How much does Hawai’i value its natural resources?
If one looks to the governor’s 2004 budget message, it would seem that the administration of Linda Lingle places a high premium on protecting the environment. It was among the top five “critical areas … of highest priority” she cited (the others are education, the economy, health care, and public safety).
But consider this: of the $3.9 billion or so in general fund expenditures that the Legislature has authorized for the 2005 fiscal year, the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ portion is a piddling $25 million, or six-tenths of one percent.
How small is that? It’s so meager that the DLNR doesn’t merit its own “slice” on the general fund pie chart distributed by the governor.
The total operating budget for the state, which includes revenues from special funds, the federal government, and other sources, comes to $7.9 billion, roughly double the general-fund authorization. The DLNR’s crumb from this pie comes to just over $73 million, or nine-tenths of one percent. Yet much of this increment goes to support agencies such as the Bureau of Conveyances and the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation, whose mission and activities do little or nothing to protect natural resources.
By other measures, too, the Department of Land and Natural Resources, which bears chief responsibility for protecting the state’s freshwater, beaches, streams, nearshore waters, and unique and threatened flora and fauna, got little respect in the last legislative session. By the time the budget for fiscal year 2005 (July 1, 2004 through June 30, 2005) was approved, the department suffered a net loss of 67 permanent and 12.48 temporary positions.
Can the cuts made by the Legislature – and by the governor in further budget restrictions made in June – allow the DLNR to meet its statutory obligations, to say nothing of furthering the cause of environmental protection? In an effort to answer this question, Environment Hawai’i took a close look at the DLNR’s state of financial health, particularly at the budgets of those agencies on the frontline of the battle to protect environmental quality.
No Warm Bodies; No Pink Slips
In a sense, the 2004-05 budget for the DLNR reflects the reality it has created for itself. For at least the last five years, the DLNR, like most other state agencies, has deliberately kept many authorized positions vacant – a fiscal trick that allowed it to meet forced cuts in spending by using money that the Legislature had given it to cover personnel expenses associated with full staffing. At the end of the 2004 fiscal year, 21 percent of the authorized positions in the DLNR were vacant (162.5 of 778). (By comparison, statewide vacancy rates hover around 12 or 13 percent; the vacancy rate used by the Legislature in calculating personnel budgets is 5 percent.)
Now, though, that practice has come back to haunt the DLNR. With vacancies left open year after year, the DLNR was hard-put to argue that the unfilled positions were essential to the department’s ability to carry out its functions. The Legislature responded by simply cutting the positions.
The hit the DLNR took amounts to an 11 percent cut in the department’s workforce, or about 10 times the level of cuts sustained in the overall state budget. (Total position cuts authorized in the state budget came to 363, or less than 1 percent: from 44,403 jobs in fiscal year 2004 to 44,040 in 2005).
To put it another way, in fiscal 2004, the DLNR’s authorized personnel level amounted to 1.7 percent of the state’s total level of authorized employees. Yet 22 percent of the total loss of authorized staff was suffered by the DLNR. (Now the DLNR’s authorized staff accounts for just 1.5 percent of the state’s authorized employees.)
Even with these cuts, the DLNR has more than 10 percent of its authorized positions vacant. According to figures provided by the DLNR Personnel Office, a month into the 2005 fiscal year, which began July 1, 2004, the department had a vacancy count of 76.50 positions.
Cruel Cuts
The personnel losses sustained by the DLNR were not spread equally among the department’s agencies. Among those taking the biggest hits were those on the front lines of the conservation battle: the Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement, the Natural Area Reserves System, the Division of Forestry and Wildlife, and the Commission on Water Resource Management.
The only DLNR division to see a gain in permanent authorized staff was the Bureau of Conveyance – though it, too, saw a net reduction; the addition of two authorized permanent positions was offset by the loss of 8 full-time temporary posts.
Even after the Legislature finished its work, the governor imposed additional cuts on the department. What began brightly in the governor’s message as a $5 million infusion of new, general-fund money to fight invasive species was whittled by the Legislature to $4 million – half from the Natural Area Reserve special fund, and half from general funds. In June, the governor pared an additional $1 million from general-fund support. Additionally, she cut a $105,000 grant-in-aid program from the State Parks Division’s budget and forced a 1 percent efficiency cut on the department, dropping the DLNR’s spending ceiling from the $73.1 million approved by the Legislature to $71.76 million. Offsetting that was $836,468 added to cover collective bargaining agreements, making the new DLNR total for fiscal 2005 $72,598,476.
A False Ceiling
The budget is better understood as a spending limit – an amount beyond which the DLNR is not supposed to go, but which it is welcome to fall short of. And in recent years, the department has stopped short of spending all it’s been authorized to spend, usually ending up around the 91 or 92 percent mark.
