Thirteen years ago, the Department of Land and Natural Resources launched a project that signaled a new seriousness of purpose to protect Hawai`i’s diminished forests. An exploding population in West Hawai`i, concerns about loss of habitat for the islands’ imperiled native species, and a desire to protect the mountain sources of replenishment for important aquifers – all combined to spur the DLNR to propose adding more than 15,000 acres to the Big Island forest reserves.
The initiative marked the first time since statehood that the government had contemplated a substantial addition to the forest reserve system, begun in 1903. By the mid-1950s, the system had reached its peak size of about 1.2 million acres (out of a total of 4 million acres in the state). In the intervening years, however, the system had lost ground – some 229,000 acres of it, to be precise, or an area equivalent to nearly 20 percent of the pre-statehood acreage.
The territorial government also had allowed lands once buttoned up in the forest reserve system to be withdrawn, primarily bowing to pressures of ranchers. Despite those early losses, however, over the six decades of territorial oversight, the forest reserve system had managed to more than offset withdrawals with deposits.
At the time of the 1989 push, William Paty, then chairman of the Board of Land and Natural Resources, described the protection of the lands – on the slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa – as “a pressing concern.” The Land Board held a hearing on the proposal in December 1989, as the law required, and then voted its approval of the plan, with a few minor changes.
And so, 13 years after this initiative was launched, how much of the acreage has actually been added to the forest reserve? Not one square inch.
Forest Retreats
The reasons for withdrawing land from the forest reserves were varied. Thousands of acres were taken for parks, schools, agriculture, roads, airports, game management areas, and a host of other purposes.1 But the overwhelming majority of withdrawals were made to accommodate ranchers, who coveted lands that, unlike the pastures they had abused for a century or more, were still carpeted with ferns and grasses and shaded with `ohi`a, koa, and other native trees.
Consider the case of the South Kona Forest Reserve. In 1910, territorial forester Ralph Hosmer recommended setting aside lands ranging from Waiea in the north to Manuka, bisected only by a strip of homestead parcels. Altogether, Hosmer recommended inclusion of 50,612 acres, of which 31,730 acres (63 percent) was public land. Some of the public land was already under pasture lease, but it would be included in the reserve as soon as the leases expired. Of the private holdings, Hosmer wrote, owners “are generally in favor of the forest policy of the government and intend to manage their holdings in general conformity with the plans proposed by the Territorial Government. In particular, the Bishop Estate, owners of the land of Kapua, have already, in a recently executed lease, made provision for the reservation of the forest on that land within the boundaries recommended.”
Below 4,000 feet, the lands in the reserve were covered with `ohi`a, Hosmer wrote. Above that, to an elevation of from 5,000 to 6,000 feet, “is a belt of nearly pure koa. The trees are of good size, from 3 to 5 feet in diameter, and of fair height, 60 to 80 feet. This belt is approximately a mile wide.”
“At the extreme south end of Kona and on Manuka,” he continued, “there is a small section of great botanical interest, in that here are found trees and shrubs that occur only in one or two other places in Hawai`i.”
In 1926,when a last, small tract of about 1,200 acres was added, the South Kona Forest Reserve reached its peak size. But by the end of the decade, pressure to withdraw lands was heating up. In 1932, territorial forester C.S. Judd asked the Board of Agriculture and Forestry to approve the withdrawal of two tracts, having a total area of 3,938 acres. One of them was the land at Haukalua and Pahoehoe, just added in 1926 “because of its forest growth,” Judd wrote. But in the six years since, “the grazing industry has been developed in this section with the ranching enterprise of Mr. L.L. McCandless on the north side and C.Q. Yee Hop on the south side. With the introduction of livestock upon these adjacent areas there has naturally been trespass on this buffer.” Because of the high cost, “it has been impossible to secure the fencing of this tract,” he continued, an expense unwarranted especially since “the forest does not conserve running water.”
