For the short term, at least, Kauai residents — and everyone worried about the impact of agrochemicals on public health — can afford to exhale. The long-awaited report by an independent Joint Fact-Finding Study Group, commissioned by the state and Kauai County, has found no smoking gun linking pesticide use with adverse health effects in the community.

But then, going forward, government leaders must resolve to keep better records and improve public transparency about pesticide use. The report did nothing to suggest that Hawaii’s people can forget about chemical exposure and its impact over the course of years.

The study, “Pesticide Use by Large Agribusinesses on Kaua‘i,” was released Friday and involved a panel of Kauai residents with a background in science.

The draft report can be downloaded from the site of Accord Network (www.accord3.com/pg1000.cfm), the public policy consultants retained to coordinate the study. Comments (submitted by email to jffcomments@gmail.com) will be accepted until 5 p.m. April 8.

The community should take this opportunity to provide feedback as requested, reporting any factual problems with the data or evidence presenting, and noting what pertinent data was missed by the study group.

The group seems to have done a thorough job, within some obvious constraints, as they themselves noted. These include: “patchy and fragmented information, incomplete and often important but proprietary data, small statistical samples, confounding demographic variables, a lack of solid human and environmental health exposure data, and evolving scientific and regulatory views.

It’s followed by the statement that many took as a bit of initial good news: “Because of the small populations involved and the lack of fully reliable and accurate health data, the information we assembled does not show that current pesticide use by seed companies and Kaua‘i Coffee plays a role in adverse health on Kaua‘i.”

The group stated that it looked for known associations between pesticides and disorders, but the incidence on Kauai was only significant for five: developmental delay, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, renal disease, diabetes and obesity. None are directly caused by pesticides, and there was no clear association with health incidents here, the report concluded.

But the group carved out quite a large caveat for its conclusion, based on the limited data.

What the members rightly suggest is that much better tracking of pesticides in the environment is needed, including what agribusiness uses but also “legacy pesticides from previous agricultural eras that persist in the environment, pesticides applied by a wide range of non-agricultural users and chemicals from other sources.”

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser wholeheartedly agrees with the working group in its conclusion that the existing Good Neighbor Program — administered by the state Department of Agriculture as a voluntary disclosure by the agricultural companies — is not equal to the task and should be overhauled.

The report noted that a separate independent review of the program is underway under the supervision of the Environmental Mediation Center.

The department should give both reports serious weight and consider ways to make fuller disclosure of pesticide practices mandatory. If the state is to do a responsible job of oversight, being watchful for long-term health effects, it needs the most complete data set possible.

The group acknowledged it could not resolve questions about several issues, including:

>> Incidents in 2006 and 2008 at Waimea Canyon Middle School, in which students were sickened and sent to hospitals.

>> A January case at the Syngenta Hawaii research site in Kekaha in which 10 contractors were taken to a hospital after they went into a field treated with chemicals before a 24-hour re-entry recommended hiatus had passed.

>> Discrepancies between state birth defects data and physician records, and generally outdated recordkeeping methods.

The report makes several pointed and reasonable recommendations: for one, it calls on the Agriculture Department to establish state standards so that chronic, long-term exposure to pesticides can be evaluated.

It also requests that a county liaison serve on the state Pesticide Advisory Committee and review pesticide use in county-controlled areas.

Further, it requests $3 million from the Legislature to enable improvements to be implemented. The department should produce a strategic plan, first, to outline how those resources would be deployed.

However officials get to that point, it’s plain that pesticides linger in the environment, comprising a problem that won’t fade away. It’s time the state gets a handle on it.