State to settle historic litigation over Native Hawaiian homesteads for $328 million

State lawyers are prepared to settle a landmark class-action lawsuit filed more than 20 years ago by Native Hawaiians waiting for homestead land leases.

Attorneys representing the state have asked the Legislature to fund a $328 million settlement in the case with roughly 2,700 plaintiffs.

The request follows 15 days of nearly back-to-back settlement conferences with a state Circuit Court judge between March 24 and April 13 in the case known as Kalima v. State of Hawaii.

Lead plaintiff Leona Kalima and two other named plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in 1999, arguing that the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, overseer of a 203,000-acre federally created land trust, had breached its fiduciary duty by not awarding homestead lots on a timely basis to qualified applicants who must be at least half Hawaiian and can receive house, farm or pastoral lots under 99-year leases that cost $1 a year.

DHHL’s wait-list for homesteads has ballooned to more than 28,000 applicants today.

Some applicants have waited for decades on the list. About 950 of the original plaintiffs in the Kalima case have died.

The pending settlement amounts to about $121,481 on average per plaintiff, though there are several classes of plaintiffs that differ by the type of land lease for which they applied and how their applications were treated, among other things.

Carl Varady, an attorney representing plaintiffs, declined to comment this morning.

A state official confirmed that Hawaii’s Department of the Attorney General has asked the Legislature to fund the pending Kalima case settlement. The official asked not to be named because settlement talks have been confidential.

Raynette Ah Chong, a plaintiff representing her late father who died in 2001 waiting for a homestead, was not aware of a settlement Tuesday morning but said it would be a blessing after so many years.

“It’s been a long, long, long, long time,” she said.

The current effort to determine claims over DHHL’s administration of the Hawaiian Homes land trust, which was created by the federal government in 1921 and passed to the state in 1959, dates back to 1988 when then-Gov. John Waihee adopted recommendations from a task force to resolve DHHL breach-of-trust claims.

Hawaii’s Legislature enacted a law in 1991 that created a special commission to administratively adjudicate claims filed by Aug. 31, 1995 for harm suffered between statehood in 1959 until 1988. Some 2,721 claimants met the deadline.

Any claim decisions by the special panel were subject to approval by the Legislature, but the panel and lawmakers failed to achieve their mission by a 1999 deadline after which claimants were allowed to, and did, sue.