On Politics: Despite unresolved conflicts over Mauna Kea, Ige must be resolved to let TMT be built

By June of 2000, the University of Hawaii had already gone through five drafts and spent more than a million dollars trying to write a compromise agreement for scientists, Native Hawaiian groups and Big Island residents to share the high air atop Mauna Kea.

Nearly 20 years later, Gov. David Ige will put the actual plan, still lacking some key Hawaiian support, into motion Monday.

“We have followed a 10-year process to get to this point, and the day for construction to begin has arrived,” Ige said during a state Capitol news conference last week.

The governor announced that the road up Hawaii’s tallest mountain will be closed starting Monday morning as the big trucks, road grading and other heavy equipment heads up to the construction site.

Working at 13,000 feet, this high-altitude project will also mean high stakes for Ige, who is nearing the end of his second and final term. How it works or fails will do much to describe the legacy of the Ige administration.

Although he never sought to make the decision on developing the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, Ige will get the credit or blame for its fate.

All along the planning process, Native Hawaiian activists have said the state, the university and others controlling access to the mountain have been insensitive to Hawaiian culture and practices.

State Attorney General Clare Connors noted that the state will move up the mountain with state and county law enforcement officers at the ready.

A Honolulu Star-Advertiser report of the news conference said Ige warned that unarmed National Guard members will be deployed but only for certain support roles, including transportation of personnel and equipment, and helping with road closures. In 2014 and 2015 blockades, protests and road closures stalled the $1.4 billion project.

The mountain is seen as a sacred Native Hawaiian site and serves as a wellspring of emotion for supporters. Although Native Hawaiian activists, like most everyone on the Big Island, take the state-built highway up the mountain to reach the peaks, that state construction on the mountain has not triggered the protests. The protests have been about the telescopes on the mountain, not the roads that replaced a 1960 jeep trail.

On political terms, the protesters, Ige and the TMT operators are in a dilemma with little chance that any will back down. For his part Ige has offered significant compromises by starting to decommission telescopes and include community input in the decision process. TMT has offered to sponsor educational projects in the community and gives annual grants to Big Island schools, besides increasing the possibility of eventual high-tech employment opportunities. Protesters, however, insist the only resolution is to not put the world’s biggest and best telescope on what is agreed to be the finest astronomical observation site on the globe.

At the end, building the telescope, neither delay nor talk, can be Ige’s only resolution.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.