Interior secretary lauds land transfer to Department of Hawaiian Home Lands

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head a Cabinet agency, struggled to contain her emotions Monday as she spoke about the imminent transfer of 80 acres of excess federal land to a trust for Native Hawaiians.

Reflecting on her Native background, she said that “to make this announcement, yes, it’s a happy day, but it’s also a sad day because we remember the tragedies that befell the Native Hawaiians throughout a tumultuous history.”

As her voice was breaking up, she continued, “Since that time our country has learned a great deal, and now we are in an era where we recognize the importance of healing the generational traumas that caused pain and heartache.”

Haaland joined the four members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation and a U.S. Commerce Department official at a news conference to herald what had been anticipated for weeks: the transfer of the former Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

Because the parcel is next to residential neighborhoods, it already is connected to utilities, roads and other networks that make housing development less costly to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the state agency that manages a 203,000-acre trust to benefit those at least half Hawaiian. Officials expect the trust to be able to develop housing for as many as 400 families on the parcel, reducing by just a fraction a wait-list of 11,000 Hawaiians seeking residential homesteads on Oahu.

The transfer will help reduce a U.S. land debt that was acknowledged when Congress in 1995 adopted the Hawaiian Home Lands Recovery Act, which gave the trust priority for claiming excess federal land in Hawaii. The law was meant to make amends for roughly 1,500 acres that the federal government took in prior decades without proper authorization.

But as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported last month, the 1995 debt has not been fully paid, partly because Congress adopted special legislation that allowed the U.S. government to repeatedly circumvent the recovery act. The congressional actions authorized the sale of dozens of excess federal parcels, mostly on Oahu, to private parties over the past decade, bypassing the trust.

None of the speakers at Monday’s news conference addressed the workarounds, but several noted that completing the 1995 commitment is overdue.

“We can all recognize that it has taken far longer than intended or expected to fully achieve the goal of the act,” said Rep. Ed Case.

Of the roughly 900 acres transferred to the trust thus far under the recovery act, the Ewa Beach one would be the first with the potential to provide homesteads to hundreds of Hawaiian families, Sen. Brian Schatz noted. None of the prior lands have been suited for homestead use, DHHL has said.

The transfer of the 80 acres would cut about $10 million from a nearly $17 million debt — calculated based on land values in 1998, the year the trust and the U.S. government agreed on a settlement deal. No other federal parcels have been identified yet to address the remaining debt, an Interior Department spokesman said.