Time to check the calendar.

Thanks to the request by the University of Hawaii and officials with the planned Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Gov. David Ige has been given some room to maneuver.

Ige now has until Sept. 26, 2021 to figure out a way to build the world’s biggest and best telescope.

For the second time in his administration, Ige has been forced to pull back from the construction of the $1.4 billion project as protesters physically blocked the path up the mountain. The demonstrators are sympathetic to Native Hawaiian claims that Mauna Kea is a sacred mountain and construction of the telescope would be in violation of native cultural practices and customs.

Ige was given the extra 784 days, including weekends, because UH and TMT asked that the permit to start building be extended. Construction, from first bulldozer blade in the ground to telescope’s first light, is estimated at 10 years.

Ige tried to start building in 2015 and was rebuffed.

Consider this the Ige version of the Mauna Kea hokey pokey. (Put your National Guard in. Take your National Guard out. Put your political capital in. And shake it all about. You do the hokey pokey. And turn yourself around.)

So now more than halfway through 2019, Ige finds himself going back up the mountain and then, embarrassingly, back down with a untallied large bill for police enforcement but no movement to show for it.

In fairness, Ige has been shadow-boxing for years with various groups claiming to represent the Hawaiian community. No single entity can claim to unanimously represent Hawaii’s first citizens, so everyone can claim they should be at the table.

Obviously the struggle to conceive, finance and build a grand telescope pales in comparison to the injustices done Native Hawaiians over the years. But at issue is building a telescope, not organizing a new Native Hawaiian movement.

That is how Ige lost. He let the conversation slip away from him. It was not that he was unable to control the dialogue, it wasn’t that he was not heard or unable to speak. For years, he was, by his own volition, mute.

So the Ige administration flag of surrender was not waved in a formal ceremony, but in an announcement from Suzanne Case, state land board chairwoman, announcing that because Ige was withdrawing the emergency proclamation, “State hunting units A, K, and G, in the Mauna Kea Forest Reserve and Natural Area Reserve, closed since July 15th, will reopen today.”

The areas had been closed, Case said, “to protect public safety and provide security for the safe movement of heavy construction equipment associated with the Thirty Meter Telescope.”

Well, that’s not happening.

Hawaii’s next governor will be sworn into office on Dec. 5, 2022, 1,219 days from today.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.