Alapaki Nahale-a became chairman of the Hawaiian Home Lands Commission in January 2011, and says it was "kind of shocking" to learn that he was the first chairman in its 100-year history to have been born and raised on Hawaiian Home lands, near Hilo.

Besides being chairman of the nine-member commission, Nahale-a also is director of the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which executes the directives of the commission regarding the 200,000 acres of trust lands set aside by Congress in 1921 to help Native Hawaiians return to their ancestral lands and attain self-reliance and self-determination.

With an annual operating and construction budget of about $100 million and about 140 employees statewide, the department is one of the largest master-plan community developers in the state, with about 10,000 residential lessees. It also manages about 700 commercial land dispositions, including leases, licenses, revocable permits and easements.

Before being appointed commission chairman by Gov. Neil Abercrombie in December 2010, Nahale-a was its East Hawaii Island representative.

He is a graduate of Kamehameha Schools and of the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science.

From 2003 to 2009, he was director of Ka Umeke Kaeo Hawaiian Immersion Public Charter School in Keaukaha. From 2008 to 2010, he also was president of the Hawai‘i Charter Schools Network.

In 2011 he was named by President Barack Obama to the Commission on Presidential Scholars, which annually honors a boy and a girl from each state for their academic achievement.

Nahale-a, who turns 44 today, lives in Pepeekeo on Hawaii island, from where he commutes to Honolulu to perform his commission and departmental duties. He is married and with his "beautiful wife," Kahele, has four children, ages 5 to 19.

QUESTION: What would you like the public to know about the Hawaiian Home Lands Commission and the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands?

ANSWER: First and foremost I wanted to call their attention to our new five-year strategic plan. I think it does a really good job of breaking down the core work of the trust into four different areas (“Deliver Diverse Homesteading Opportunities,” “Provide Excellent Service,” “Reaffirm and Assert Trust Status,” and “Ensure the Financial Well-being of the Trust”).

I learned pretty quickly that Hawaiian Homes is probably one of the most misunderstood organizations among the state departments, so I think we’ve put forward a plan that shows folks all the different kinds of work we need to do.

Q: Was there a five-year plan before?

A: Well, there was a five-year plan approved by the previous commission, but it expired at the end of 2011. It was a good plan. I think we tried to build off of it. A lot of the themes are similar, but one of the differences for us was trying to be as specific as possible for each year so that our beneficiaries and the community knew what we intended to get done.

So, for example, if you look at the first theme — delivering homesteading opportunities — we actually say how many units in every area we’re going to build. That way folks don’t have to wonder if we’re coming to their community or not.

A: What’s been the annual average for placing people in Hawaiian Home Lands homes?

Q: It’s been about 150, so we’ve set a target of 200. We believe we can create greater efficiencies and better access with 200 units.

Q: How many people are considered beneficiaries?

A: We have 28,000 individuals on our current waitlist, but we actually have 42,000 applications. Those two numbers get mixed up often, because an individual can apply for two different kinds of homesteading. One of the big confusions is that people think of us as a housing agency, but in reality we’re a homesteading agency, and we’re charged with returning our beneficiaries to their ancestral lands for residential use, for agricultural use, and for pastoral use. And a really unknown fact is that we’re also charged with providing access to aquaculture leases, but we’ve never done it in the 100-year history of the trust.

Q: The available lands didn’t include much water, did they? I mean, where you could have fish ponds.

A: That’s our assumption, so I think by exploring that history it will give us a better sense of what we got and why there was a problem, although that issue about the quality of the land applies to all of our homesteading options. We got some of the worst, most remote, most arid lands in the state at the time, so to do even a homestead housing community, we have to bring in the water, the wastewater treatment, all the roads, the sidewalks, the power lines — it’s extremely expensive.

Q: Why don’t you just let the beneficiaries go out there and live on it? Why do you have to provide all the infrastructure?

