(Posted 8/24/09)
The state Environmental Council has had it with the Lingle administration’s lack of support. In a letter August 17 to deputy director of Health Laurence Lau, council chairman Gail Grabowsky announced that the council would not be meeting again until certain conditions had been met:
•The administration would have to provide funds adequate for all neighbor island members to participate in at least six meetings a year. This requirement could be met by providing members with airfare or by having “adequate public-friendly meeting facilities for video conferencing” with “real-time, on-site staff support for the sites.”
•The council would have staff support equivalent to a half-time position to take meeting minutes, conduct basic research, carry out communications, and assist with rule revisions, exemption lists, and the council’s annual report.
•Adequate funds would be available to produce the annual report. (In the most recent two years, the report was prepared but not published or distributed.)
•The governor’s office would fill all vacancies on the council to bring it up to full membership and fill any new vacancies within two months.
According to Grabowsky’s letter, the council unanimously approved the action at its July 23 meeting. She summarized many of the reasons behind the council members’ frustrations. Meetings were held in recent years “in rooms within the DOH building in which effective participation by neighbor island members through videoconferencing did not occur… Meeting rooms were also often inadequate for public participation and comment. Sufficient staff support to generate meeting minutes was so lacking that the Council went without consecutive meeting minutes for months at a time. It has been difficult for the Council to sustain quorum, not only because neighbor island members have not been able to participate effectively in meetings, but also because appointments to the Council have, for long periods of time, been extremely slow, even when Council membership had dropped to nearly half its mandated membership. Finally, there appears to be no support or commitment to assisting the Council in discharging its legislative mandate to produce an annual report.”
For background on this, see the article appearing in the June 2009 edition of Environment Hawai`i, available at our online archives.
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