Letters

posted in: August 1994 | 0

Legislature Changes Law On Conservation Land

The law regulating activities in the Conservation District has been rewritten and re-coedited. The changes that were made may have significant ramifications.

Throughout the legislative session, Department of Land and Natural Resources officials declared that House Bill 3445 was a product of the Conservation District Review Project Advisory Committee and that the bill did not substantively alter existing law. Neither claim was true.

After one committee hearing, the Sierra Club and Citizens for Protection of the North Kohala Coastline succeeded in getting the bill amended in ways far more protective of the environment. Unfortunately, Representative Terrance Tom stripped the bill of all but one of our amendments and Senator Randy Iwase refused to restore them.

Our amendments would have offered greater protection of cultural resources, prohibited golf courses and resorts in the Conservation District, and closed various loopholes. The DLNR argued (correctly) that these amendments would have changed the law. But so too did the bill without our amendments.

Among other things, the bill now allows the Board of Land and Natural Resources to establish uses for which no permit is required. Such a provision may be sensible (such as to remove alien species), but is subject to abuse. The major concern is that the Land Board will exempt the Kaua’i boaters from having to obtain a Conservation District Use Permit. Theoretically, the board should have to go through rulemaking to provide such an exemption – but you never know.

We were successful in getting the bill amended in one way. Though the legalese is complicated, the bill makes it abundantly clear that private citizens have the right to sue private parties violating the Conservation District law, its rules, or terms of a Conservation District Use Permit and obtain injunctive relief as well as attorneys fees, if the suit is successful.

David Kimo Frankel
Sierra Club, Hawai’i Chapter

No Bad Faith In S.P.A.M. Process

As quoted in your July 1994 issue, Alan Murakami’s comments on the report of the Stream Protection and Management Task Force, coupled with your own parenthetical comment, suggest that Meredith Ching of Alexander & Baldwin somehow broke faith with the rest of the committee by backpedaling from agreements that had been made previously by the Task Force. As a mediator, I take no position on the merits of the particular issues Alan may have referred to. Nor am I an apologist for Alexander & Baldwin or, for that matter, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. My interest is in perceptions of the process.

In that regard, the ground rules that enabled Alan, Meredith, and all of the other committee members to accomplish what they did were predicated on being able to make changes to an emerging document that took many months to come together. In fact, all of the committee members agreed from the time deliberations started that any understandings reached would be considered contingent agreements until the committee’s entire deliberation process was completed. The purpose of this ground rule was to make sure that all of the recommendations and all of the sub-parts of the various recommendations could be understood and approved or not “in total” and in relation to each other.

Many changes to the document were made at the very end of the committee’s deliberations by many members, including Alan, Meredith, and others. All of this was perfectly acceptable under the committee’s adopted rules. While the issues under discussion were difficult ones, I believe everyone put out their best effort. Failure to reach agreement does not imply bad faith. It just means the issues are tough ones.

Peter S. Adler
Hawai’i Justice Foundation

Volume 5, Number 2 August 1994