Isle Democrats lead charge against the environment

How close are Hawaii’s Democrats coming to a tipping point?

Journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell, in his book of the same name, defines a "tipping point" as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."

Pay attention now to see if we are coming to the tipping point. At the Legislature, community groups, environmental activists and just interested citizens are coming out against a series of Democrat-sponsored bills to temporarily drop many government safeguards from public construction projects.

The bills are presumably moving ahead with the blessing of Gov. Neil Abercrombie, titular head of the state Democratic Party, although two state planning agencies have opposed them.

Legislative sources say Abercrombie is supporting them, while his office is officially noncommittal.

Opponents point to four bills that they say collectively allow exceptionally high-density developments in yet-to-be-established urban planning districts and state agency/private partnership projects.

Last year the Legislature approved the Public Land Development Corp., which allows state land to be developed by private interests with exemptions from state and city laws and ordinances.

Combine this year’s new exemptions around planned rail stations and bus transit stations with private interests using the land development corporations and environmentalists see construction anarchy.

The problem with the bills is that there are no talking points; there is no specific piece of land or specific project that would be exempted, so the public is left to fill in the blanks.

"Í think these bills will haunt the Democrats at the coming Democratic Party of Hawaii county and state conventions and well into the actual elections," predicted Scott Foster, a Democratic activist, who helped organize the protests.

Hawaii’s voters are already weary of development and development protests. When Joni Mitchell sang: "You don’t know what you got till it’s gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," she was signing about Hawaii, not Manitoba.

If Hawaii has a series of tough environmental protection laws and a cadre of bureaucrats to enforce them, it is because we know that the free market leads to bulldozers and cement mixers at dawn.

Tom Coffman, historian, author and journalist, says meddling with environmental legislation is risky.

"Abandoning the environment, mining the irreplaceable resources, will put the Democrats of Hawaii on the wrong side of history. When the public figures it out, there will be a 1954 in reverse," Coffman said.

The Legislature’s strongest and most informed environmentalist is not some baby-faced, starry-eyed Democrat, fresh from college who just "wants to give back."

It is 78-year-old GOP Rep. Cynthia Thielen, a veteran environmental attorney who battled the state over the development of the H-3 freeway.

She says the Democrats "are looking at the environment as an inconvenience." She says throw out the four bills, Hawaii’s environmental laws are good enough, don’t exempt anything more. When asked if the legislation could be amended to compromise, Thielen flatly said, "No."

Meanwhile, Democrats are watching one of their most successful standard-bearers, former two-term Gov. Ben Cayetano, run a populist campaign for mayor of Honolulu that is aimed directly against the Honolulu rail project.

The ongoing $5.3 billion rail project has been everything good to every big shot in the Democratic Party. Former Mayor Mufi Hannemann promised jobs and more jobs; U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye vowed manna from heaven or at least the federal treasury; and the Legislature and the Honolulu City Council pledged our tax money to make it all happen.

Who didn’t like it? Democrat Cayetano and the Republicans. And they are joining forces.

Add this to the Democratic activists and the GOP tree-huggers furious at the Legislature’s Democrats.

If Gladwell’s next book is called "Cascading Failure," Hawaii might be the place to do his research.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.