DHHL court master needed

The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands has reached the point — passed it long ago, some would say — at which outside intervention is required to force a fix of its myriad problems.

In the absence of any other significant steps toward a solution — have there been any? — the best course may be to seek the direction of a court-appointed master to mandate a wholesale restructuring of the agency. This could beat a path toward a far more efficient management of the department’s federal trust on behalf of its beneficiaries: those with more than 50 percent Hawaiian ancestry.

That’s one rational prescription that the situation suggests, but on the way to that conclusion there’s ample reason for a primal scream from Hawaii residents, who ought to be utterly enraged by this. The latest, stunning revelation is that the agency, which has known for years that a principal funding mechanism is going to lapse very soon, has failed to do anything about it.

That mechanism is annual payments from the state, amounting to $30 million a year to settle mammoth breach-of-trust claims filed against the state for misappropriating lands in the land trust the federal government created nearly a century ago.

The last check in this 20-year series of hefty payments — $600 million in total — will be in the mail less than a year from now, and the fact that DHHL has been barreling headlong toward that fiscal cliff without a contingency plan is beyond belief.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, enough to be laid on thickly with a trowel. The governor’s office, through successive administrations, should have been responsible for riding herd on the agency for its perennially lax operations. The commissioners themselves seem to have been waiting for marching orders of some kind, when it is they who are supposed to be setting policy.

And, of course, DHHL administrators, also over various regime changes, are accountable for failing to get a grip on the agency’s various failures of oversight and management.

This has become painfully clear over the course of Star-Advertiser writer Rob Perez’s ongoing investigative series on DHHL’s problems, ranging from erratic decisions and shoddy oversight in its short-term leases, to the legacy shortcomings in winnowing its list of beneficiaries waiting for a long-term lease.

Perez emailed a set of questions last week to DHHL officials, including this query: "When beneficiaries ask how has the $600 million benefitted them, what would the department’s response be? What have been some measurable results in terms of what that money has paid for?"

The answer was unsatisfying: a relatively brief list of projects, some of them incomplete. Its plans for replacement revenues, according to the response, comprised assorted vague pledges to increase performance of financial assets and trust lands, and "pursuing revenue generating opportunities on the home lands."

Isn’t that what DHHL should have been doing for the last five years, or more?

One hopeful development is the planned resumption of mediation talks to settle an ongoing class-action suit known as Kalima v. State. Another breach-of-trust case, this suit involves more than 2,700 beneficiaries to whom the state failed to issue homesteads. The state’s high court affirmed in 2006 that the beneficiaries had the right to sue.

The mediation talks will have numerous targets, but ideally one point of agreement should be the appointment of a court master to whip this entire sorry mess into shape.

Failing the assembly of smart, objective parties with the power to mandate a corrective plan — people skilled in the areas apparently so lacking at DHHL — the chance to compel new and competent management for the trust will surely evaporate.