The clock has started ticking on what is sure to be the most daunting challenge faced by the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands: The agency must get the historic $600 million outlay in state funds attached to projects addressing the persistent homesteading backlog for its trust beneficiaries.

The deadline for encumbering the funds, under the legislation Gov. David Ige signed into law last session, is three years, which in governmental terms is the blink of an eye. If the money isn’t in position by then to be spent down on specific projects, it will revert to the state’s general fund.

In August, the Hawaiian Homes Commission, the policy board governing the century-old federal Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, approved a “preliminary strategic approach.” This is essentially a preliminary plan — a framework for spending the money, principally to develop homestead lots for the roughly 28,000 Native Hawaiians who have lingered on the waiting list for years.

There is no small degree of concern among stakeholders that this effort could fail. DHHL in more recent years has shown a greater willingness to innovate in its approach to its mission: providing leases for residential, agricultural or pastoral purposes, for lessees of at least half Native Hawaiian ancestry.

But the agency has a long record of dysfunction, of projects lagging for years, of inconsistency with the way its leasing mission is handled. The waiting list accrued largely due to such lapses occurring chronically over the years.

The appointment of directors to head the agency rarely gets the priority from an incoming governor that it deserves. That really must change with the next administration, given the urgency the development agenda has gained. It would be wise to weight the selection of a director according to the nominee’s experience managing such a high-profile agenda.

Kali Watson, a former DHHL director who now heads a nonprofit affordable-housing development firm, was dubious about the prospects for change.

“I don’t think with the existing staff the department is going to be able to meet that deadline,” he said at the commission meeting. “There’s no way.”

That is an understandable response, and DHHL will need to improve the efficiency of its processes. But how far should that effort extend? Watson suggested that the governor issue an emergency proclamation to waive certain state bidding and procurement rules.

The time for taking that step may come, but we’re not there yet. DHHL should set benchmarks for gauging whether the array of projects is on track to make deadline. If it’s not, officials then could make the case that unforeseen delays threaten progress and that the emergency threshold has been reached.

For now, it would be wiser to seek legislative relief for some procedures in the coming session, but to ensure that potential private partners are properly vetted. Without oversight, the potential for corruption and bad decisions is unacceptable.

Already there are landowners that are approaching the department with offers to sell the agency their property for use in homesteading projects. Some could indeed work, but others, undoubtedly, would be less than optimal sites for implementing the DHHL development agenda, lacking in infrastructure or with some other flaw.

When the new administration takes over, officials would need to be brought up to speed on DHHL’s full range of projects, some of which predated the $600 million investment. They must examine which of the bottlenecks could be cleared while maintaining some controls.

Ultimately, this challenge is a wake-up call that delivering for beneficiaries, difficult as that is, cannot be postponed.