Since 1989, taxpayers in Hawai’i have been picking up the costs of meetings of the Hawai’i Space Development Authority. That usually involves some travel for the authority’s chairman, Thomas B. Hayward, since the meetings are held in California. Other expenses are for dinners, lunches, breakfasts, and the like. Some members of the unpaid authority also are reimbursed their travel expenses.
Who are the authority’s members?
No one seems to know for sure at the Office of Space Industry, a branch of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. The office’s director, Ken Munechika, recently told Environment Hawai’i that he was aware that a board member had passed away lately, but did not know whether that position had been filled. (The death was that of Thomas O. Paine, a former administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He died in May 1992.) Munechika hesitated to identify any other members.
Munechika was asked if John Jefferies might be a member. No, Munechika said; Jefferies’ name “doesn’t ring a bell.” (According to Hayward’s billings, Jefferies, who departed as director of the University of Hawai’i’s Institute for Astronomy in 1983, is a board member.)
Munechika did not want to answer any other questions about the Space Development Authority before consulting with Hayward. “Admiral Hayward is the individual, the chairman,” Munechika said. When asked whether Hayward appointed the authority’s members, Munechika said: “I’ll have to ask.”
Mixed Messages
In a telephone interview, Hayward provided Environment Hawai`i with a list, starting, as Munechika did, with the late Thomas Paine. Other members identified by Hayward are Eberhardt Rechtin, Richard Smith, Willis Hawkins, and Jefferies each of them, according to Hayward, “well known and respected in their fields.”
Was Paul Coleman on the board?
“No,” Hayward answered. “That would be a conflict of interest. Dr. Coleman is head of the Universities Space Research Association, so his participation on the authority board might put him in a position of conflict. ” But, Hayward added, “Coleman is an observer at board meetings – a very active, helpful observer.”
Actually, Coleman, too, was identified by Hayward as “HSDA Board member” on Hayward’s invoice number 158 (December 18, 1992).
According to Hayward, he selects – and the governor approves- the people who sit on the authority’s advisory board. No one in the governor’s office, however, had any knowledge of current board members.
Unclear Mandate
It is difficult to know precisely how much the state has spent to support the work of the authority. Apart from the hundreds of thousands of dollars the state has paid to Hayward, its chairman, the Office of Space Industry would appear, from its budget records, to have paid something on the order of $20,000 a year since 1989 to reimburse HSDA members’ meals and travel costs.
Yet to date, Hawai’i has no law establishing the HSDA. In 1991, the Legislature had the chance to do so. Legislation introduced that year (Senate Bill 1391 and House Bill 900) would have established the authority and would have given it vast powers (including the power of eminent domain). By the same token, the bill would have made the authority exempt “from all statutes, ordinances, charter provisions, and rules of any governmental agency relating to planning, zoning, construction standards…” On February 1, 1991, the Senate Planning Committee (Milton Holt, chairman) and the Senate Science, Technology and Economic Development Committee (chaired by Richard Matsuura) heard the bill.
Apart from George Mead, then director of the Office of Space Industry, few of those testifying were supportive of the measure. Murray Towill, newly appointed DBEDT director, appeared somewhat embarrassed by the bill, which he described as merely a “trial balloon” that he had inherited. Holt and Matsuura decided to hold the bill in committee.
In the two years since that bill was heard, the administration has not prepared or introduced any other bill establishing a space authority.
Paper Authority
Legislative approval of the authority seems to have been – in the eyes of the OSI and Hayward, at least- a technicality. Well before and long since the hearing on the space development authority bill, Hayward has regularly used stationery bearing the “Hawai’i Space Development Authority” name and identifying himself as its chairman.
David Penn, a resident of Na’alehu doing graduate work at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, is perhaps the most dogged of several people taking exception to Hayward’s ongoing identification of himself as chairman of an authority that has yet to be established by law. He expressed his views to Hayward in a letter October 21,1991, to which Hayward responded a month later (on HSDA stationery). Hayward wrote:
“Regarding my use of the title Chairman, Hawai’i Space Development Authority, this is to advise you that at the time I accepted this assignment from the governor, three years ago, my title was then and still remains, Chairman, Hawai’i Space Development Authority and Special Advisor to the Governor. The purpose of such a title was to provide a clear indication to industry and governments outside of the state of the seriousness of Hawai’i’s interest in pursuing the commercial spaceport concept. The HSDA was created by the authority of Chapter 201-7, HRS [Hawai’i Revised Statutes] and was properly registered in the state.”
Penn was not swayed. “I reject your claim” of HSDA’s legitimacy, he wrote Hayward on February 24, 1992. “HRS 201-7 refers only to DBED’s authority to appoint and utilize ‘advisory committees,’ not development authorities…. I would like to know who conferred your title upon you and the details of HSDA being ‘properly registered in the state.’ As it stands now, I can only conclude that your continued use of this title and HSDA’s promotion of itself as an official government agency is contrary to the intent of the state Legislature and the democratic will of the people, and may be in violation of Hawai’i law.”
Hayward has not answered that last letter of Penn. Ultimately, Penn’s questions ended up at the Department of Attorney General, at the request of Senator Andrew Levin.
In Name Only
Levin’s original request was sent to the attorney general in October of 1991. When no answer had been received by late April of 1992, he wrote again – this time receiving an answer from Deputy Attorney General Ann M. Ogata-Deal, dated May 27, 1992.
Ogata-Deal stated that the HSDA “was established by memorandum dated April 1, 1989, from the Honorable Roger A. Ulveling, then-director of business and economic development, to Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, Special Advisor to the Governor for Space… The memorandum provides that the HSDA was established to ‘bring together acknowledged leaders in the aerospace field for the purpose of advising on and helping formulate Hawai’i’s space policy,’ and names Admiral Hayward as the chairman of the HSDA.”
Ogata-Deal notes further that “under Section 201-7 of Hawai’i Revised Statutes, DBEDT is authorized to appoint advisory committees.” In addition, she referred to Act 355 of the 1988 Session Laws of Hawai’i – which established the Office of Space Industry – as providing “further evidence that space-related matters fall within the purview of DBED.”
“Although the HSDA is styled as an ‘authority’ rather than an ‘advisory committee,”‘ Ogata-Deal wrote, “we believe that the function of the HSDA, rather than its name, is determinative of its legality under Section 201-7. The memorandum establishes the HSDA as an advisory committee of DBED with its function limited to ‘advising on and helping formulate Hawai’i’s space policy.’”
In this light, Ogata-Deal concluded, “we believe that the HSDA is a legally established advisory committee under Section 201-7, Hawai’i Revised Statutes.”
The Official List
On June 18, the Office of Space Industry finally provided Environment Hawai’i with an official list of advisory board members. They are: Hayward, Jefferies, Rechtin (“former chairman and CEO, Aerospace Corporation”); Hawkins (“senior advisor, Lockheed Corporation”); Smith (“former general manager, Kennedy Space Center”); and “Dr. Thomas O. Payne” (sic) – who, OSI notes, “recently passed away.”
Volume 4, Number 1 July 1993
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