House Bill 2217 should have passed easily. It would have opened up to public comment agency decisions that proposed projects have no significant environmental impact – the so-called “Negative Declarations.” At present, public comment is limited to those projects for which Environmental Impact Statements are prepared. If someone disagrees with a Negative Declaration, or challenges the adequacy of an Environmental Assessment per se, the only recourse is to challenge the declaration in court. It is a clumsy, costly process, and the Legislative Reference Bureau, after studying the problem, suggested the remedy that H.B 2217 would have provided. (For specifics, see “Declaratory Rulings and the Environmental Council,” LRB Report No. 13, 1989.)
The bill easily cleared Mark Andrews’ Committee on Planning, Energy and Environmental Protection. But it ran into trouble in the Senate, where it was assigned to Donna Ikeda’s Agriculture Committee. At the hearing, testimony in support of the bill was offered by several environmental groups – and even Hawaiian Electric! Opposition came only from the Department of Land and Natural Resources and the City and County of Honolulu’s Department of General Planning. (This is a mystery: surely a 30-day public comment period on Negative Declarations is preferable to drawn-out court battles.) Ikeda had approved a bill that would have provided administrative appeals of Environmental Assessments last year, which was vetoed by the governor. Evidently on the assumption that this was the same bill, she held it in committee.
Ikeda noted at the hearing that the University of Hawaii’s Environmental Center was supposed to be undertaking a thorough study of Hawai’i’s overall environmental statutes (Chapter 343), and so when that was completed, there would be another opportunity for the Legislature to take up needed revisions to that statute. (That UH study makes an interesting aside. The money for it was allocated in the 1989 budget, but still had not been released at the time of Ikeda’s hearing on H.B. 2217. After a few strategically placed phone calls, it now appears that the money will, finally, be transferred to the Environmental Center.)
Volume 1, Number 1 July 1990