Agriculture director grilled over jobs, food goals

The state department in charge of managing Hawaii’s agricultural resources has been operating for years with one-third of its staff positions left vacant, prompting House Finance Committee Chairwoman Sylvia Luke to threaten to eliminate the positions altogether.

“I don’t know what the problem is, but I don’t know how a department can function with one-third of its positions vacant,” Luke told Department of Agriculture Director Scott Enright during a budget briefing Friday at the state Capitol. “So I’m just thinking that you don’t need the positions.”

Luke also took Enright to task for what she called the “fake goal” of doubling local food production — a campaign promise made by Gov. David Ige that’s been left to the Agriculture Department to fulfill.

About 122 out of 360 positions in the Agriculture Department are unfilled. They include jobs such as environmental health specialists to oversee the enforcement of federal and state laws, plant quarantine inspectors to guard against invasive species and entomologists who can help combat devastating plant pests.

Enright said the Agriculture Department had hired a record 55 people this past year. However, the department also lost 52 employees, many of them due to retirement. He said it was a constant struggle to replace retirees as well as retain millennials who have a tendency to job hop.

Enright said that employees are also lured away by higher-paying jobs.

But Luke, known for her hard questioning of department officials when it comes to budgetary matters, said she was frustrated.

“As far as vacancies, this is the fifth year I have been chair of this committee and this is the fifth year that we talked about the vacancies,” she said. “Congratulations that you filled 50 positions, but it’s been the same for the last five years.”

She suggested that the money for the positions could be allocated elsewhere.

“Every year we gave you a pass and said, ‘OK.’ We negotiated which positions should be given or not,” she said. “Well, we will just eliminate them and we will see where we go.”

Departmental budget briefings have been scheduled in the days leading up to the legislative session, which opens Jan. 18. Ige submitted his proposed two-year budget to the Legislature last month, which will be debated by lawmakers for several months before being sent back to Ige, likely heavily amended.

It’s up to the departmental directors to defend their funding requests, and Enright also came under fire over Ige’s campaign pledge of doubling local food production by 2020.

The Ige administration said earlier this year that the goal had been changed to 2030, but has recently backtracked on that, saying that it is and always has been 2020.

“Does the governor known that 2020 is three years from now?” Luke asked.

“I believe, yes,” Enright responded.

Luke said it didn’t really matter whether the goal was 2020 or 2030 because it was a “fake goal” anyway.

“It’s a fake goal because we don’t even know where we are starting and where we want to end up and how do we get there,” she said.

The Agriculture Department doesn’t have firm statistics on how much food is currently being produced in Hawaii, making the goal of doubling that figure elusive. It’s also not clear what doubling local food production means exactly, such as whether this only includes food that is locally consumed or also includes exports.

“In your vision, what do you want to achieve?” Luke said. “Because food production in and of itself is not the same as food sustainability. You can produce double or triple the mangoes, but we can’t survive on mangoes alone. So what are you trying to achieve? I just don’t understand.”

Enright said that he’s “attempting to create a diversified agricultural economy where it makes economic sense.”

He tried to clarify the administration’s changing target date, saying, “2030 came up when there was a move with staff to align the governor’s …”

But Luke jumped in to finish the sentence: “the governor’s goal with reality, right?”

The Agriculture Department was working with Honolulu’s Ulupono Initiative to come up with a statewide online food metrics platform that would give policymakers a much better picture of food imports and exports and help them better define sustainability goals. But that work, being done by Sustain Hawaii, never met the needs of the Agriculture Department, Enright told lawmakers on Friday.

The Agriculture Department spent $90,000 on the computer program, with Ulupono contributing $160,000.

Enright said that he gave up on the project in December after waiting more than a year for it to be finished. He said he will be looking for a new contractor to pick up the work.