A: We actually have done that in several places. … But when you let folks go into areas without infrastructure, immediately they would like infrastructure. … But they ask for it for good reasons. I mean, if you move into an area that’s remote, then when you call the ambulance, the ambulance says they can’t get to you because there’s no paved roads. Same thing with fire protection. Or let’s say you move there and you have kids and there’s no school nearby. So, infrastructure is important to quality of life, and I think as we’ve learned those lessons over the years, we have to try to find a balance.  

Q: How many beneficiaries are living on Hawaiian Home Lands right now?

A: We have 10,000 current lessees, but unlike a typical developer, once we build a house, we don’t just walk away. We’re still a landowner and we have a lifelong relationship with that homesteader. Even though they have a 99-year lease with an option to extend another hundred years, we still have obligations to help that family transfer their lease, or mitigate neighbor-to-neighbor complaints. We also have to take action if someone is using their land illegally, cancel leases … And then, because we build the community in most cases, we have this ongoing need to support that community by making sure the infrastructure is maintained, if the counties don’t take it.

Then we have the 28,000 wait-listers, right? Then we have, we estimate, an additional 30,000 qualified Native Hawaiians who haven’t signed up for homesteading, for a multitude of reasons, whom we still consider beneficiaries.

Q: What about the people on the waitlist? Where are they living now?

A: It’s all over the state. The longest waitlist for housing is on Oahu, but Oahu makes up only 4 percent of our total land base, so we have this real challenging supply-and-demand issue.

Q: Do you think any of them are among the homeless?

A: Absolutely. There are beneficiaries who are homeless or who are incarcerated, and that’s why in our plan we have taken what I feel is a really bold step to acknowledge that we need to meet the needs of our beneficiaries wherever they may be in society.

Q: When somebody qualifies for a homestead, do they just get a home for free?

A: We will put all the infrastructure in … then we give the family their individual lease. Then they’re responsible for paying for the actual vertical construction of the house itself. Typically they’ll get a mortgage.

Q: Through you guys?

A: We do do some lending but we don’t have that kind of capital, so we actually guarantee loans in the public and private sector.

Q: In your five-year plan it says you want to “identify the first 100 families on the waitlist and identify barriers to homesteading.” Why is it difficult to identify the first 100 families on the waitlist? And what would you consider barriers?

A: No. 1, you have to understand that on Hawaii Island, to give you a concrete example, we set out to meet face to face with the first 100 families on the waitlist. That means they’ve been on our waitlist for over 40, sometimes over 50 years. So over the course of time, a lot of those folks, they’ve stopped updating their address, so just contacting them is one big problem. And our waitlist is not digitized.  So, for example, I cannot email that group.

Q: So the top people on your list would be ones that have been there 40-50 years?

A: Correct, but anecdotally, I’ll tell you, real quick, that when I go around the community and folks, they tell me, “I’ve been on the waitlist 20 years,” or 18 years, or 33 years, I always ask, “Well, how many times have we offered you a homesteading opportunity?” And someone once told me “Well, over 20.” So I verified that if you’ve been on the waiting list that long, we’ve offered you homesteading. 

There’s two primary reasons folks have declined those offers. No. 1: They don’t want to live where we’re offering them a homestead. … The second barrier is affordability. So even if it’s, like, $220,000 for a unit, even though that’s a great price on Oahu, it’s still tough for families to qualify for that mortgage.

We have homesteading available right now. We have lots in Discovery Harbor in Kau; we have lots in Kona, in Lai Opua. So it’s really a misnomer that we’re not offering homesteading. We’re just not offering it where people need it or at a price point they can afford. That’s the real challenge.

Q: The enabling legislation of the Hawaiian Homes Commission talks about self-determination for Hawaiians. How does that dovetail with the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission, which is tallying up the number of Native Hawaiians in Hawaii and on the mainland for the purpose of establishing some sort of sovereign government?

A: I think it’s a great parallel effort. At the heart of it is understanding that the Hawaiians are best suited to making sure that their needs are taken care of. To me, self-determination is taking responsibility for your community’s own well-being.

