What Natural Area Reserves are to state land, Natural Area Partnerships are to privately owned land: those areas where the natural resource values are so high and rare that they warrant the highest levels of protection the state can offer.
To encourage landowners to participate in the protection of natural resources, the 1991 Legislature established the Natural Area Partnership Program. Once the Board of Land and Natural Resources approves an area for participation in Natural Area Partnership Program, the state picks up two-thirds of the cost of managing it. Private sources (usually the landowner) pick up the remainder.
Unlike the Natural Area Reserve System, NAPP has had, since 1995, an earmarked source of funds: part of the conveyance tax paid on land transfers goes to support the NAPP.
Two of the largest areas to be managed under the NAPP are on the island of Maui: Pu`u Kukui, covering 8,600 acres of mostly mountain forests in West Maui, is owned by Maui Land & Pineapple Co., Inc., while The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i owns the 5,230-acre Waikamoi preserve.
Randy Bartlett, manager of Pu`u Kukui, says his annual budget is around $250,000 a year, including the state’s contribution (about $170,000). At Waikamoi, manager Mark White says his budget for next year is around $450,000, while for the last four years, it has averaged about $390,000 a year.
Statewide, seven Natural Area Partnership areas, covering 25,138 acres, received just over $1 million from the state in fiscal year 1996-97 (the last year for which reliable figures are available). In other words, for that year, the state’s support for an acre of land in a privately owned natural area came to just over $43 a year. With a private match of half that (say, $21 a year), the average budget for managing an acre of NAPP land comes to roughly $64 a year. And, according to the state’s own projections, the budget for NAPP projects will rise to nearly $1.2 million by fiscal year 2003.
Contrast that to state support for its own Natural Area Reserves. On the Big Island, for example, with about 82,000 acres in the NARS, the state’s support comes to $290,000, slightly more than $3.50 an acre per year.
And while the budget for NAPP is rising, that for NARS has done nothing but fall since 1991. In that year, the Legislature allocated $1,086,000 for NARS management. Today, the budget for all 19 reserves statewide is about $683,000, with 10 percent of that going to help out other branches of the DLNR’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife that have suffered budgetary cuts.
— Christopher Joyce
Volume 10, Number 5 November 1999
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