The Mauna Kea access restrictions in the University of Hawaii’s proposed administrative rules — roundly opposed by many Big Islanders and other residents — will further polarize our community and add credence to the longstanding charge that state officials routinely ignore the concerns of local residents. The proposal’s timing — when virtually all are calling for a peaceful resolution to the Mauna Kea clash — couldn’t be worse.

As an early astronomy guide for the observatories, I’ve watched the Mauna Kea controversy close-up and witnessed 30 years of UH and state Department of Land and Natural Resources malfeasance. A combination of astronomical ambitions, ethnocentric prejudice and pressure from Hawaii’s construction and tourism industries underlie that history. These proposed rules — and the Office of Mauna Kea Management (OMKM) that created them — are direct descendants of that unsavory past.

The seeds of these rules were planted in a notorious time, after a blistering 1998 legislative audit finally exposed decades of UH and DLNR malfeasance. Ten years earlier, when we were beefing up our fledgling Visitor Information Station program in 1988, restricting islanders’ access was not supported by the mountain’s astronomy staff.

We knew islanders had long feared that astronomy would take over the mountaintop, and we all understood that Mauna Kea belonged to them long before we showed up.

That understanding was upturned by then-UH President Kenneth Mortimer and Institute for Astronomy Acting Director Bob McLaren in their defensive — I would say even vindictive — response to the audit. Mortimer and McLaren — and the BLNR chairperson then — shamelessly denied most of the auditor’s conclusions and blamed the public for whatever problems existed. So they proposed the first public access restrictions, similar to those in the current proposed rules. The Sierra Club’s Nelson Ho called that “scapegoating the public” rather than dealing with the “industrialization and commercialization of the summit.”

But even more disturbing, university officials proposed creating their own management agency, an entity they could control: the Office of Mauna Kea Management.

I don’t believe OMKM was ever intended to actually restore balance on the mountain but instead to use pro forma planning and carefully selected cultural consultants as political cover for building more telescopes and to begin limiting access — especially noncommercial access — to the summit.

Sierra Club, Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, the Royal Order of Kamehameha, Ka Lahui Hawai‘i and others opposed OMKM’s creation because of its obvious conflict of interest — “a fox guarding the henhouse,” they said.

Instead, they proposed a wholly new management agency in which statutory “rightholders” of this ceded land would manage the mountain on behalf of the public and Native Hawaiians, rather than for astronomers, tour companies and the construction industry. But “old boy politics” prevailed and their proposal was universally ignored by state officials.

These proposed rules are part of that unsavory history — tools to completely take over the mountaintop, as Big Islanders feared in the 1980s, and to further empower OMKM.

If the UH regents now adopt these rules, they will join the long list of state officials who have already been tainted by this dismal legacy.

To avoid that, they should reject the rules, phase out OMKM, and embrace Hawaiian proposals for a new management agency that has no conflict of interest.

If they decide to ignore the public and adopt the rules, Gov. David Ige will then be asked for his approval, an act that would further inflame the community divisions that are spreading across our archipelago.