Environmental Council ‘Marginalized’: Robert A. King has submitted his resignation as chairman of the state Environmental Council, setting forth his reasons in a blistering letter to Governor Linda Lingle.
“I find I cannot perform my duties due to lack of support by the administration,” King wrote in his letter dated April 7. “During the last two years the Environmental Council has been marginalized to the point of irrelevance…. [T]he situation continues to degrade.”
King recited a list of grievances, including:
- The council completed an update of its rules in 2007 and sent them to the governor’s office, but “We never received a response of any kind.”
- No travel was provided for neighbor island members, who were told to use video conference facilities instead. However, “with limited or no technical support available, the system has not worked correctly for a single meeting.”
- Council meetings were moved from the Office of Environmental Control to “a very small room in the basement at Kinau Hale, where half the people present had to stand… Next we moved to the VCC …, which is even smaller. The current meeting options are extremely discouraging to any public involvement whatsoever.”
“Although I have met with management at the [Department of Health] and with staff at your office, the situation continues to deteriorate. I do not believe the Council is viable at this level of support,” King concluded.
The term of King, president of Pacific Biodiesel, was set to expire in 2012.
The Environmental Council approves agency lists of activities exempt from environmental review and issues rules implementing the state environmental policy act.
Missing Exit Signs: For years, the “EXIT” signs in almost all Wal-Mart stores were lit up by tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. The electron decay from the tritium causes phosphor-coated tubes to glow, lighting the signs even in power outages.
Then Wal-Mart discovered that possession of tritium requires a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, since tritium is widely used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. So in 2007 it began replacing the signs.
At that point it discovered some 16,000 signs were missing, including 17 from the Wal-Mart stores on Ke`eamoku Street in Honolulu and in Pearl City.
Nothing suggests that a group of determined nuclear terrorists stole the signs to get tritium needed to make a dirty bomb, but there is a better-than-even chance that the tritium ended up in landfills or dumps or, if broken, dispersed around the exits. The radioactivity from tritium is relatively weak, but tritium is water-soluble. If it gets into human food, it can pose a serious health hazard.
Wal-Mart gave a final report on the missing signs to the NRC in January. Some signs may have been removed by contractors as surplus or may have been tossed out, it said, but “one of the options, ‘unauthorized removal by a person,’ may represent the most likely disposition.”
At Long Last, Resolution: One of the final acts of Big Island planning director Chris Yuen before a new administration took office last December was to resolve a case of long-standing Special Management Area violations in Kohala.
The violations involved illegal grading and clearing by Ahmad Mohammadi and the company he owns, E Commerce Enterprises Corporation, starting in 2003. In 2005, the Planning Department slapped Mohammadi with a $400,000 fine for bulldozing and carving out roads down a steep-sided gulch. Mohammadi also was sanctioned by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources for unpermitted work in the Conservation District near the shore.
Resolution of the infractions at the county level dragged out for years. Finally, last November, the county Planning Commission approved an after-the-fact SMA permit for some of the work, while requiring Mohammadi to remediate the road down the gulch with plantings. Fines were reduced to $100,000, with Mohammadi being able to apply that toward the cost of remediation.
For more information, see the June 2005 “Board Talk” column and the article in the January 2006 issue of Environment Hawai`i.
Volume 19, Number 11 May 2009
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