Many Hawaii residents passing through Honolulu International Airport, which opened small in 1927 and became "international" in 1951, would agree that the sprawling facility is showing its age.

State transportation officials, and state House Speaker Calvin Say, are champing at the bit to get improvements going there and at other public facilities, but insist that bureaucratic red tape is holding back repairs. They’re pushing Senate Bill 755, which would grant a three-year exemption from some environmental laws for a slew of public projects.

However, they are unable to detail the airport projects that have been held up. Meanwhile, the claim for waivers has environmental and open-government activists up in arms: They worry about abuse and say the measure excludes public involvement and county and state regulatory oversight, and has potential to endanger Hawaii’s coastal ecosystems and resources.

"Right now, (state Budget Director) Kalbert Young is sitting on $800 million in bond cash for our state projects at the airports," said the House speaker. "We’re sitting on $1.2 billion in revenue bond cash for our state projects at the airport, highways and harbors."

Airport modernization has been stalled, Say said, "because of the permitting process that they have to go through … It’s all existing facilities. There’s no new harbor that we want them to build. There is no new airport we want them to build."

Say cited the widening of the Queen Kaahumanu Highway to Kona International Airport that had been delayed because of environmental review. The state Department of Transportation has said the delay of more than two years has been caused by bid protests and recent inadvertent archaeological finds near the project, according to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

A Transportation Department spokesman on Friday said no project is now "stuck" because of environmental review requirements.

Robert D. Harris, director of Sierra Club’s Hawaii chapter, called Say’s assertion "misguided."

Making basic repairs and maintenance of existing buildings doesn’t require obtaining an environmental regulatory permit, he said. "It’s only when you start triggering new structure. … As a general matter, if you’re doing repair and maintenance, the stuff does not trigger it. If your basic improvements are within the same building structure, again, it doesn’t trigger any of the stuff.

"Now if we’re talking about major projects, like actually destroying a bridge and rebuilding it, yeah, there is a reasonable type of regulatory process to make sure you’re doing it right."

Skeptics of SB 755 say that many projects already are being exempted from requirements for environmental review. Citing economic sluggishness, however, Hawaii lawmakers have kept alive the measure, saying such requirements are stalling construction projects that could energize the state’s economy.

Say is an avid advocate of SB 755, which for three years would set aside environmental review of coastal Special Management Area permits for harbors, highways and airports, and allow Gov. Neil Abercrombie to allow other state projects to go ahead without assessment by the state Health Department’s Environmental Council.

Because of "very cumbersome" requirements, Say said, state agencies would not be able to go forward with projects in the vacuum of construction by private companies or, through this year’s presidential campaign, the federal government.

The counties and state have bond loans that could be used to pay for projects. However, Say said, "It takes five years before there’s groundbreaking. For me, it’s crazy."

"Five years to get a particular project off the ground?" he asked. "Knowing that we’re not going to have any construction for the next six months from the private sector, and all reports forecast, and all the reports forecast, yeah, the (federal) money’s there but nobody can use it until you see what the climate on Capitol Hill is going to be."

The Abercrombie administration did not propose the bill, but some state agencies — notably the Department of Transportation that includes the Airports Division — support its exemption of projects within the state’s Coastal Zone Management Plan because those projects must conform to the 1972 federal Coastal Zone Management Act.

"The provisions of this bill … will temporarily remove regulatory restrictions and/or enable the director of transportation, with the approval of the governor, to exempt certain state projects from several duplicative state permitting requirements," the DOT testified this month. "This will allow various DOT projects to be expeditiously completed and help to promote economic revitalization. These new provisions will still allow for open transparency in the public process and protection of the environment. It is important to note that removing duplicative state permitting processes removes the redundancies of the review processes that are in place through federal regulations."

Legislators "want to fast-track construction projects," said Jesse K. Souki, director of the state Office of Planning. "It’s the Legislature’s belief that having streamlined permitting will help do that" while meeting "the minimum standard and objectives" of the federal law.

The bill would affect projects through June 2015; Say said it is intended to give Abercrombie "a chance for three years" to exercise the authority. However, Souki told legislators this month that his office is "working on an alternative process" to deal with Special Management Area permits that will be completed to present to next year’s Legislature.

The proposal to allow gubernatorial waiver of public projects has faced strong objection by Abercrombie-appointee Gary Hooser, director of the Office of Environmental Quality Control, and the 11-citizen Environmental Council.

Mary Steiner, the council’s chairwoman, testified that "the activities likely to be placed on the governor’s exemption list would not be the ones with little or no significant effects, but would be the ones with potential significant effects or creating public controversy. This would be a misuse of executive power, counter to democratic principles of governance" and "contrary" to a state law’s call for "public participation in the review process."

Already, Hooser said, "most projects are exempt, or they have to do the next level, which is an environmental assessment," less that the environmental impact statement required of major projects. He pointed out to legislators that no backlog of agency requests for exemptions exists and the Environment Council "is fully functioning and has, in fact, sent notices to every agency in state government asking them to update their exemption lists."

If SB 755 is enacted, Hooser said he expects legal challenges, because the section of the bill that would give the governor power to go forward on projects with exemption of environmental review was not in bills that were debated before the Senate, as required by the state Constitution.

Final decking of legislative bills occurs this week, the deadline for measures to be presented in their final forms for voting before the Legislature adjourns May 3. At this point, House and Senate conferees have yet to meet and iron out differences, and Harris has doubts whether the bill will be enacted. He hopes it won’t be.

"My suspicion is that the Senate isn’t really interested in moving on it," he said, "and, frankly, I’m surprised that the House has pushed it as aggressively as they have, particularly during an election year, knowing there isn’t an appetite on the Senate side."