The Environmental Council is one of many appointed panels comprising volunteer experts who help guide the state in its business.

But the particular importance of this council, which reviews requests for exemptions to the state’s environmental impact statements, has just become clear. The council suspended its work last August, citing difficulties getting state support and a meeting place that would enable videoconferencing, as some members live on neighbor islands and flying them to Oahu is too expensive.

Delay upon delay interfered with fulfilling even this modest goal; a scheduled July 22 meeting was canceled because the room was booked several months out.

The appalling result of this dysfunction is that several projects that can safely bypass the lengthy and complex EIS process, including a University of Hawaii study on coral worth several million dollars in research funds, are on hold.

Clearly, the onus is on the Office of Environmental Quality Control, the division of the state Department of Health that oversees the environmental review process, to handle logistics for the Environmental Council. OEQC needs to do so immediately so the council can elect a new chairperson — another chore that’s lapsed because of the delays — and tackle the backlog of exemption applications.

Several reforms aimed at clarifying the administration of the council by OEQC are part of a larger, complex effort to overhaul the state’s environmental laws. The EIS process, always a contentious realm, became an all-out battlefield in the Superferry case. This prompted the formation of a task force that last year proposed changes aimed at making the process more rational.

Work needs to continue in the months before lawmakers reconvene on several unresolved reform conflicts. But proposed improvements to Environmental Council operations were spun off into a separate measure, Senate Bill 2818.

Here the issues are more clear-cut: The council would be placed more clearly under OEQC, its membership of 15 reduced to a more manageable nine. The governor would still appoint all nine, but six would come from lists submitted by the House speaker and the Senate president. The OEQC director would be removed as an ex-officio voting member.

These changes would help to make the political aspect of the appointments more diffuse and bolster the character of the council as a more broad-based and professional body.

This bill stalled last spring in the House; a similar proposal should be resurrected and passed next year.

Iin the meantime, the OEQC — which, unlike other health agencies, had no reduction in force during the recent budget cuts — needs to provide the support the council needs. There’s nothing complicated about providing a meeting space and staff support. Allowing the continued dysfunction of a governmental body that has such important work to address, a circumstance that’s already lasted a whole year, is a shameful example of bureaucratic inertia.