The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, despite its noble stated mission and goals, has become the embodiment of a money pit — and the agency must start digging out and fixing grave dysfunctions before they totally subsume its very mission.
The clarion call comes amid court wrangling over how much state taxpayers are obligated to fund DHHL annually for administration and operations: The state attorney general says $5 million, but DHHL, along with the Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., says it needs $28 million from the general fund. Further, DHHL wants another $40 million to $50 million in general obligation bonds to cover infrastructure repairs.
Those are huge sums, made even more discomfiting by DHHL’s poor track record in managing land assets that should be benefiting more of its Native Hawaiian beneficiaries.
The money dispute is back in Circuit Court after the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the state “has failed by any reasonable measure, under the undisputed facts, to provide sufficient funding to DHHL.”
Among those facts is that tens of thousands of qualified beneficiaries — more than 27,000, reportedly — remain on DHHL’s waiting lists for homestead lots, many for decades. This has been a longstanding and lingering travesty, and DHHL’s failure to take care of its people expeditiously has been complicated by finances, lawsuits, wavering political will, dubious political patronage and shoddy management within DHHL itself.
At the very least, DHHL’s dysfunction must start to be righted before millions of dollars at the high end can be justified. Throwing ever-more millions down a money pit cannot be the wise course here — especially if those millions go to sustaining a DHHL bureaucracy and development interests, but make shamefully little traction for Native Hawaiian homesteaders.
That’s largely the situation today: In a twisted strategy to make money to operate the department and its programs, DHHL for decades has pursued land leases with non-Hawaiian and corporate developers; meanwhile, its Native Hawaiian applicants wait.
Nearly a century ago, when Congress passed the 1920 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act to set aside some 200,000 acres for Native Hawaiian homesteads, it seemed a sound idea: rehabilitation of the indigenous people through a government-sponsored homesteading program.
The lands became the state’s responsibility with 1959 statehood, and DHHL was charged with fulfilling the obligation to get Hawaiians with at least 50 percent blood quantum onto homestead acreage, via 99-year leases for $1 per year.
But over the decades, DHHL has been a woeful manager of both acreage and finances, and lacking infrastructure has been a major obstacle. Numerous state audits, a federal-state task force and news reports have revealed deficiencies in a wide range of its operations, from failure to meet fiduciary obligations to bad loan management, to controversial land deals and lease favoritism.
DHHL currently receives $9.6 million in state general funds. Further, this past June saw the final $30 million payment to DHHL, a hefty sum it has received annually over the past 20 years under a 1995, $600 million settlement for state misappropriation of trust lands.
Still, it has been a chronic struggle for DHHL to do right by its intended beneficiaries. Tragic stories emerge periodically about Native Hawaiian kupuna who have died after waiting for decades without realizing the promise of a homestead.
The federal government remains a co-trustee of the land assets. Movement is surging on Native Hawaiian sovereignty. Nearly a century after the Hawaiian Homes Act, and nearly 40 years after a 1978 Constitutional Convention amendment requiring the state to fund DHHL, the time seems ripe for a fundamental reassessment of the needs and operation of this land trust.
Meanwhile, the current wrangling over state funding for DHHL — $5 million? $28 million? — only highlights the fact that whatever figure prevails will be more money down the pit if the agency can’t become more efficient and start getting more homesteaders on homelands. DHHL is bogged down by boondoggles — and these are crushing those at the core of its mission, its Native Hawaiian beneficiaries.
