Given the sky-high valuation on Hawaii real estate, it’s remarkable how carelessly state government manages this resource.

The latest evidence supporting that rather sour conclusion comes from the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. Documents analyzed by Honolulu Star-Advertiser writers Rob Perez and Dana Williams track the performance and oversight on about 340 “revocable” permits issued by DLNR.

The record does not reflect well on the agency, which must bring these sweetheart deals into rational regulation.

Revocable permits are supposed to be short-term arrangements to give the state some flexibility on land that otherwise might go underutilized. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the optimal way of handling land management. In fact, however, many of these agreements, involving publicly owned tracts comprising thousands of acres, have been treated as long-term deals. And, because there’s no conventional lease involved, they don’t have the oversight — and appropriate lease rents — normally attached to them.

There are no clear rules developed to offer specificity to the state’s enabling law on the permits. As a result, numerous accords have languished on the books without any corrections or adjustments made.

Among them, Gay &Robinson has paid 3 cents per acre each month to lease more than 1,600 acres in Waimea, Kauai, for use as pastureland — a rate that has been in place for more than 16 years.

Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy runs an equestrian program on 10 acres on Hawaii island, paying $1.30 per acre. That deal’s been in place for 25 years. The academy is the state’s most expensive private school, and would find a hardship case tough to make.

The other standout example was Syngenta Seeds, which has rented almost 44 acres of agricultural land on Kauai for 33 years, paying just $17 per acre each month since 1999.

DLNR’s written response to Star-Advertiser queries is unfathomable: “The department has operated effectively under statutory provision and does not believe administrative rules are necessary,” officials said. The law, they also said, does not provide a maximum term for the permits. That’s a key point, and that’s precisely why the administrative rules are needed. Lawmakers should insist that the law be clarified to require them.

The presumptive short-term nature of the permits — the ability of the state to reclaim the land without the notice a formal lease would require — is the reason the state gives the permit holder control of the property more cheaply — typically at a 25 percent discount.

But if the revocable permits are so infrequently reassessed and revoked, the practice amounts to the state merely waiving a significant amount of rent revenue it could be collecting.

It’s not even clear how much revenue the state is losing. Program administrators have noted in annual reports to the Board of Land and Natural Resources that they are unable to gauge market rental values accurately because of a lack of appraisers. This is the first shortcoming that needs to be fixed: adequate staffing or reallocation of resources to allow the permits to be reviewed.

Further, the policies guiding these decisions are not clear, consistent or transparent. For instance, Hilton Hawaiian Village pays $405,192 in yearly rent for a tiny parcel of submerged land beneath the pier it owns in its Waikiki lagoon; the month-to-month lease began in the late 1950s. Why this use is deemed “temporary” is never explained.

This pattern of irrationality is distressingly similar to land-management performance by another state agency, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the subject of repeated investigations by the Star-Advertiser. And it’s supremely ironic that the management team tasked with reforming DHHL’s own permit program included the former DLNR chairman, William Aila Jr., who should have been applying the same ideas to his own agency.

For a state that purportedly puts such stock in its precious land resources, officials put in charge have done such a poor custodial job. That is perhaps the greatest irony of all, and a shameful shortcoming.