Editorial

<b.Hawai'i Can't Afford Cuts to the DLNR's Budget

There’s no money.”

It’s an excuse as old as the hills and as common as it is ancient. But when it comes to managing Hawai’i’s precious natural resources – its irreplaceable and endangered plants and animals, its limited freshwater, the crystal nearshore waters and the marine life they support, the forests, trails, parks, and beaches that we’ve come to take as our birthright – that excuse cannot be accepted without challenge.

For when those natural resources are allowed to disappear or diminish in lean times, the prospect of their restoration when times are flush simply does not exist. Once they’re gone, all the tea in China won’t buy them back.

So what, exactly, was the Legislature thinking when it gave the state Department of Land and Natural Resources such a shellacking for fiscal year 2005? Probably it wasn’t thinking at all; in all likelihood, it was, in the everlasting search for targets of budgetary opportunity, merely going for the easiest target – the weak, the lame, the halt.

And that’s exactly what the DLNR has been allowed to become under the administration of Governor Lingle and her appointed chief of natural resources, ex-land-appraiser and wine merchant Peter Young.

As the cover article this month clearly lays out, the fiscal lashings sustained by the DLNR go to the heart of this key agency’s ability to carry out its core tasks. To recap:

The DLNR’s enforcement arm, the Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement, lost 12 permanent full-time positions. That’s a cut of more than 10 percent. DOCARE is responsible for enforcing the department’s regulations in and on the water, on state-owned land, and in the state Conservation District. It never was adequately funded. Now, with these cuts, scofflaws, poachers, and worse have been given a virtual green light to conduct their mischief without fear of punishment.

The Natural Area Reserves System, which bears responsibility for protecting and preserving the state’s rarest and most threatened ecosystems, has been reduced to beggary. It lost 5 of its 27 full-time staff positions and now is apparently expected to keep the 109,000-plus acres in its jurisdiction in pristine condition on a budget that parses out to barely $10 an acre. That’s outrageous.

The Division of Aquatic Resources, unlike many of its sister agencies within the DLNR, has kept its vacancy counts low and thus should have been spared the worst of the Legislature’s insults. Yet in effect it was punished for its good behavior. It actually lost workers when positions were cut. The apparent offset of two new added positions is just that – only apparent – since the two workers at issue were already working for DAR under contract.

Conditions throughout the state parks system, already grim, are hardly likely to improve, so far as maintenance and upkeep are concerned. While the Division of State Parks received much-needed capital improvement funds, a large measure of park problems can be laid to the door of poor and irregular upkeep. That means even fewer workers to clean the toilets, mow the grass, and in general keep the state’s parks in fighting trim.

We could go on and on: the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation, a favorite whipping boy of boating enthusiasts, lost 13 positions. The Bureau of Conveyances – which probably would be better housed in the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs – did gain two permanent positions, but lost 8 full-time temporary posts; it was one of the few divisions that actually saw its operational budget increase substantially (rising to $3.2 million from $2.6 million in fiscal 2004).

A Difficult System

Many of the DLNR’s hits came as a result of its high vacancy rates. Yet ask any state employee, whether in or out of the DLNR, about the state’s civil service program, administered by the Department of Human Resources Development, and be prepared to sit back and listen as, hour after hour, the complaints mount. No one we’ve spoken with would favor a return to the pre-civil service days, but the burdens that DHRD imposes on administrators statewide is unduly heavy. The state would certainly be well served if the Legislature or its auditor explored why this agency is so often accused of ineptitude, laziness, or worse.

Still, other executive departments have managed to blaze a trail through the civil service bureaucracy. There has to be another reason the DLNR has been so spectacularly unsuccessful in filling its many vacant positions. And this, we suspect, lies in the intentional desire to keep positions open.

Sure enough, a review of the DLNR’s monthly personnel vacancy reports reveals that month after month, positions have been deliberately kept vacant “to meet vacancy savings.” Also, within weeks of taking office, Governor Lingle put in place a hiring freeze, with no vacant positions to be filled unless and until she had issued specific authority. Here, again, the DLNR’s vacancy reports show that in case after case, recruitment efforts were suspended as a result of this freeze.

In interviews with DLNR division chiefs, many said they were looking to the 2005 Legislature to restore the harsh cuts inflicted in 2004. A memo last June to all department heads from Director of Finance Georgina Kawamura suggests that won’t be likely. In preparing their biannual budget requests for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, Kawamura advised, “Do not ask for more money. Instead, identify the specific and potential areas for budget reduction, cost containment, and improved performance.”

Living Beyond Our Means

Much of the focus of the Lingle administration has been on the need for Hawai’i to live within its fiscal means. That’s only prudent. But at a time when the economy is strong and state revenues are increasing and expected to continue to rise, it makes little sense to stint on spending that is needed to maintain, to say nothing of to augment, Hawai’i’s natural resources. Time and again, economists have in recent years pointed out the nexus between natural resources and economic strength. If the state loses or damages its freshwater aquifers, if it allows its beaches and parks to fall into disrepair, if it loses watershed lands to development, if it allows native ecosystems to wither and the animals within them to disappear into oblivion, then it is living beyond its means, no matter what the fiscal bottom line.

If the Department of Land and Natural Resources is to live up to the stewardship obligations that have been invested in it by the Constitution and the Legislature, it absolutely must have additional funds and additional personnel. If the Lingle administration refuses to ask for them, the Legislature should step up to the plate and insist that, at least in this area, the DLNR be given the wherewithal to protect Hawai’i’s irreplaceable natural resources. Perhaps that means devising new methods for recovering costs of resource management. The Division of Aquatic Resources might take a slice of the fees tour boat operators plying marine reserve waters pay to the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation. The Natural Area Reserve fund could be restructured to provide funds for managing state lands as well as private ones. And the conveyance tax could be reasonably increased to provide additional funds for watershed management, whether on state or private lands.

Whatever it takes, the cuts made by the 2004 Legislature must be restored. And the DLNR’s vacancy rates, which continue to hover at unacceptably high levels, have to be shrunk. From the governor to the Legislature and beyond, we must recognize that without its natural resources, Hawai’i would be an inhospitable rock. To protect them and restore them is one of the state government’s most fundamental duties.

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 15, Number 5 November 2004