Board Talk

Damon Estate Hopes to Avoid Fine, Restore Logged Lands in Ka’u

In April, the Board of Land and Natural Resources fined Damon Estate $480,335 for allowing Steve’s Ag Services to take hundreds of trees from Conservation District land owned by the estate in Ka’u. Believing the fines were miscalculated, Damon Estate’s attorney requested a contested case hearing immediately after the board’s decision.

Whatever the outcome of the contested case, Damon Estate may avoid paying the fines altogether by exercising one of the conditions of the Land Board’s April 11 decision. It states that in lieu of paying the fine (not including $13,535 in administrative costs), Damon Estate could instead restore the degraded Kahuku Ranch land.

This option was at first thought to be infeasible, since Damon Estate is selling most of Kahuku Ranch to the National Park Service this month. As it turns out, though, the estate is trying to achieve restoration by partnering with the Park Service.

And the estate has moved quickly. Within a week of the Land Board’s April decision, Damon Estate consultant Charles Wakida had prepared a reforestation plan, attorney Linnel Nishioka told the Land Board at its May 9 meeting on Maui. Nishioka, a former deputy attorney general and director of the state Commission on Water Resource Management, is now representing Damon Estate.

At the May meeting, Nishioka asked that the Land Board chair delay selecting a hearing officer for the contested case while the estate continues work on the reforestation plan, which it will submit to the Land Board upon its completion. Nishioka told the board that Wakida had worked with the Park Service in developing the plan. “We think we’re going to have a really nice private-public partnership, the kind that I know you like to see at DLNR,” she said.

After the estate’s trustees approve the plan, the estate will take it to the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands (formerly known as the Land Division’s Planning Branch) and its Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

Nishioka said that the state hopes to present the plan to the board at its second meeting in June on the Big Island.

“We don’t object with the process moving forward, but the state can save resources” by not appointing a hearing officer right away, Nishioka said. The Land Board agreed to her request and voted to defer selecting a hearing officer until August 31.

The Land Board has approved six years of funding for The Nature Conservancy’s Kapunakea and Pelekunu preserves. On April 25, the Land Board renewed the preserves’ enrollment in the state’s Natural Area Partnership Program, which provides matching funds to private landowners managing native ecosystems.

From fiscal year 2004 through 2009, the state will provide two thirds of the total budget for managing both preserves, $882,705 for Pelekunu on Moloka’i, and $791,888 for Kapunakea on Maui. The money will go toward assistance in the control of ungulates, invasive species, and small mammals, rare species protection and research, community outreach, and watershed partnerships, among other things.

The rugged, remote Pelekunu preserve spans 5,759 acres in northeast Moloka’i and is a large piece in the East Moloka’i Watershed Partnership. The preserve, created in 1986, protects the area’s stream system – “one of the best remaining in Hawai’i,” according to TNC – as well as a dozens of rare or endangered plant, bird, snail, and insect species.

In 1992, Pioneer Mill Company, Ltd. gave TNC a perpetual conservation easement on 1,264 acres of its land in West Maui. Now known as the Kapunakea preserve, the area’s upper regions are “recognized as among the highest quality native areas in the state,” the TNC states in its management plan. Also home to a variety of rare species, the Kapunakea preserve contains ten different types of native-dominated ecosystems, from bogs to shrublands to koa and ‘ohi’a forests.

Both preserves have been part of the NAPP since 1992.

The DLNR wants to develop state lands near Honokohau, Hawai’i, but lacks the expertise to do it. So, it plans to issue a request for proposals to developers, one of which may ultimately receive a 65-year lease for the 349-acre area.

Mostly vacant and zoned Conservation and Urban, the area has great revenue potential, the DLNR’s Land Division has determined. The division’s objective is to have a “master-planned mixed use development project with resort, commercial, industrial and/or marina components,” according to a staff report.

The area contains some Honokohau Harbor-related facilities, which the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation manages, as well as archaeological features and anchialine ponds, which the National Parks Service is managing under a revocable permit.

At the Land Board’s April 25 meeting, a mistake in the staff submittal suggesting that the board would be approving a lease that day caused a minor panic among the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the environmental groups Life of the Land and Hawai’i’s Thousand Friends, all of which showed up to oppose the action.

Land Division staff then clarified that it only meant to propose approving the concept of the development.

A couple of years ago, when the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation proposed to privatize the Ala Wai boat harbor, the Land Board created a group of stakeholders to help devise the RFP. Concerned that the Land Division had not made similar room in its process for public comment on the RFP, the Land Board asked that a public meeting be held to gather community input on development criteria.

The board also wanted briefings on that criteria was before the RFPs are issued, and on the qualified applicants and their proposals afterward.

After amending the staff’s recommendations to reflect the its wishes, the board unanimously approved the concept of issuing a direct lease for mixed-use development, a lease for future submerged lands, and a land license to excavate the harbor basin.

The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which owns 200 acres adjacent to the DLNR lands, has already selected an applicant to lease, develop, and manage a commercial/business park/resort/timeshare project there, and is in the process of negotiating a lease. According to the Land Division staff report, the DHHL developer would prefer to do a larger master-planned project that would include the DLNR’s lands.

— Teresa Dawson

Volume 13, Number 12 June 2003