The state House voted unanimously Monday for a bill to repeal the Public Land Development Corp., undoing a law that will likely be remembered at the state Capitol as a cautionary tale of government hubris.

The PLDC was created in 2011 to work with the private sector on development projects on underused state land. But the new agency, which was granted broad exemptions from land use regulations, never developed a single project after it was attacked by environmentalists and some Native Hawaiian and labor activists as a government overreach.

The public opposition was so loud, and so strident, that lawmakers who had voted overwhelmingly for the PLDC two years ago uniformly agreed to abandon the agency. The Senate voted unanimously for the repeal bill last week, and it now goes to Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who said he will sign the bill into law.

"I’d just as soon get it behind all of us as soon as possible," Abercrombie said Sunday. "I think it’s a lesson in good intentions gone awry."

Abercrombie, like many lawmakers, remains interested in public-private partnerships to develop state land.

Lawmakers are still considering legislation this session that would authorize a handful of private development projects on underused public school land that could generate revenue to modernize schools. Another bill would create a Public-Private Partnership Authority that could help develop a new film production studio on Maui, a redevelopment project in Wahiawa and a county-initiated project.

But lawmakers would not grant these public-private development projects broad exemptions from land use regulations, which many considered the worst aspect of the PLDC, and have made community engagement a priority.

House Majority Leader Scott Saiki (D, Downtown-Kakaako-McCully), one of the few lawmakers who voted against the PLDC two years ago, said the state should encourage responsible economic development.

"The PLDC failed because it went too far and was unbalanced," he said.

Rep. Nicole Lowen (D, Holualoa-Kailua-Kona-Honokohau) said repealing the PLDC could help restore public trust in state government.

"Society is healthiest when its citizens have confidence that their leaders are acting in their interest, and this bill — this repeal — is a step in that direction," she said.

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz (D, Wheeler-Wahiawa-Schofield), who was among the lawmakers originally behind the PLDC, said the problem was not the idea, but the implementation. The pressure to repeal the law came last year after public protests during hearings across the state on the agency’s administrative rules.

"It’s really about implementation," he said. "The administration is going to have to be a lot more proactive in communicating with the public and the communities once a law gets passed as to how things are going to be implemented so that we can address concerns as soon as possible."

The Senate had voted 23-1 and the House had voted 40-9 to create the PLDC. Abercrombie held a signing ceremony in May 2011 to announce the new agency as the development arm of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, which had asked lawmakers for the exemptions from land use regulations to help speed projects.

There was no significant attempt to repeal the PLDC last session, when environmentalists and conservationists fought several bills that would have exempted state construction from environmental review. But opposition began to build last summer, and by last fall the PLDC had become both a public policy and political headache for the governor and lawmakers.

The Sierra Club Hawaii Chapter derided the PLDC as "grand theft aina," while other activists held up the new agency as a symbol of the state’s coziness with private developers at the expense of conservation. County officials on the neighbor islands complained that the law threatened home rule by bypassing county zoning regulations.

Mahina Martin, a community activist on Maui, said the key lesson from the PLDC is that the public should take a more active role in the legislative process before laws are approved.

"These laws get proposed and decided on in a short span of about 20 weeks, but we get to live with them for a lifetime," she said in an email. "Early in the repeal fight, I had found it so disheartening that disdain for the public’s opinion was prevalent among some of our elected officials. It was really disturbing to sometimes see bully politicians in these seats of privilege that voters put them in.

"It shouldn’t have to take tremendous personal sacrifices of time and money by average citizens to keep politics in Hawaii transparent and sensitive to the will of our people. A burden that is far greater for neighbor islanders."

William Aila, director of the DLNR, said the lesson for the state is to listen to the community "a little more closely" and to be more transparent.

"The intent was always benign," he said. "But I guess we haven’t earned enough trust yet to be able to be considered benign. But we never had the opportunity to put any projects forward, so unfortunately we won’t know."

Abercrombie, who had initially dismissed PLDC critics as the "usual suspects" and had vowed to veto any repeal bill, said he wishes there was more opportunity for dialogue. He said the instantaneous nature of communication on social media, where much of the opposition to the PLDC fermented, can make thoughtful debate difficult.

"There’s very little opportunity for a dialogue or a conversation as to what was intended and what good results might be from something," the governor said. "So there was this kind of instantaneous negative feedback on it, which then just gobbled up the entire conversation to the degree there was one.

"So it didn’t have much of a chance."