How useful is a planning document that takes so long to complete that by the time it’s finished, it’s hopelessly outdated? That is the question that needs to be asked and answered by the Commission on Water Resource Management as it plods toward the goal of updating the Hawai‘i Water Plan.
The plan has a number of elements. Each county is to prepare a Water Use and Development Plan, the Department of Health is to prepare a Water Quality Plan, the Department of Land and Natural Resources is to prepare a State Water Projects Plan, while the commission itself is to prepare a Water Resource Protection Plan. In July 1990, the commission approved the first Hawai‘i Water Plan, and two years later it approved a draft update. In 1998, the Legislature added yet another element, the Agricultural Water Use and Development Plan, which the Department of Agriculture delivered to the commission in 2003.
Coordinating all these disparate elements is so daunting that the commission hired a contractor to develop a “framework” for updating the plan. That framework, completed in 2000, sets forth a logical progression in the development of the various components of the overall plan, with the plans for state water projects and agriculture being used as building blocks for the counties’ respective plans.
The commission has frequently defended its lack of progress on the update to the Hawai‘i Water Plan as attributable to a lack of funds. “Funding constraints have limited updating the HWP to … the State Water Projects Plan and a partial update of the Water Resource Protection Plan,” states CWRM’s 2004 report to the Legislature. Yet contracts for both those plans were executed seven years ago and both plans were to have been completed by 2000.
What happened?
[b][i]The Water Projects Plan[/b][/i]
The only one of the water plan’s eight components to be updated since 1992 (not including the 2003 AWUDP) has been the State Water Projects Plan. But the glacial pace at which it was completed has already become problematic for the counties as they embark on developing their updated plans.
In April 1998, the state Board of Land and Natural Resources, using funds provided by CWRM, entered into a $388,000 contract with Fukunaga and Associates, Inc., to update the State Water Projects Plan ($288,000) and to develop a master plan for water sources exploration and development needs to support state water projects on O‘ahu ($100,000). According to a source in the DLNR’s Engineering Division, that second document, called the O‘ahu master plan, is to review existing infrastructure of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and determine whether it is sufficient to address future state needs.
Fukunaga had until February 1999 to com plete a final O‘ahu master plan, and until May 1999 to complete a State Water Projects Plan. The contract terms, however, allowed for extending those deadlines for good cause, as determined by the DLNR director.
May 1999 came and went without a final plan. Most of the work was completed and more than half the available funds were spent by the end of 2000, yet the contract needed extending three times. The final SWPP was accepted by the commission in February 2003. That plan, however, was only considered Phase 1 of the contract. The O‘ahu master plan is still incomplete and the contract remains open.
“Eventually, all the elements of the Hawai‘i Water Plan, which are at various stages of development, will ‘catch up’ with each other,” according to notes of a CWRM staff discussion September 5, 2002. “In the case of the SWPP, completion of the plan is important as the plan provides information that should be incorporated into the county Water Use and Development Plans.” Every school built or planned, every mile of landscaped state highway, every airport, library, state park, boat harbor, Hawaiian Home lot, and the like, is to be folded into the SWPP . As anticipated with the “framework” for updating the Hawai‘i Water Plan, counties are to rely on the SWPP in preparing their respective Water Use and Development Plans
But how useful will that information be to the counties? One planner with Maui County told Environment Hawai‘i that its discussion of projects in some parts of Maui was either outdated or just plain wrong and, in any event, would be useless in helping the county develop its own Water Use and Development Plan.
Our own cursory review of the plan turned up several significant flaws. The typographical mistake on the cover – calling it a “statewide technique document” instead of a “technical” document – is not the most significant, just the first. The most serious problem would seem to be that the plan is based on information that was already outdated at the time the plan was prepared. A description of the Kekaha (Kaua‘i) irriga tion system, to cite one example, appears to be based on data that was last current around 1997. At that time, the system was still operated by the state Department of Agriculture, which expected to develop an ag park on the former cane land.
“One or two lots in the agriculture park may be leased and occupied by the end of 1999,” says page 2-12 of volume 3 of the February 2003 report. “The cumulative safe capacity from the two intake pumps are [sic] adequate to meet the water demands of the two farm lots anticipated to be in service by the end of 1999 and the estimated water demand of the 19 farm lots.” By the time of the report, however, the DOA was no longer running the Kekaha system; it was turned over to the Agribusiness Development Cor poration in the late 1990s. The Kekaha report is unusual only in that the narrative speaks of 1999 as though it were in the future. Other summaries for state projects have similarly outdated information, however. Most tables charting “future use” start with projections for 2001.
While Fukunaga was developing the SWPP, the state Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling on the Waiahole Ditch case, holding that the state has a public trust duty to recognize the value of leaving water in streams, uphold Native Hawaiian and traditional and customary rights to water, and “with utmost haste” pursue permanent instream flow standards for windward streams, among other things.
