Mahalo!
Before all else, Environment Hawai`i expresses its gratitude to the Commission on Water Resource Management. The commissioners’ concern with ensuring that the plan will address all needs, great and small, has put residents of the state in the Commission’s debt.
In the last several months, when development of the Hawai`i Water Plan has proceeded at a pace that left most people eating dust, the Commission has stood steadfast against the torrent of documents and draft plans. It has gone to great lengths and has spent many hours in the effort to accommodate concerns about the plan expressed by the public. While it has met statutory obligations to approve a Hawai`i Water Plan by the July 1 deadline, it is inviting continued public involvement in the evolution of the final plan over the next year.
Given the shortcomings in the plan and the difficulties that the public has had in obtaining copies of documents in time to provide informed comment, that extension is welcome indeed.
First among those shortcomings is the plan’s treatment of water. The Hawai`i Water Plan in its present form is a prescription for maximizing water usage, not controlling it. By stating in effect that abundant water supplies will be available (by hook or crook, coastal grout curtains or desalination), it sidesteps the need to establish a set of priorities for water use, to say nothing of avoiding mention of the whopping costs this would entail.
The plan fails to confront the basic problem in management of any resource: When should the “highest and best use” (to borrow the planners’ euphemism for the use that yields greatest economic value) take a back seat to what the Water Code defines as use in the public interest?
The way the Water Code is structured, public interest receives due consideration only in Water Management Areas. Designation, however, is triggered by an impending crisis of one sort or another. By then, and almost by definition, the options for reserving water in the public interest are severely limited.
An Agenda for Change
Passage of the Water Code three years ago was no mean feat. Lined up against it then (and still) are formidable institutions that would like to see the state’s regulatory powers over water, limited though they are, reduced even further. Desirable as amending the code may be, opening it up to legislative tampering is fraught with political risk.
Still, the Legislature itself has set up a review mechanism. Starting in 1992, a commission working out of the Legislative Auditor’s office will be charged with assessing the way in which the Water Code (and, by implication, the plan as well) is working. It is not too early to think about what that commission might propose.
Among the options to consider are elimination of Water Management Areas, with the Commission’s full regulatory powers — which now apply only in WMAs — thus being extended statewide. If that is not politically feasible, the threshold for designation should be reduced to 60 percent (or less) of sustainable yield. Given the high degree of unreliability attached to sustainable yield estimates, reducing the designation threshold is not only reasonable, but necessary to safeguard the public interest as envisioned by the code and required by the Constitution.
Aside from any changes in the Code itself, the Commission should be given its own staff. The Division of Water Resource Management (formerly DOWALD, or the Division of Water and Land Development) has divided loyalties. It is both a driller of wells and serves as staff to the Commission that approves well development. This conflict of interest has not gone unnoticed — either by the public or by the Commission itself. Apart from that, the preparation of the Water Plan has taxed the skeleton staff of DOWALD/DOWRM nearly to the breaking point. What will happen when the Commission has to implement the plan? Both taxpayers and the Commission would be better served if the Commission had an independent staff.
Accountability
Through the hearings process, the state has given the public a means of reviewing the consultants’ reports. As much as this opportunity to comment is needed and appreciated, it results in the public paying twice for the work: First, through taxes, it pays for the report. Then it pays again when, on its own time and without pay, it checks over the consultants’ work.
The agencies that hire the consultants should hold them to minimal standards for readability, grammar and content. If just a couple of reports were thrown back to the consultants for repairs, future reports would likely be better written and researched in the first place — and the burden on the public commensurately reduced.
But as becomes clear through reading the consultants’ contracts, it is not really the agency staff that judges the consultants’ work, but other consultants. There seems to be an infinite regression here: Consultants are hired to do work because of short staff. Because no staff is available to review the consultants’ work, more consultants are hired to review other consultants’ work. Who is to review the consultants’ review of the consultants? Still more consultants?
This madness must stop.
The Hubris of Technocrats
Speaking of costs, we note the engineering bias that permeates the plan. When water supply may fall short of anticipated demand, the consultants’ response is not to look to curbing growth or reducing demand through conservation, changes in landscaping, or other means. Rather, we hear a recitation of the engineer’s catechism — a statement of faith that technology will save the day. If a solution isn’t immediately at hand, one will (if enough money is spent) be available by the time it is needed.
The consultants are primarily engineers. They may have been hired because of their technical expertise, but it’s fair to ask if they might have more than a passing interest in putting the state on a water track that will keep the engineering and construction trades hard at work for years to come.
Volume 1, Number 2 August 1990
Leave a Reply