Ka‘ū News Briefs, Monday, April 26, 2021

    The letter in opposition was signed by organizations that include: Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., Aina Aloha Economic Futures, Conservation Council for Hawaiʻi, Earth Justice, Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi, Aloha Aina Party, and many more.
    Supporters include Pacific Resource Partnership, which represents the carpenters union and contractors, and Stanford Carr Development.
    The letter in opposition says, "Upholding the public interest and the public trust in our limited public lands and resources is a concern for all of who live in these islands. Ensuring that our public lands are used appropriately and consistent with the public interest and the public trust requires periodic, consistent review of their existing uses, particularly with the drastic environmental and socioeconomic changes anticipated for the post COVID, climate change era.
    "HB499 HD2 SD2 CD1 could preclude a meaningful review of any industrial, commercial, resort, mixed-use, and government/military use of any public lands – including uses which may have been initiated up to 65 years ago – for an additional 40 years. Instead of reassessing uses at the end of existing
65-year leases, and making new determinations on the best potential uses of our public lands, the DLNR and BLNR would be allowed to simply extend these uses for another four decades, in exchange for infrastructure and building upgrades that all but guarantee the further continuation of potentially inappropriate or outdated uses. Moreover, 40-year lease extensions may also result in private lessees maintaining a continuous and uninterrupted leasehold interest in public lands for up to 105 years."
    "Such a long-term and uninterrupted leasehold interest will inevitably result in an expectation by a lessee that their control of leased public lands will be continued indefinitely." The letter says the opponents expect that this kind of lease extension "lease of public land, on any island, may result in a tidal wave of century-long leases and the ensuing political pressure from lessees to effectively if not outright privatize our public lands. This would be particularly detrimental to Native Hawaiians whose unrelinquished claims to public “ceded” lands, which were taken from their established government without consent or compensation and under the threat of violence and bloodshed, may be foreclosed for generations into the future."    The letter charges that DLNR has "a decades-long practice of directly issuing hundreds of annual revocable permits to the same permittees, for decades at a time, with little oversight or accountability – and often without complying with the DLNR’s own Revocable Permits Task Force recommendations adopted by the Board of Land & Natural Resources. Ir points to "the repeated approval of subleases for highly controversial observatory development projects that required nominal rents of a nominal $1, which has contributed to the conflict and controversy surrounding Mauna Kea and Haleakalā; the failure to properly inspect or enforce lease conditions for lands leased to the military for highly destructive live-fire training; the failure to hold a beachfront luxury resort accountable for its highly profitable, unpermitted commercial use of public lands; and the reissuance or 'holdover' of revocable permits for the diversion of hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day from East Maui streams for decades, without an environmental assessment and without addressing the concerns of environmentalists and impacted Native Hawaiian communities."
    According to the letter, "These and many more examples indicate a pattern of disregard for the public interest and the public trust in the DLNR and BLNR’s exercise of discretion over public lands and resources, raising significant doubts as to whether and how such discretion will be used appropriately in the four-decade extensions authorized by HB499 HD2 SD2 CD1."