Land Use Commission rejects Mauna Kea petition

HILO >> A petition that challenged the density of development of astronomy observatories on Mauna Kea was denied Friday by the state Land Use Commission, with a majority of the commissioners declaring they have no jurisdiction over the issue.

Bianca Isaki, who filed the petition on behalf of Hawaiian cultural practitioners Ku‘ulei Higashi Kanahele and Ahiena Kanahele, said she plans to appeal that decision to Circuit Court in Hilo. Isaki said she hopes to persuade the court to declare the LUC does in fact have the authority to decide the issue, and to send the petition back to them.

The petition alleged the 13 existing Mauna Kea observatories along with their related offices, parking lots and utilities amount to inappropriate urban development on state conservation lands, and argued the area must be reclassified as urban before any further development takes place.

The Kanahele filing is a maneuver that might have put new legal obstacles in the way of the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope, which has state and county permits to build a new high-tech observatory on the mountain.

Reclassifying even a portion of the summit area of Mauna Kea for urban uses would surely have been a long, hard-fought process that could have taken years.

Sponsors of the TMT already have spent a decade obtaining permits and fending off legal challenges, and construction of the telescope has been stalled since mid-July by protesters who are blocking Mauna Kea Access Road.

The protesters, who call themselves kiai, or protectors, say the TMT would be a desecration of a mountain that many Hawaiians consider sacred. They say they will not allow the telescope to be built.

The vote on the Kanahele petition by the Land Use Commission was 5-2, with commission Chairman Jonathan Scheuer and Commissioner Dan Giovanni voting in favor of the petition.

A key issue was whether the LUC has the authority to demand that the summit area be reclassified as urban before any further development takes place. Lawyers for the state argued that the commission does not.

It is the state Department of Land and Natural Resources that is responsible for regulating the uses of conservation lands, and the state Board of Land and Natural Resources issued a conservation district use permit to TMT authorizing the project to proceed.

Several commissioners expressed frustration with the way the University of Hawaii and the Department of Land and Natural Resources have managed development in the 525-acre Astronomy Precinct, where the Mauna Kea observatories were built.

“I find myself critical of not only the DLNR, but the university and how they’ve in effect governed and managed the land, which leads us to where we are,” said Giovanni.

Others were more blunt. Commissioner Arnold Wong opined, “I think the management kind of sucks,” but said the law required that he vote against the Kanahele petition “even though I don’t want to.”

Scheuer described a pattern of “incremental decision making,” with the university seeking one conservation district permit after another without ever properly evaluating the combined impact of all of the telescope projects on the summit area.

“It’s a shame,” Scheuer said. “Jurisdictional issues aside, I think we have a clear picture that if they had followed the proper process — this process — we would not be where we are now.”

Commissioner Nancy Cabral said development of astronomy on Mauna Kea was cheered on for many years because it brought jobs and economic development, and said the new shift in attitudes “needs to take place so we don’t just pave paradise and make it a parking lot.” But not all of the decisions of the past can simply be erased, she said.

Cabral said she would vote against the petition, but “I certainly do not want to think that my life will be threatened, or my business, or my personal property or my business property will be threatened in any way for the fact that I take a vote in a manner that I’m sworn, taken an oath to take, because I hear that people’s lives are threatened and their properties are threatened because they support the Thirty Meter Telescope,” she said.

“I really, really hope that we are not moving to the point of anarchy, because that’s where that point of action takes us,” she said. She said she hopes the word gets out that the commission sincerely listened to the testimony and legal arguments, and did what the law required.