PLDC disaster affirms why public distrust is deserved

The Public Land Development Corp. sneaked into town like the proverbial thief in the night, and, sadly, it appears to be going out the same way — if it’s going out at all.

And the elected officials responsible for this ham-handed exercise in back-door democracy wonder why the public doesn’t trust them.

The Legislature created the PLDC in 2011 to raise revenues for state services by allowing private development of underused state lands.

The projects would be overseen by a largely unaccountable board that could make development deals free from many state and county environmental and zoning controls.

Incredibly, legislation of such magnitude passed with little notice and without full public hearings.

Community groups, environmentalists and Native Hawaiians became enraged, calling it "grand theft aina."

The two main legislators behind the idea — Sens. Dono­van Dela Cruz and Malama Solo­mon — and a supportive Gov. Neil Abercrombie responded by insulting opponents, offering minor rules tweaks and pledging to block efforts to repeal the law.

But steady public outrage forced them to reconsider, and some kind of repeal bill seems inevitable in this year’s Legislature.

Unfortunately, Dela Cruz and Solo­mon are playing the same legislative games with repeal that caused so much alarm about PLDC’s birth, leading to worries that the repeal is a sham to keep the PLDC alive in another form.

First Solomon said she wouldn’t hear a repeal bill. Then she and Dela Cruz did a gut-and-replace on the bill to punish other state agencies for the PLDC’s demise. Finally, another gut-and-replace produced an actual repeal bill that passed the Senate unanimously.

But unlike the clean repeal passed by the House, the Senate bill would keep PLDC staff on the state payroll in another department, breeding suspicion that a resurrection is planned.

A separate bill by Dela Cruz would create a Public-Private Partnership Authority with similar powers as the PLDC, and another Senate bill would give the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands the right to enter into private development deals that could include casino gambling.

Abercrombie is pushing bills to allow development around schools and park lands separate from the PLDC.

Whether or not the PLDC was a good idea, its execution has been so clumsy that public trust is irrevocably lost.

The only workable path forward is complete repeal of the PLDC and its staff and an end to current maneuvers to perpetuate the agency under a different name.

Revisiting the concept should wait for the next Legislature, when we can truly start fresh with full transparency and open discussion of the options.

Dela Cruz and Solo­mon buried themselves in their own shibai and can’t dig out with more of the same.

To earn trust, the only way is to behave in a trustworthy manner.

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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.