The second tract proposed for withdrawal in 1932 was 2,720 acres at Honomalino. When originally set aside in 1911, Judd wrote, these lands were not regarded as valuable for their protection of water reserves, but rather for the wood they could produce. “Since there is no prospect of establishing a successful logging enterprise in this region for long years to come,” wrote Judd, “the use of this land for the next highest purpose” – grazing – “is desirable now.” The tract “consists of scattered groves of `ohi`a and kopiko trees with a vigorous growth of guava thicketsÉ It is surrounded on all four sides by the privately owned lands which are being grazed by the Honomalino Ranch. Requests for cooperation from this ranch for fencing this area have not been grantedÉ I do not feel justified, either, in spending government money for the Territory’s share of a fence which will protect a forest area of doubtful value for strict forest purposes.”
In 1938, Governor Joseph P. Poindexter, finally acting upon the recommendation, signed a proclamation withdrawing the lands. That didn’t stop the pressure for release of even more lands from the South Kona reserve. In 1940, Yee Hop wanted to graze Kaohe 1 and 3 in the South Kona reserve, and the Board of Agriculture and Forestry (BAF) gave its consent. By 1943, Lester Marks, commissioner of public lands (and son-in-law of McCandless) was proposing the withdrawal of “the entire lands presently known as the South Kona Forest Reserve É for purposes of leasing.”
This time, the BAF stood its ground – and even won some back. Minutes of its November 23, 1943, meeting report that its president, Colin Lennox, recommended the board rescind its withdrawal of the Kaohe lands, on which, noted commissioner D.T. Fleming, stood “a great many large fine `ohi`a treese to allow continuous grazing on this land was a grave mistake.” The board approved Lennox’s recommendation.
Lost Value
In the mid-1950s, cattle ranching reached its zenith in Hawai`i, in terms of the area occupied by ranches (about 1.2 million acres of public and private land) and the lease rents paid for use of public grazing lands (about $550,000). In 1962, one of the most controversial issues facing the young state was how to manage public lands. Should the state’s vast holdings, including the huge tracts of grazing land, be parceled out and sold? This was favored by those who urged a mainland model of land ownership imposed on the islands and came to be known as the “second mahele.” Or should the state retain control of its lands and treat them as an asset to produce income and generate economic growth over the long term?
The resulting Act 32 generally adopted the second of these approaches. With certain well-described exceptions (benefiting chiefly the plantations), public lands were to be leased at auction to the highest bidder. The Department of Land and Natural Resources was required to determine before auction the specific use or uses for which each discrete parcel of land was to be put to. The successful bidder was constrained to abide by the identified use. Thus, for example, if the department was auctioning a lease of land whose intended use was sugar cultivation, the winning bidder could not use it as pasture or for residential purposes, but could – legally, at least – do nothing more than plant it in cane.
The changes effectively transformed public land into a tool the state could use to help certain favored sectors of the economy prosper. Much more was at stake in the leasing of lands than simply getting the most dollar-per-acre of rent. Instead, through the process of identifying and restricting land use, the state was able to push the economy in one or another direction.
At the end of the legislative process, the system of awarding pasture leases, which for more than a century encumbered the largest blocks of public lands, emerged little changed. Although some foresters were keenly aware of the damage to the land that grazing brought about, few realized that this system of leasing marginal lands for pasture could be ruinous to the ranchers as well. One of the first to note this was A.W. Carter of Parker Ranch. In 1938, he wrote, “it costs us considerably more to raise cattle in this Territory than it does on the Western ranches. Much of the Ranch land is government owned. This is put up at public auction and for the last fifteen years, there has been an irresponsible element who run the rental values up to prohibitive prices. A lessee may have had these lands stocked; the auction may not come off until shortly before a new lease is to take effect and the result is that he has to bid much more for the land than he would otherwise be willing to pay in order to have sufficient acreage to take care of the cattle he has on the property.