Most divisions within the department come close to spending (occasionally even overspending) their authorized amounts. What skews the budget picture for the DLNR is the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation. DOBOR, which manages the state’s small-boat harbors, has its operating budget drawn exclusively from the Boating Special Fund, an account into which is deposited all rental receipts from berths, lease rents from marinas, taxes on marine fuel, and permit fees paid by commercial tour operators. Year after year, the Boating Division forecasts special fund revenues that wildly exceed actual income – with the difference typically being on the order of $5 million to $6 million. That’s because DOBOR is always hoping to see its revenue double, although it’s not raised fees for years. So, while DOBOR’s authorized expenditure ceiling has hovered around $16 million the last couple of years, actual annual revenues into its special fund usually range between $9 million and $10 million.
If one removes DOBOR’s budget from the equation, then the DLNR regularly spends down the full amount it was allotted by the Legislature.
An Eviscerated Police Force
One of the most common complaints overheard in discussions about Hawai’i’s efforts to protect its natural resources runs along these lines: We don’t need more laws; we simply need to enforce those we already have on the books.
That’s where DOCARE – the Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement – comes in. DOCARE has responsibility to ensure that all of the regulations for each of the DLNR’s branches are observed. It officers are harbor policemen, game wardens, traffic cops, marine patrol, and guardians of state forests all rolled into one.
Gary Moniz, who heads the division, lost 12 full-time permanent positions this past legislative session, bringing his authorized permanent staff level down to 107 (from 119 in fiscal 2003). Moniz blames bad timing.
When the Legislature opened this year, Moniz had 16 vacancies in his division, for a vacancy rate of 13 percent. According to documents provided by the DLNR’s personnel office, six positions had been “left vacant to meet vacancy savings” – that is, there was no intention to fill them. Of the 10 remaining vacancies, Moniz had received approval from the governor to fill them and to begin the recruitment process. But when the Legislature looked to make personnel cuts, it considered as fair game any positions that were vacant as of December 1, 2003. And so Moniz’s division lost 11 percent of its authorized force. He did gain 4 temporary positions to add to the 2 temporary posts he had going into the current fiscal year. Net result for DOCARE: it entered the 2005 fiscal year with a total of 113 full-time positions, as opposed to the 121 it had in fiscal 2004. “I’m asking for all the positions that were abolished to be restored,” Moniz told Environment Hawai’i in discussing his budget request for fiscal 2006.
To cover all the Big Island, DOCARE has fewer than two dozen employees, Moniz said, and response time can range “from a minute to a day,” he noted. At present, Maui has 14 DOCARE officers on the payroll; Lana’i 2, Moloka’i 1, and Kaua’i 10. In addition to its customary duties, DOCARE also finds itself providing security for cruise ships whenever they visit harbors under the DLNR’s jurisdiction (at Lahaina and Kona).
The state’s Natural Area Reserves System consists of 109,164 acres. The budget the Legislature has given the DLNR’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife to manage and protect the irreplaceable natural resources contained in the system’s units is $1,094,015 – or precisely $10.02 per acre (a figure that also includes administrative expenses, such as office help and the meetings of NARS commissioners). For this, the NARS staff, at an authorized level of 22 full-time positions spread across five islands, is supposed to fence out and remove damaging pigs and other wildlife; keep down invasive weeds; and protect birds and rare plants from predation by rats and mongooses.
The units in the system were chosen because they include some of the rarest and most pristine ecosystems or geological areas remaining in the state. At no time has the NAR System received an adequate level of funding. Even so, the 2005 fiscal year operating budget represents the lowest appropriation in more than six years.
With the NARS budget wholly inadequate to achieve the management tasks associated with the system’s 19 reserves, it should hardly be a surprise that positions have been kept vacant, allowing funds to be redirected to on-the-ground activities. Even so, the NARS vacancy rate – never lower than 7 for the last two years – was unusually high: 26 percent. Now, though, with five positions lost in the 2005 budget, authorized staff is at a level not seen since the earliest days of the program.
For many years, conservationists have asked the Legislature to establish a permanent revenue source for NARS. In the late 1980s, just such a fund was established, the Natural Area Reserve fund, and it continues to receive 25 percent of revenues generated by the state conveyance tax, paid whenever a piece of land changes hands. Several years after the fund was established, however, the Legislature passed a law that requires money in the fund to be used to underwrite the initiatives of private landowners wanting to restore and protect high-quality forest lands through the state’s Natural Area Partnership Program (which gives private landowners a 2-1 match for any funds they spend) and the state’s Forest Stewardship Program, designed to spur development of more commercial forests (participants on average receive about a $2 state match for every $3 they spend).
