Attempt to save PLDC staffers | Honolulu Star-Advertiser

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2012 August 29 CTY - Zee Aki gestured to the the board and the audience as he spoke in Hawaiian in the hearing room of the DLNR and gave testimony in oppostion to the Public Land Development Corporation and the adoption of the Hawaii Rule on Wednesday evening. Sitting on the right is Lloyd Haraguchi

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The utterance at the state Legislature that produced the most consternation wasn’t a word at all, but four letters: PLDC.

Critics of the PLDC batted around that acronym for the Public Land Development Corp. a lot in the past session, ultimately succeeding in having the agency authorization law repealed.

The whole uproar over the corporation had to do in part with a broad distrust of giving a new authority so much influence over the use of public lands. However, there was at least the sense among some lawmakers that its employees shouldn’t have to lose their jobs over it.

House Bill 1133, the vehicle for the repeal, was amended in the Senate Committee on Water and Land to protect the jobs of three staffers. The Senate Draft 2 of the bill essentially would have transferred the PLDC’s “employees and assets” to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. No such provision was made in the House, so the bill went to conference to iron out this and other differences between drafts.

In the end, however, there were no jobs set aside in the budget for agency staff, said state Sen. David Ige, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

“We did not provide any language that would provide for them specifically,” Ige said.

Among those in his chamber Ige had to win over was state Sen. Malama Solomon, one of the backers of the agency.

Ige had a lot of political force on his side, however. The repeal of the PLDC was a campaign issue in many races this election year. And it seemed there had been just too much consternation over the entire creation of the agency, which some said had not been sufficiently debated in public, for any element of it to be preserved.

“I think there were a lot of concerns raised as the bill proceeded,” Ige said. “I guess there was a lot of testimony and other comments in the community concerning how there was some effort to retain the PLDC in some way shape or form. Keeping the staff would have been one form of keeping the corporation.”

But Ige doesn’t think the three will have trouble finding a job. DLNR, for example, has a new watershed protection program (see adjoining story), he said: There’s bound to be room someplace.