“In Hawai`i there is no sale for any large number of cattle. The market for butcher cattle is limited and there is very little sale for breeding cattle. All of the lands in the Territory that are used for cattle purposes are stocked and, therefore, if one is compelled to remove large numbers of cattle from lands on which he has lost a lease, he would have to sell them to the fellow who gets the lease at any price he will pay for them. This brings our average cost of leased lands to about five or six times as much as the average on the mainland on an equal carrying capacity.”2
As sincere as Carter’s complaints about the high cost of public pasture must have been, the fact remained that throughout the 20th century, rents for pasture leases were, acre for acre, a small fraction of rents paid for other agricultural uses. After 1962, leases began to include rental reopenings at specified periods of the lease, usually after 10 and 20 years. These reopenings called for an independent appraiser to determine whether the rent should be adjusted up or down, and, if so, by how much.
On occasion, the appraisal would determine that the rents obtained at auction for pasture leases were below what was reasonable, based on the carrying capacity of the land (total acreage divided by the number of acres it takes to support a cow or a cow-calf combination). But at other times, appraisers would find the lease rents paid during the first decade of a lease had been bid up so high at the initial public auction that the ranchers were paying rent that was more than the land could support, based on any reasonable assessment of its carrying capacity.
For example, a lease of about 7,300 acres at Kalopa and Kaohe 3, on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island, was auctioned in 1976 for $77,600 a year. In 1986, after the first adjustment in rent, annual lease payments were reduced to almost a third — $28,375. In 1996, at the second reopening, a commercial appraiser recommended the state receive $41,400 a year (based on a carrying capacity of 900 animals). The lessee, deputy state veterinarian Jason Moniz of K.K. Ranch, came back with his own appraisal, done by Burt Smith, a specialist in pasture and livestock management with the University of Hawai`i Cooperative Extension Service, that suggested the rental be no greater than $28,800 and that the carrying capacity be reduced to between 750 and 800 head of cattle. The state agreed. (Although leases allow the state to conduct inspections that might show whether land is being overgrazed, in practice, inspections are rare and inspectors are almost never able to obtain accurate, independent counts of animals on leased lands.)
In the case of other leases, lessees who felt they had paid more at auction than the land was worth would seek to change lease terms (say, not undertake improvements required, or fail to post a performance bond), fall behind on their rent, sell off stands of valuable timber, or go into default. Although the attorney general (backed by a Supreme Court decision) frowned on changes in lease terms after the award of a lease at auction, the failure of the Land Division of the Department of Land and Natural Resources to enforce lease terms consistently and scrupulously was tantamount to a de facto amendment of the original leases. And even when lessees were not flagrantly violating lease terms, some doubtless resorted to stocking more cattle on the land than the land could possibly support in order to increase ranch revenues, if only for the short term.
The long-term effect of ranching, even by the most conservative ranchers, has been a diminishment of the land’s ability to support livestock, and with it, a diminishment of the value of the land to the state, measured by a strictly economic index. For example, in 1982, the state leased out 172,194 acres of pasture lands on the island of Hawai`i. For this, the state was to receive $633,660 a year, or an average rent of about $3.70 an acre. Today, the state leases out 87,091 acres of pasture and agricultural land on Hawai`i, with annual rental totaling $340,666, or about $3.90 an acre. The slight increase in per-acre value does not take into account inflation, nor does it reflect the fact that the 2002 figures include higher-value agricultural lands (such as those used for diversified crops) that were not included in the 1982 figures.3 And, in any event, without regard to revenue per acre, the total acreage of Big Island land that is under pasture lease has been reduced by more than half, with a commensurate reduction in income to the state.
The issue goes beyond the fact that the state is state not receiving rent for tens of thousands of acres of public lands formerly under leases. The removal of these lands from rent rolls brings enormous liabilities as well. At Ukumehame on Maui, for example, where the last lessee had grazed 350 cattle on about 5,000 acres until the cattle were starving to death, bringing the land back into productive pasture use would entail replanting on an enormous scale along with the construction of paddocks and water lines. In today’s cattle market, where imported meat is cheaper than that raised locally, the capital investment such improvements would require could not possibly be justified in light of the meager returns provided by grazing at most 600 head of cattle on the land.