So going back to the question you brought up, I do believe that Native Hawaiians and beneficiaries of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act have the ability to be self-governing and to execute the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act obligations on their own.

Q: It seems like the department is fairly independent of the regular state government regarding its mission and its funding.

A: Well we do have some authorities, given this unique relationship we have with the state. But we also have a lot of state obligations. We have to follow the state procurement code. We have to follow civil service laws. I think that our future is probably better served gaining autonomies from that system.

I want to make a real quick point about the relationship to the state. We currently do not get state general funds. We have 200,000 acres of land, 10,000 existing lessees, 28,000 Native Hawaiians who have signed up, 42,000 applications and potentially 30,000 other qualified beneficiaries. We’re a state department with that size of need and we get zero general funds.

Q: How does that happen?

A: For various reasons. So we’ve been really self-supportive over the years. That’s why we use some of our lands, where it’s wise, for commercial leases.

We do get some support from the state, and really, in recent times, we’ve been using what we call Act 14 settlement money. We get $30 million a year from the state of Hawaii, but that’s not general funds operating money. That is compensation for the land the state took out of the Hawaiian Home Lands trust illegally.

In the early days of statehood, a lot of Hawaiian Home Lands were taken for airports and sewer systems and easements, so for last 20 years the state has been giving Hawaiian Homes money for that take. That’s how we’ve been supporting ourselves. That money runs out in 2014, so we are facing an economic challenge in two years. One of our biggest challenges at Hawaiian Homes is to make sure we have the financial means to serve the beneficiaries going forward.

Q: How will you do that?

A: Multiple ways. I think we will be making a request for general funds in the next biennium budget. We also are accelerating our commercial lease revenues, on lands where it’s appropriate to do so.  We’re also working very hard to get a greater share of federal money. There’s a lot of native federal money available. In addition, we’re trying to get federal money that’s not native money, that’s available to all entities. And finally we’re trying to get a bigger pot of private dollars. … There are situations where a private sector group could partner with us, if they believe in our mission.

Q: Your plan mentions that you want to cut operating expenses by 5 percent in the first year. How would you do that?

A: Several ways, some of which we’ve done already. We’re looking at every expenditure, from who has cellphones, what the cellphone plan is … We’re looking at our travel, who travels, can we do video conferencing instead? We’re looking at making sure that we’re developing along a timetable that makes sense, so we’re not going to expend money someplace where we’re not ready to build, which mean that we’d then have to redo a permit or a proposal request.

It’s tough economic times on the planet, and I find this is the time that every smart organization needs to use this situation as a chance to get more lean and make sure it’s investing on the most critical functions and operations.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to bring up?

A: The only thing I would bring up, because it has gotten some attention, is our interest in correctional facilities — in particular, the Maui jail. The EIS is almost done, and we put $13 million into planning this facility, but there’s still no plan to actually finish construction, so we’re taking the lead on putting a plan together, bringing together Public Safety, DLNR …

Q: Why are you guys doing this?

A: That’s why I wanted to bring it up, and there’s two primary reasons.
No. 1, like I mentioned earlier, we have beneficiaries incarcerated, and the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act talks about rehabilitation. But it’s hard for families to rehabilitate themselves if key members of their family are incarcerated on the mainland. So we care about that and we would like to get them home.

The second reason is that our land that is not great for homesteading could be well positioned, strategically, to help with our correctional facility issues. So, for example, in Puunene, we have two large parcels that, if the Maui jail does get built where it’s proposed, it opens up infrastructure for our parcels, which then allows us to generate commercial revenue and do homesteading. But to do it on our own in an isolated area, it’s economically unfeasible.

So there’s two primary reasons for us do this, and I think they’re great, compelling reasons. But without the context, people think, “Why is Hawaiian Homes getting involved there? That’s not what they do.” It’s hard to explain all of the elements.