Editorial

What Will It Take to Save A Refuge?

From the murk that surrounds the federal government’s dealings with the former owners of the South Kona unit of the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, one indisputable fact emerges. The former owners and those representing them have utterly no shame.

Worse yet, despite loud protests to the contrary, they seem to possess not a scintilla of concern for the welfare of the land and the precious and rare plants and animals inhabiting it.

The upshot is that these natural resources for which the public paid a more than fair price have suffered six years of neglect. A recent survey shows forest cover has diminished by 10 percent in the last 10 years – the result in large part of grazing by cattle that have no business being there but remain because the former owners have made it impossible for the government to remove them. The status of endangered plants cannot be monitored because the former owners have blocked routine access.

The ‘alala, the chief reason for the government’s interest in the land in the first place, has not been seen in the area for more than a year and is feared to be extinct in the wild. Could this have been prevented by more aggressive management? We will never know, but the possibility is there.

The overarching question has to be: Why?

The former owners have attempted to blame the government for the many impasses. But this doesn’t wash. If the government officials involved in this debacle are to be faulted for anything, it is their all-too-patient indulgence of the former owners’ outrageous claims – among others, that every thing on the 5,300-acre refuge that has not grown roots is their personal property, for which the government must pay them removal costs; and that a promise to grant access easements to the government means that they can impose additional costly and onerous conditions for road use.

No, the fault lies squarely with two sisters who once owned the refuge land and their two associates (one the husband of a sister, the other portraying himself, usually, as an unpaid friend). This quartet seems determined to latch onto every conceivable technicality or legal loophole and turn it into a hobble on the Fish and Wildlife Service. In this fashion, the service has become so entangled in legal knots that it has been unable to protect the land and the resources for which the federal government – make that: we – paid so handsomely.

Not content with receiving almost $8 million for their land (and whatever the sisters say, they were willing sellers who requested condemnation), the former owners have taken the Fish and Wildlife Service to court over its failure to pay extortionate relocation costs for items that most people would be thrilled to walk away from. But because of a federal law requiring the government to pay moving costs for landowners displaced by condemnation, suddenly the junk obtains value far beyond anything it would be worth in the marketplace. Thus has dross – a pile of rotting koa, water troughs unable to hold water, broken salt boxes – been transformed into gold. Rumplestiltskin would be proud.

In this light, the former owners’ reluctance to move their claimed “personal property” on their own – a “self-move,” as the law calls it – becomes understandable, if contemptible. For a self-move, they would be paid only their actual, documented costs. Under this scenario, the owners would gain nothing by removing their extensive “personal property” from the refuge except continued possession of it – a dubious benefit, given the decrepitude of most items.

What the former owners appear to be seeking instead is the best of all possible worlds: To have the government pay them a “settlement” just shy of a quarter million dollars that could seem reasonable only when held against the low bid of a commercial mover, whose estimate had to include costs imposed by the former owners such as unspecified but probably usurious road use fees (payable to them), liability insurance, and the like.

By the time the quarter-million-dollar settlement was offered, the Fish and Wildlife Service had finally let go of any delusions it may have had of being able to arrive at a fair deal with such people. In the weeks leading up to the inevitable federal lawsuit, it stood its ground. With the former owners having ignored the service’s deadline for arrangement of a commercial move, the service argued that the only option available to the former owners was the self-move. And so the litigation began.

Slow Roads

Alas, the litigation deals only with relocation costs. The matter of securing overland access – necessary for meaningful management of natural resources – has not been raised for more than a year, when the Fish and Wildlife Service last proposed condemnation. As one of the realty officers with the service explained recently, the current administration does not favor the taking of private lands by unwilling sellers.

Where does that leave the issue of access to the South Kona refuge lands? If ever there was a case for unfriendly condemnation, even by an administration punctiliously respectful of private property rights, it is to be found in South Kona. Yet with no one in the federal government pursuing this, when can the Fish and Wildlife Service’s biologists ever expect to be able to give the refuge and its resources the attention they deserve and need?

In January 1999, in two days of discussions with federal officials over relocation and access issues, Bill Rosehill informed staff of the Fish and Wildlife Service that the courts should decide the dispute over access. The message could not have been clearer had it been written on the wall, and yet the service has ignored it.

If access is to be gained, something or someone will have to give. Will it be when the federal government resolves to take the dispute to court? This option isn’t likely until after the 2004 elections, if then.

Will it be when the refuge’s former owners have a change of heart? We might as well wait until the Ice Age hits Hell, by which time the refuge’s natural resources will have long been history.

Or will the impasse finally be broken by yet another lawsuit from conservationists seeking to force all parties involved to do what is right and required? Much as the former owners have protested against such lawsuits in the past, their own actions are an engraved invitation to meet them in court.

Volume 14, Number 5 November 2003