House cuts funding for TMT enforcement from state budget

House lawmakers approved a rough draft of the new state operating budget Tuesday that cut more than $65 million in funding that Gov. David Ige requested for law enforcement operations to cope with disturbances such as the ongoing protests over the Thirty Meter Telescope, according to House Finance Committee Chairwoman Sylvia Luke.

When Ige presented his budget proposal to reporters in December, he declined to say how much money he had set aside for dealing with the ongoing TMT impasse but acknowledged he tucked away money in the budgets of various departments to cope with protests.

It turns out the amounts he set aside to deal with protests were huge.

For this year and next year, the administration budgeted $8.7 million for the Attorney General’s Office, nearly $36 million for the state Department of Defense, $8.7 million for the Department of Land and Natural Resources, $8.4 million for the Department of Public Safety and $18.4 million for the Department of Transportation, according to data provided by Luke.

Ige’s chief of staff, Linda Chu Takayama, said in a written statement that the money Ige requested was “a contingency amount for any upcoming projects that may attract community activism, including but not limited to Mauna Kea.”

The Ige administration has reported spending about $15 million already on law enforcement operations to cope with the anti-TMT protests on Mauna Kea, and Luke said lawmakers are still uncertain exactly which programs had to give up portions of their budgets to cover that tab.

The draft budget approved Tuesday by the House therefore includes $15 million for the state Department of Defense that can be distributed to state departments this year to ensure they all have enough money to operate, but the budget doesn’t include anywhere near the entire amount Ige wanted.

“From what we know right now, we cannot commit that type of public funds for future TMT enforcement, but we’re hopeful that there is a path forward that the governor and the mayor and the interested parties can at least let the Legislature know what they want to do in the future,” said Luke (D, Punchbowl-Pauoa-Nuu­anu).

Luke said that does not mean lawmakers are giving up on TMT, but “TMT is just one part of the state’s needs.”

“There’s tons of state needs. At this point in time we cannot commit that significant amount of money without some kind of a plan,” she said.

The state closed Mauna Kea Access Road on July 15 to prepare for construction of the $1.4 billion TMT near the Mauna Kea summit, but opponents of the telescope then set up barricades on the road to try to block the project.

The opponents of TMT contend it would be a desecration of a mountain that many Hawaiians consider sacred, and for more than five months they protested by chanting, praying, dancing hula and camping on the paved, two-lane road.

Law enforcement officials arrested 39 protesters July 17 for obstructing the road during the nonviolent protests but did not attempt to use mass arrests to clear the road again. Astronomers and other work crews were allowed up the road during the protests to service the existing observatories and other facilities on the mountain.

That stalemate continued until late December, when Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim gave his personal guarantee there would be no attempt to move TMT equipment up the mountain to start construction in January or February. The protesters then moved to the side of the road, which then reopened.

Since the state spent $15 million on enforcement during just the first few months of the protests, the administration apparently guessed that level of spending might continue and budgeted for that cost, Luke said.

“To give them the benefit of the doubt, I think they had no idea” of what to expect, Luke said of the tens of millions of dollars the administration requested for enforcement.

The draft budget approved Tuesday by the House totals more than $15.57 billion for this year and $15.67 billion for next year, but those sums do not include separate spending measures lawmakers are advancing separately to cope with housing, homelessness, to provide more money for college scholarships and other issues.

The draft budget does include more than $7.7 million for health and safety repairs to Aloha Stadium, and another $980,000to fund a new complex litigation, fraud and compliance unit. Attorney General Clare Connors has said the new unit will investigate and prosecute government corruption, program theft, fraud, campaign spending fraud, bribery “and other matters that could erode the public’s confidence in government.”

The proposed budget now goes to the state Senate for further consideration.