An even direr scenario exists at Pu`uwa`awa`a, on the island of Hawai`i. In this ahupua`a of more than 100,000 acres are found some of the rarest plant species in the world, relics of the ancient dry forests that spread over most islands’ leeward plains. Following more than a century of hard grazing not just by cattle, but also by herds of goats and sheep numbering at times in the thousands, Pu`uwa`awa`a was not removed from the state’s list of lands eligible for leasing until earlier this year, by which time its natural treasures were more imperiled than ever before while its ability to support commercial ranching was nil. The only proposals for use of the land that would have brought revenue into the state were from conservation associations proposing to offset costs of restoring the land through limited ecotourism and hunting, but these were rejected by the Board of Land and Natural Resources, under pressure from hunting organizations.
And so the state finds itself burdened for years to come with the need to protect Pu`uwa`awa`a’s natural resources from fire and the foraging of game mammals, with no funds to do so. In 1985, the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife developed its first plan to manage Pu`uwa`awa`a’s resources. Seven years later, it prepared a six-year management plan for Pu`uwa`awa`a whose implementation was estimated to cost nearly $200,000 a year. Neither plan was ever launched, much less completed. A management plan developed by one of the private organizations seeking to lease Pu`uwa`awa`a two years ago placed annual operating costs at $922,000 a year, following an initial investment of nearly $3 million. That plan, which would have been underwritten by private foundations, was scuttled by the Land Board. In July, DOFAW again put forward a management plan, this time with a projected budget of $18,763,717 over 10 years, “of which approximately $942,000 or 5 percent can be funded or supported within the current management capacities and budgets of DOFAW and its cooperators.”4
Where has the land’s value gone? Part of it has shifted to the cattle, whose annual average weight gain – a measure used in determining the land’s value – comes directly from the land. In the same way, the land has been taxed with the support of the pigs, goats, and sheep the hunters lay claim to. While conscientious ranchers may maintain pastures with plantings and fertilizers and keep down populations of game animals that would compete with cattle for forage, most state land (Pu`uwa`awa`a included) has not received such care. Part of the value has been transferred to the many alien plant species that may have been planted with the best of intentions, but which steal the lands nutrients from native species. A lot has gone up in flames. And much has simply washed away. As pasture specialist Burt Smith wrote in his report on Ukumehame, “All too often this basic resource [the land] ends up being poured into the ocean as the leaseholder attempts to increase yields beyond sustainability in an effort to stay afloat financially.”
Regime Shift
In 1987, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 778, “A Bill for an Act Relating to Protection of Hawai`i’s Native Flora and Fauna,” which became Act 82 upon the governor’s signature. The preamble took note of Hawai`i’s “rare species of plants, animals, and fish which are found nowhere else in the world.”
“The legislature also finds that Hawai`i has sizable areas of high quality native forests which are not placed into the conservation district. To the maximum extent practical, it is the intention of the legislature to preserve Hawai`i’s unique native flora and fauna by reclassifying such areas as conservation districts.”
The law went on to require the Department of Land and Natural Resources to “initiate amendments to the conservation district boundaries É in order to include high quality native forests and the habitat of rare native species of flora and fauna within the conservation district.” In addition, the state’s land use law, Chapter 205, was changed so that all lands included in the forest reserve as of 1961 were placed automatically into the Conservation District. (Lands not already in the Conservation District that were added to forest reserves after 1961 would have to be the subject of separate petitions before the Land Use Commission before they would be included in the Conservation District.)
Act 82 did not result in any amendments to the Conservation District boundaries, but did prompt the DLNR to propose the additions to the forest reserves described at the start of this article.
