Days before the departure of the Big Island administration of Mayor Harry Kim, the Hawai`i County Planning Department released draft guidelines for monitoring water quality in West Hawai`i. The “Revised Monitoring Protocol Guidelines” would, if adopted, establish more uniform reporting standards for developers and other large landowners whose Special Management Area permits include water-quality monitoring requirements.
As the document explains, the need for uniform, consistent data on marine life and water quality was identified more than a decade ago in meetings of the West Hawai`i Coastal Monitoring Task Force. Guidelines developed back then have been used since to evaluate water quality monitoring plans submitted by SMA permit applicants.
But the reaction to the November draft has been mixed. While some officials praise the proposed guidelines as a huge step forward, the responses of others, including permit holders, have been cooler.
Among those welcoming the proposal is Bill Walsh, the aquatic biologist in Kona who works for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Aquatic Resources. “A lot of the existing monitoring is piecemeal, hodgepodge,” Walsh told Environment Hawai`i. Walsh praised county planner Dana Okano, who was in charge of the project, for taking that and achieving “quite a convergence of methodologies” in the draft guidelines.
In Honolulu, Watson Okubo, with the state Department of Health’s Clean Water Branch, was more skeptical. “My initial impression is, it’s rather ambitious,” Okubo said in a telephone interview. “So much so, I’m asking, what are they doing all of this for? What are they trying to accomplish? If you do everything that’s in there, it’ll cost somebody a lot of money.”
In fact, Okubo seemed skeptical about the very need for monitoring water quality in West Hawai`i at all. “The water quality is such that, it’s good quality already,” he said. “To me, I think the developers or whoever owns these companies should be asked to spend money in other areas that would help the environment. When you talk about water quality and compare Kona water with O`ahu water, it’s like night and day…. On O`ahu, it seems any good rain will turn Kaiaka Bay turbid and yucky. Look at Ke`ehi Lagoon – a little rain makes the place look like soup. So, generally speaking, Kona is pretty clean.”
A Need for Change
In 2004, the county asked the University of Hawai`i at Hilo Marine Science Department to evaluate the data collected by SMA permit holders in West Hawai`i. Thirteen projects were identified as having a monitoring component in their SMA permits. Of those, however, monitoring reports from just three – Waikoloa resort, the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawai`i Authority, and Hokuli`a, the controversial agricultural subdivision – “contained sufficient data over a sufficient duration to evaluate temporal trends for water quality and compliance with [Hawai`i Department of Health] water quality standards; none of the other developments even came close to having sufficient data for these types of analyses.” (Actually, the reports from NELHA stopped in 2002. For the period 2002 through 2006, NELHA did not file timely annual reports, and instead make up the deficiency with one huge make-up report in March 2007. As of mid-December, it was again in arrears on its reports.)
After two years of work, in April 2006, the university evaluators made three recommendations to the county:
First, the guidelines developed in 1992 should be “revised, amplified, enhanced, adhered to, and enforced,” with the guidelines being provided to developers before they apply for SMA permits.
Second, “a countywide coastal water monitoring program needs to be developed to monitor long-term environmental changes at existing and future developments.” This, the report said, “will provide crucial data for evaluation of environmental conditions and impacts on coastal resources and water quality. We suggest that the program be directed by Hawai`i County and funded from fees charged to existing and future resorts and developments in West Hawai`i.”
Finally, “Hawai`i County needs to develop an anchialine pond protection/ management program. This program would include a) an enforcement policy of no net loss of ponds on both public and private lands, b) conducting an island-wide inventory of anchialine ponds, and c) establishing water quality standards for ponds. Without development of an anchialine protection/ management program, anchialine ponds will most likely disappear within the next two decades.”
Against this background, Okano, a planner hired by the state Coastal Zone Management Program but working for the county, organized a series of stakeholder meetings in April 2008. The November draft guidelines were the initial outcome, but whether the project will be pursued by the new administration of Mayor Billy Kenoi is an unanswered question.