About the only area of the DLNR’s budget that saw meaningful increases in the fiscal year 2005 was the Division of Forestry and Wildlife, which administers the new Hawai’i Invasive Species Council. The Legislature approved a $2 million general-fund boost in DOFAW’s account for forest and wildlife resources, from which it draws funds for protection of native species. (DOFAW has a total of four different accounts in the state budget: one is for forest products development; another is for the Natural Area Reserves System, discussed above; a third is for forest recreation, which includes trail and hunting programs; and the forest and wildlife resources budget, discussed in this section.) The Legislature’s budget bill also gave the forest and wildlife account another $2 million diverted from the Natural Area Reserve special fund.
The increase of $4 million was short of what Lingle had announced she would seek in her budget message. In that, she stated she was asking for $5 million “to strengthen our commitment to controlling invasive species.”
“If sufficient funds exist, I intend to continue this initiative in the next fiscal biennium,” she wrote.
Yet, it turns out, even the $4 million the Legislature approved was too much for Lingle. After she received the Legislature’s budget, she whacked off another $1 million from the funds earmarked to help control invasive species. Still, she defended the action, telling the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “Nothing was dedicated before to invasive species control, so $3 million is significant.”
But is the $3 million in fact new money?
Lingle’s original budget called for $3 million of the $5 million to come from general funds, the state’s pot of revenue that is unrestricted as to how it can be spent, with the balance coming from the Natural Area Reserve fund. After the legislative cut and the further cut by Lingle, only $1 million remains in general fund support for the Hawai’i Invasive Species Council, funded through the DOFAW forest and wildlife resources account.
But even that $1 million, it could be argued, has been drawn from the NAR special fund. In fiscal 2004, the NAR fund was one of several special funds raided by the Legislature, and $1million of its assets were diverted to the general fund. In effect, then, the entire $3 million appropriation in “new” funds to fight invasive species comes from the NAR fund.
Can the NAR fund support the invasive species program and continue to meet its existing commitments?
The NAR fund receives 25 percent of the conveyance taxes paid to the state. State law requires the funds to be distributed to projects in the following order of priority: First, natural area partnerships and forest stewardship programs; second, watershed management partnerships; and third, a youth conservation corps.
In recent years, deposits to the fund have been running around $2.7 million. Yet expenditures have outstripped income; in fiscal year 2003, DOFAW spent $3.48 million on projects supported by the NAR fund, and in fiscal 2004, projections called for spending $3.3 million.
Sources at the DLNR say that paying for both DOFAW’s commitments to private landowners and underwriting expenses of the Hawai’i Invasive Species Council should not be a problem; soaring land values have pumped up conveyance taxes, and in fiscal 2004, they say, the NAR fund probably received on the order of about $5 million. Yet even so, the fund has been operating in the red. The question arises: how can Lingle’s promise of continuing HISC financial support be drawn from the NAR fund without breaching contracts with private landowners participating in the several programs supported by the same fund?
This question was posed to Randy Kennedy, who heads the Natural Area Reserve System, which, in addition to managing the NARS units, also oversees the distribution of the NAR fund monies to private cooperators. “The HISC raid,” he replied, “which is obviously money well spent if they achieve their goals, was hopefully a one-time transfer.”
As of October, the HISC was barely out of the starting gate in its race to spend the $3 million in its budget. Mindy Wilkinson, HISC coordinator with the Division of Forestry and Wildlife, said in mid-October that two fund transfers were pending approval from the DLNR fiscal office and the state director of finance. One was a transfer of funds from the DLNR to the Department of Health, in the amount of about $175,000, the other a transfer from DLNR to the Department of Agriculture for $650,000.
The funds to the DOH are to enhance the ability of its Vector Control Branch to respond to West Nile Virus. At present, Wilkinson said, Vector Control “has outdated computers, no fogging sprayers for mosquitos, no trucks on which to mount the sprayers.” The HISC funds will be spent on “mainly equipment and data systems,” she said.
The Department of Agriculture will be using its funds to support basic research into the state’s vulnerabilities when it comes to pests that may be brought into Hawai’i in cargo containers and private shipping services, such as FedEx and UPS. According to Neil Rimer of the Department of Agriculture’s quarantine branch, the funds will be used to hire research support workers to examine the material that’s coming in, “look at the volume, look at the risk – look through boxes, collect data.” That will help the department “figure out what’s coming in and see what pests are out there,” Rimer told Environment Hawai’i. Once that’s done, the state can better assess its long-term needs for more thorough routine and ongoing quarantine inspections.
