Pro, con forces gear up for PLDC fight at Legislature

Lobbyists and state bureaucrats are joining Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s fight to preserve the Public Land Development Corp. at the same time that citizen groups are lining up in opposition.

It is too early to know if the disgruntled citizens will cause a delay or rewrite of state law, but it does appear that Abercrombie and the PLDC have succeeded in uniting ad hoc groups in opposition to his plans.

Groups from Kauai, Molokai and the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii are all planning to stage rallies at the state Capitol when the Legislature opens on Wednesday.

“Show up to send a message that it is not OK to pass laws that take away the public’s right to participate in the process.

“Show up to send a message that the PLDC must be repealed, that environmental and public-interest laws must be embraced, not circumvented,” wrote Gary Hooser, presently a Kauai County councilman and former executive director of the state Office of Environmental Quality Control.

The longtime Molokai community leader Walter Ritte is also calling for rallies at the same time to oppose support of genetically modified organisms, and the PLDC.

At the same time, lobbyists influential with the Abercrombie administration, including John Radcliffe and William Kaneko, are putting together a “2013 Thought Leaders Conference” to run the day before the Legislature opens.

This meeting, dubbed “Lifting the Fiscal Vog,” will start with a speech by Abercrombie and go through an economic overview of Hawaii and presentations by Abercrombie administration department heads.

The meetings are to wrap up with a “call to action” by Radcliffe, Bank of Hawaii CEO Peter Ho and others.

Much of the meeting, according to Radcliffe, will be a pep talk to get the state’s business community involved in and supporting government actions during the legislative session.

“We are at a crossroads, public sector costs are going up, agency after agency is underfunded and not operating at capacity,” Radcliffe said in an interview. “Business has to understand it should be part of the solution.”

The stimulus for the conference came after the resounding statewide rejection of the plans for the PLDC, which would let private interests partner with the state to develop state lands without having to follow many existing state and county environmental and zoning regulations.

“The PLDC is an interesting and important component. What I saw was a terrible anger on the part of people who thought government was out to get them — no real communications was going on,” Radcliffe said.

Whether the conference will be the catalyst to start talks is not certain, but Abercrombie appears to be stirring up various key political actors.

The administration is also armed with a new white paper that sets up the state’s Office of State Planning to be the point of the spear in moving the state into transit-oriented development, which would include heavy development around proposed city rail stations.

Much of the report is boilerplate about smart growth, planned development and “walkable” cities — until you get to the very end.

Urging the state to get more involved in transit-oriented development, the long-winded report says the state should “prioritize existing state properties and other assets the state currently controls that are near transit … and identify short-, medium- or long-term action … to enhance opportunities for sustainable development.”

The state should do this, the report suggests, in demonstration projects with “private sector developers.”

Not surprisingly, the report makes the same case as the supporters of the PLDC.

What now is open for question is whether any of this outweighs the serious political danger Abercrombie’s plans are provoking both for himself and his Democratic allies.

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