Former county Planning Director Chris Yuen said he did not know what his successor would do. “I know the direction we were on,” he said in a telephone interview. “The genesis of this was, the county collects all this water quality monitoring data… I wanted to see if there were any trends and have an independent review of it.”
The UHH Marine Science Department, which undertook the review, suspected there might be a trend to increasing nutrients, particularly nitrates, Yuen said, but the data were insufficient to be definitive.
“The principal recommendation was to go back to the 1992 monitoring protocols that had been developed and agreed upon by the various players, but had not been acted upon.” While many of the chemical parameters of water quality were being regularly monitored by the SMA permittees, “it wasn’t comprehensive or consistent,” Yuen said. And biological monitoring at both the micro- and macro- scale was seriously lacking, he said.
“It was clear we couldn’t just simply adopt the 1992 protocols,” he added. The draft that was released just as Yuen was leaving office “wasn’t an ultimatum,” he said, just “a firmer draft of what we would want to do.” It was sent out to stakeholders for their reactions and input, he said. The idea wasn’t to increase the burdens on SMA permit holders, he said: “If we don’t understand the burdens of this monitoring, they need to let us know. It’s still a matter of discussion, but the idea is to make it standard and get a little more in the way of field observation.”
Alarm
Ron Baird, administrator of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawai`i Authority, signaled his alarm over the draft at the December meeting of the NELHA board. NELHA’s two SMA permits require extensive water quality monitoring, most of it chemical. Baird said that although he had been able to economize by eliminating two positions in NELHA’s water quality laboratory, “under the draft water quality monitoring plan … the environmental monitoring program here would have to be substantially expanded…. We will probably have to add a couple of positions in our water lab and begin a more intense monitoring program.” The costs, he said, would be charged to all tenants.
Baird also disparaged the need for the proposed changes. At the April meeting, he said, “there was considerable discussion by our staff, Dr. [Steve] Dollar, Dr. [Richard] Brock [water quality consultants], about this unrealistic academic proposal…. When the draft report came out, all those concerns were totally missing, they weren’t even referenced.”
The new protocols involve “a substantial amount of proposed clinical tests – frankly busywork – dissolved nitrogen, total nitrogen,” Baird said. “Some of these tests are totally without any reason. Some of these tests the Department of Health has said. these don’t do any good at all, why would you test for these?”
Baird urged members of the NELHA board to push back against the draft guidelines. Board Chairman John DeLong seemed willing to oblige: “It sounds like we need to mount a lobbying effort, some kind of educational effort, so we don’t incur needless expenses that we’re passing onto tenants that clearly don’t benefit the environment…. Where should we focus our efforts?”
“With the new county planning director,” Baird said.
Bobby Command, Mayor Kenoi’s new executive assistant for West Hawai`i, was attending his first meeting as the county’s representative on the NELHA board. “I don’t know how urgent this is,” he said at the meeting. “The new mayor hasn’t selected a planning director. I suggest we wait.”
Baird acknowledged that the new administration might not pursue the previous planning director’s initiative. Still, Command was charged with finding out what the Kenoi administration’s intentions were and reporting them back to NELHA.
“This is something I should get educated on, and brief you on,” he said.
In mid-December, Environment Hawai`i asked Command what the administration’s position would be on the guidelines. Command, who was a reporter with West Hawai`i Today before joining the county, said he still needed “to get up to speed on that.”
Monitoring Elsewhere
When it comes to monitoring as a condition of permits for the SMA, which are issued at the county level, Hawai`i County seems to have taken the lead with the guidelines for West Hawai`i. A staffer with the City and County of Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting said that that agency had no guidelines. Thorne Abbott, who is the CZM planner for Maui County, said that “only a couple of projects” in the Wailea-Makena area have water quality monitoring requirements included as SMA permit conditions, but the county had no uniform protocol for collecting the data. (Abbott, by the way, had high praise for the efforts of Hawai`i County, and particularly Dana Okano, to improve monitoring efforts in West Hawai`i.) In Kaua`i, a staff person with the county Planning Department CZM program said that the county had nothing similar to the West Hawai`i monitoring protocol, but it was certainly an idea that was worth considering.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 19, Number 7 January 2009
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