Separately, the Office of State Planning was undertaking the most far-reaching boundary review in the state’s history, a process that resulted in a detailed, four-volume report. Many of the areas that the DLNR had proposed for inclusion in the forest reserves (including some originally proposed for forest reserve status in the early days of the territorial government) were now also recommended for inclusion in the Conservation District. Both public and private lands were included, with more than 113,000 acres in North and South Kona and 22,500 acres in Kohala proposed as “areas of critical concern.”
While the DLNR proposal was approved with minimal objection (a notable exception being land proposed for forest reserve status at Honuaula, North Kona), not so with the OSP’s, especially when it came to land on the Big Island. Ranchers from Kohala to South Kona rose up in arms over the prospect of shifting so many acres of West Hawai`i into the Conservation District. As a result of the outcry, the Legislature in 1992 adopted a resolution setting up a task force that looked into the proposal. The workshop members included agency representatives, private landowners, and delegates from two non-profit groups, The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i and the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Hawai`i office. Three years later, their final report was issued, which focused on non-regulatory ways of protecting watersheds. No redistricting of any area of critical concern has yet occurred.
In the mid-1990s, Big Island Land Board member Chris Yuen attempted to jump-start the stalled process of forest reserve designation and at the same time add a few more small tracts of land in the same general areas. As before, the proposals met with little objection. In correspondence between Yuen and staff of the DLNR’s Land Division, Yuen was told that all that needed to be done before an executive order setting aside the lands was forwarded to the governor was for a metes and bounds description of the forest reserve additions to be prepared by the state surveyor. This responsibility, the Land Division said, fell to the Division of Forestry and Wildlife.
For the last five years, DOFAW has not moved forward with the proposals, claiming it could not afford the expense of hiring the state surveyor to do the required surveys. Yet almost all of the areas to be added to the forest reserve have already been fully surveyed, having been leased in the recent past. (A metes-and-bounds survey is a prerequisite to a lease of any parcel of state land.)
In any case, Mike Buck, administrator of DOFAW, claims the formal executive orders setting aside the lands to his division is just that – a formality. The lands are already being managed as forest reserves without the set aside, he told Environment Hawai`i.
But are they really? Rules governing the forest reserves are far stricter than those governing unencumbered state land under the management of the Land Division. And when it comes to enforcement of rules, the fact that lands have not been formally set aside is a problem for the DLNR’s Division of Conservation and Resource Enforcement, according to Lenny Terlep, DOCARE’s Hawai`i island chief. Until the set-aside occurs, people caught poaching koa or other trees, grazing their cattle in the forest, or otherwise violating forest reserve rules do not face the same penalties they would face if the land on which the violations occurred were part of the forest reserve.
And in any event, what does management of state forest reserves entail today? For the first five decades, the Division of Forestry of the territorial government reported monthly on the number of wild animals removed from the reserves, the length of fences built or repaired, the number and variety of trees planted. Buck says that today, forest management relies much more on public-private partnerships. The state, left to its own resources, he says, is simply unable to undertake the sort of aggressive management that characterized the early days of forestry in Hawai`i.
— Patricia Tummons
- Not included in this calculation of losses to the forest reserve system are about 110,000 acres of state lands now in the Natural Area Reserves System. Most of these lands were shifted to NARS from the forest reserves and continue to be managed as well as or better than public lands in the forest reserve.
- Alfred W. Carter: Hawai`i’s Dean of Cattlemen and Notes on Hawaiian Livestock, compiled by Lucille Brundage (Waimea, Hawai`i, 1971), pp. 75-76.
- It is worth noting that until the last decade of the 20th century, the Public Lands Commission and its successor, the Land Division of the Department of Land and Natural Resources, published annual reports that included detailed lists of lands leased, to whom, lease terms, acreage, rents, and nature of use. Such reports, essential for public accountability, have not been available for nearly a decade.
- The plan is available on the internet. Follow the links to it at [url=http://www.dofaw.net]www.dofaw.net[/url]
Volume 13, Number 5 November 2002
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