Maui streams for its sugar operations.
Each year, from 2001 to 2014, the one-year permits had been extended without any official environmental review.
“A&B’s continuously uninterrupted use of these public lands on a holdover basis for the last 13 years is not temporary,” wrote Circuit Judge Rhonda Nishimura in her order.
But in a shrewd move, A&B then persuaded legislators to pass a controversial new law allowing it, and other water permit holders, up to three more years of stream diversion while state permit challenges are resolved.
In signing that law last week, Gov. David Ige acknowledged that the “current process of providing leases for water and revocable permits for water does not work.” It now falls to the state BLNR to work swiftly to rectify the process.
Detailed weaknesses of that process also were revealed in a February Star-Advertiser series, which found some permits lasting for decades, in some cases with large landowners or for-profit companies enjoying discounted rents unchanged since the 1990s.
Clearly, it’s well past time for BLNR to overhaul its RP policy for the public good, not for favored beneficiaries. Its land-division permits — the vast majority overseen by the board — now will undergo review and renewal in smaller batches, grouped by county, at four separate meetings to enable closer evaluation. The old process entailed bulk-review of permits in December — in essence, an unacceptable rubber stamping.
The BLNR’s move to reform its problematic revocable permit process harkens to similar problems at DHHL, which in December 2014 pledged to improve its RP process.
DHHL said then that changes would include developing a permit system based on competitive bids rather than “first-come, first-serve,” as had been used for decades.
Also targeted: The department was to eliminate annual automatic renewals for RPs, establish procedures for determining fair market rents, and conduct compliance reviews on an annual basis.
Unfortunately, DHHL did not respond last week to inquiries about the status of its revocable permit reforms; it should.
Further, like DLNR, it must be kept on task for better land management.
In Hawaii, where land is so valuable, state agencies have been
derelict in not o ptimizing holdings. Identifying weaknesses in the system is just the start; enacting the improvements must follow.
