The Agribusiness Development Corp. has been removed from the state Department of Agriculture and placed within the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

Among the bills Gov. David Ige has signed into law this year is Senate Bill 2473, which moved the ADC to DBEDT for administrative purposes. The bill also amended the responsibilities and powers of the ADC, its board of directors and its agribusiness plan.

The purpose of SB 2473, now Act 219, was to address the internal issues within and lack of support for local agriculture by the ADC as presented in a state audit in 2021. The corporation, established in 1994 to manage the thousands of acres of land left behind by sugar and pineapple plantations, has done little in that regard, the audit said.

It concluded that the ADC’s board of directors, who are given little training and direction, and staff do not understand the corporation’s purpose and that statutory requirements, such as the development of an agribusiness plan, were seen as unnecessary.

One of the issues noted in the audit was that essential ADC documents regarding its land management and day-to-day operations were “inconsistent, incomplete, and, in many cases, non-­existent,” so an audit of the corporation’s financial records wasn’t even possible.

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz, who introduced the bill, is hoping that DBEDT will provide the ADC with the administrative support it needs.

“ADC needs help with human resources, accounting. All the things that the audit said were problematic with the ADC, DBEDT already assists other agencies with that,” Dela Cruz said.

DBEDT provides administrative support for 10 agencies, including the Hawaii State Energy Office, the Land Use Commission and the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

While Dela Cruz said that the ADC’s function and purpose are determined by state law rather than the department it’s attached to, key stakeholders in Hawaii agriculture argued against the bill while it was going through the state Legislature.

The Hawaii Farm Bureau and the DOA itself were among testifiers who expressed concern about removing the ADC from the expertise from the Agriculture Department. The state audit had noted that there was little agricultural expertise within the ADC when it was attached to the DOA.

It’s not entirely clear what the consequences of moving the ADC to DBEDT will be, but that’s part of the concern.

“I just think there may be unforeseen consequences in terms of the mandate of the two different agencies,” said Anne Frederick, executive director of the Hawai‘i Alliance for Progressive Action.

Similarly, the DOA in a testimony said it’s “concerned about possible unforeseen impacts that may occur from a disentanglement of our administrative and operational relationship with ADC.”

Aside from that, opponents of the move said that the bill didn’t do enough to address the sluggish progress made by the corporation.