When CWRM staff presented a draft SWPP to the commission in late 2000, then-CWRM chair Tim Johns expressed concern that the document failed to even reference the Waiahole decision, let alone address how the decision would affect state water supplies and uses. Dean Nakano with the commission’s planning branch responded that the implications of Waiahole would be more thoroughly and more appropriately dealt with in the Water Resource Protection Plan.
[b][i]WRPP[/b][/i]
Of all the components of the Hawai‘i Water Plan, the Water Resource Protection Plan is the big one. “Updating of the WRPP is considered fundamental to the commission in carrying out its resources protection and management/regulatory responsibilities,” the Water Commission has written in three requests to the governor to extend a state contract for the WRPP update.
A recent CWRM progress report on the update includes a 21-page outline of work to be done. When CWRM contracted with Wilson Okamoto & Associates, Inc., in June 1998 to update the WRPP, the scope of services was extensive. At a minimum, WOA was to verify and update characteristics of ground water resources, identify surface water hydrologic units and recommend units for resource protection and development, develop a pilot method for assessing instream flow standards and availability for develop ment, and recommend short-and long-term conservation measures. To do all of this, WOA would be paid $225,000 and have until June 30, 2000.
But as with the contract for the State Water Projects Plan, the schedule quickly fell by the wayside. The scope of work changed, as well. The contract allows the CWRM director to make changes in the scope of work so long as any changes to the contract amount are incor porated by written amendment. That condi tion has allowed the scope of the plan to morph into a “partial update” of the WRPP, focusing primarily on “augmenting the Commission’s Stream Protection and Management Branch,” according to CWRM’s2003 report to the Legislature. As for the rest of the items under the contract, who will do them and when they will be done is anyone’s guess.
At a March 16, 1999 meeting with the contractor, commission staff, and Felix Limtiaco of The Limtiaco Consulting Group, CWRM staffer Nakano distributed a Revised Scope of Services including an appendix titled Summary of Stream Database Information. In adding the requirement of a stream database, CWRM staff admitted that “funds are probably not sufficient to include all items in the Revised Scope of Services,” a memo of the meeting states. That being the case, the group decided that developing the surface water database should have the highest prior ity. The memo states that the executive summary, introduction, inventory and assessment of existing resources are essential to the WRPP update and “the extent to which the remain ing sections are covered is flexible since funds are limited.”
CWRM met with WOA regularly through out 1999 to discuss how best to conduct the work. And in March 2000, with WOA being only 75 percent complete with a draft implementation plan and schedule, then-CWRM director Linnel Nishioka, signing for then-CWRM chair Johns, requested an extension of the contract to June 2002. The request noted that there was “no change to scope of work.”
By February 2001, WOA had submitted an interim report on a Surface Water Classification and Stream Coding System and had collected surface water diversion data for all islands. By September, WOA had subcon tracted its work on updating sustainable yields to Water Resources Associates. By then, WOA was 50 percent done with a final implementation plan, had compiled a surface water data base, was 95 percent done with a surface water coding system, and was 50 percent done with updating sustainable yields. WRA submitted draft summary tables of sustainable yields for all islands in April 2003.
In April 2004, Ernest Lau, who had by then replaced Nishioka as CWRM executive director, requested and received a third two-year extension to June 2006. To date, nothing has been officially presented to the Water Commission as part of the WRPP. But with the contract with WOA now being considered only a partial update, Nakano says the main products will be a watershed/stream coding system that “will mirror the commission’s groundwater system, where areas are delineated into hydrologic units,” and a review and update of groundwater sustainable yields.
“Those are the two key components. We only had X amount of money so we couldn’t do a full-blown plan,” he says, adding that he hopes the coding system and sustainable yield review will be completed within the year, or at most by the end of June 2006.
As for some of the other aspects of the WRPP, instream flow standards for example, Nakano says it will be a collaborative effort between CWRM staff and the stream protection group that the commission assembled last year.
“If you were a consultant, I would just tell you to do [instream flow standards] statewide, but you’d do it in a vacuum…you’d produce something without stakeholders’ input,” he says. Instead of having WOA come up with a process to set instream flow standards, the commission will try to incorporate recommendations from stream protection advocates into the WRPP. “I don’t want the consultant to waste time developing a policy that doesn’t meet the Water Code.”
[b][i]County Updates[/b][/i]
It will be years before the county Water Use and Development Plans are available for integration into the overall Hawai‘i Water Plan. Kaua‘i has not yet hired a contractor to begin work; Maui County is only just now starting on what is expected to be a four-year-long project. Honolulu has begun work on its updated plan, but a spokesman for the Board of Water Supply says the earliest any plan could be finished will be 2008. Only Hawai‘i County seems on track to have its plan completed soon; a spokesman says a draft should be out by this summer.
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 15, Number 8 February 2005
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