The transfer of these, and more, funds to other agencies effectively takes the money out of the DLNR budget, making its overall spending authority shrink further. When all is said and done, after those inter-agency transfers, the overall nominal increase in support for the forest resources account is closer to $2 million than $3 million.
From the humblest catfish in Nu’uanu Valley to the magnificent humpback whale, the aquatic and marine species found in all Hawai’i waters fall under the jurisdiction of the DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Species, or DAR.
Compared to other DLNR agencies, it would seem as though DAR escaped the heaviest blows, with an actual net gain of about two full-time temporary positions. Yet Brian Kanenako, the DAR’s budget point man, says the personnel changes wrought by the Legislature were devastating. “We lost the backbone of our labor force,” he says. Forty percent of the division’s technical work force – the guys that build things, assist with marine and freshwater surveys, and do whatever other odd jobs need to be done – was cut. The addition of two new temporary positions was no addition at all: the people now added had been working for DAR for years under a contract through the Research Corporation of the University of Hawai’i (RCUH). The only change is that now their paychecks are issued by a different state agency. According to Kanenako, the Legislature insisted that the positions be made part of the DAR personnel count.
One possible reason the DAR cuts were mild by comparison might be that year after year, its vacancy rates were among the lowest in the DLNR.
The Division of State Parks is often the target of brutal criticism, arising from the sad state of repair of many of the state’s most important recreational areas. If maintenance and upkeep are a function of personnel, though, don’t expect to see the condition of Hawai’i’s decrepit parks improve anytime soon. The parks agency went from having 126 authorized permanent positions in fiscal 2004 to having 105 in fiscal 2005.
As with DOCARE, State Parks had been attempting to hire personnel to fill most of the two dozen or so vacancies it had last fall when the Legislature decided to cut them instead, says Dan Quinn, administrator of the division. Even now, he says, he’s recruiting for several vacancies, but admits it’s often a long and arduous process to fill them. “There’s a lot of scrutiny of the positions,” he told Environment Hawai’i. “We need the governor’s approval for each one. And we have it for some, but on others we’re still awaiting approval.”
Have any of his requests for filling vacancies been rejected? “We haven’t had rejections,” he responded, “but they’ve sent some back” for resubmittal. “At the end of the last session, we got some back and they asked for reprioritization,” he added.
Quinn said he’s pushing to have the department’s budget for fiscal 2006 include the positions lost in 2005. The budget process is still ongoing, and Quinn was uncertain at press time as to how his request would play out in the administration’s final budget request to the 2005 Legislature.
The loss in personnel hurts State Parks especially hard, he said. “It stretches us even thinner, primarily in areas of maintenance,” Quinn said. “The age of our facilities and infrastructure have exacerbated the maintenance problems. One of the real bright points is passage of a bill that allows the Transient Accommodations Tax,” he added, referring to the tax paid by hotels and other businesses that cater to tourists, “help with park and trails upkeep. This is the second year for that.”
State Parks received a $5 million capital improvement budget for fiscal 2005, much of it for reconstruction of older facilities, compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and replacement of large-capacity cesspools with facilities that meet new federal rules that come into effect next spring.
The $5 million is a start, but Quinn says his division needs closer to $73 million in capital funds “to bring our facilities up to where we’d like to be.”
The DLNR’s Land Division oversees al-most all leases of state-owned land, amounting to hundreds of thousands of acres. Its land agents are to ensure that lessees are complying with the terms and conditions of their leases, a task that in the past has been made difficult by personnel shortages, yet which is imperative if state lands are to be husbanded responsibly. In addition, the Land Division houses the Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, which processes applications for Conservation District Use Permits, shoreline certifications, and beach restoration projects, among other things.
This agency, however, lost five positions by action of the 2004 Legislature. One of the five was not abolished but was shifted to the Department of Agriculture, which took over management of some of the agricultural lands formerly leased out by the DLNR. All the lost or transferred positions – and several more – were vacant as of December 2003, when the division had no fewer than 12 of its authorized positions vacant, including one vacancy created in 2000 when an employee died.
The Land Division gets nearly all its support from the Special Land and Development Fund, which receives rents from state lands. In past years, this fund has been subject to raiding; in fiscal 2003, for example, $13,150,000 was transferred from this fund to the state’s general fund.
The state Commission on Water Resource Management, which is administratively attached to the Department of Land and Natural Resources, suffered much the same fate as other DLNR branches in the FY 2005 budget. Two permanent positions were cut (the same two that were added in FY 2004). Overall, though, operating budget cuts were not severe. If one considers only the general-funded portion of the budget, the cuts come to less than 2 percent.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 15, Number 5 November 2004
Leave a Reply