Kealoha Pisciotta said she and three other appellants, Clarence Ching, Paul Neves and E. Kalani Flores, made the deadline Monday to appeal the sublease and the denial of the contested case hearing requests.
The appellants say the $1.3 billion project on Mauna Kea will negatively impact Native Hawaiian cultural practices.
TMT spokeswoman Sandra Dawson said a ground breaking and blessing is scheduled Oct. 7. She doesn’t expect the appeal to affect that plan or construction. Major construction is expected to begin in spring 2015.
Pisciotta said the appellants are filing separately in 3rd Circuit Court in Hilo. They are representing themselves.
The appellants previously participated in a contested case hearing in 2011 about the project’s conservation use permit and the subsequent appeal, also heard in 3rd Circuit Court.
A judge upheld the decision to grant a conservation use permit in May. That decision is being appealed to the state Intermediate Court of Appeals.
The state Board of Land and Natural Resources denied the new contested case hearing requests in part because it found no statute or rule that requires one for a sublease.
While similar issues were raised during the initial contested case hearing and appeal, Pisciotta said another hearings process should be held to help the state make an informed decision.
“The agency process is an opportunity to inform the decision makers on how our rights and resources will be impacted,” she said.
Email Tom Callis at tcallis@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
]]>Late in the day on December 23rd, the final version of the Monument management plan was quietly published on the Papahānaumokuākea website. No press release. No email to the list serv. Just a quick post on the eve of the Eve of Christmas, which just happened to get picked up in a google alert days later.
Given all the eco-mojo the Bush Administration has tried to squish out of this “blue asterisk,” you would expect a mighty deal be made of finally finishing the management plan two years later. The fact that the release was so secretive has gotta make you wonder what’s actually in it.
On their website, James Connaugton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality is quoted as saying:
“When President Bush first designated the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in June 2006, his goal was to move beyond just thinking about conservation to carefully managing this important area.”
Yikes! What does the federal government mean exactly when it says “move beyond” conservation?
Well, from what we see in the plan it means:
Over 50% of the proposed 355 million-dollar budget is for government operations and research, while a mere 12% goes to reducing existing threats, like clean-up of marine debris and legacy military contamination. The plan also fails to allocate sufficient resources for Native Hawaiian involvement in Monument decision-making, and leaves decision-making to a closed-door Monument Management Board.
The plan essentially abandons the “precautionary principle,” which was a hallmark of the State’s visionary pre-monument protections that required biological, cultural and historic resource integrity be favored when the impacts of any proposed activity were uncertain.
So while the revised vision, mission, and goals now commit to conservation as the purpose of the Monument, you can see that the actions to implement this plan remain largely unimproved over the weak draft released earlier this Spring.
When the draft version of this plan was released, the National Wildlife Federation, the Center for Biological Diversity and more than a dozen other organizations–representing well over 5 million people–joined KAHEA in strongly criticizing the management plan. Despite two years of advocacy, and thousands of public letters and comments calling for a stronger, more protective plan, it is apparent that our united call for a true pu‘uhonua didn’t fit with the federal government’s vision for the future of “conservation” in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
So, here’s our take – a quote for the papers – on the federal government’s attempt to “move beyond” conservation:
“This is conservation on paper, but not in practice. They have reshuffled the goals to say ‘full conservation’ but their proposed actions speak louder than their words. They are exempting increased military exercises proposed for this extremely delicate ocean habitat from management. They are proposing increased tourism, new construction, and extractive research without adequate public oversight and Native Hawaiian consultation,” said Marti Townsend, Program Director of KAHEA: The Hawaiian-Environmental Alliance.
To learn more about this issue, including a detailed review of the draft plan, visit our website at: www.kahea.org
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