There they sit, in Honolulu Harbor, in downtown’s Capitol Historic District and even out in Wahiawa: millions of dollars worth of empty unused state and county buildings representing ideas either forgotten, not acted upon or just victims of legions of paper shufflers.

For years, I thought Hawaii’s bureaucratic sink hole was the empty Kamamalu Building across from Iolani Palace and the Hawaiian Electric building. It turns out to be just one of many fallow government edifices.

The Star-Advertiser’s Kokua Line columnist, June Watanabe, writes this week that although the state’s $2.3 million Transportation Department Baseyard on California Avenue in Wahiawa remains "substantially completed at the end of 2012, it remains closed with no opening date in sight."

Officials say work along the perimeter of the property is still needed before the occupancy permit can be granted.

Of course when it takes eight months to tidy up the paperwork, you can appreciate why Gov. Neil Abercrombie was pushing so hard for his Public Land Development Corp., which would grant the state and private developers’ exemptions from many state and county permits. The PLDC was spiked by the Legislature, but inertia remains a government calling card.

Back in town, another mostly empty puzzlement is the $20 million parking garage for the city and state traffic management center on South King Street. The garage was completed last year, but the five-story building is mostly empty because parking is reserved for the traffic center, which is not expected to be built until 2015, at the earliest.

The government ghost town doesn’t end there. Over at Honolulu Harbor sits the ferry terminal at Pier 19.

Yes, we have no ferry — but if a ferry boat does come a-calling, direct it to tie up at the $4.3 million terminal across from Aloha Tower in the harbor.

With the foresight so appreciated by government, the ferry terminal was built in 2002, way before the Superferry was around and long after the Seaflite hydrofoil had already gone out of business. It was built, according to an article in the Star-Bulletin by Russ Lynch, because "federal money was available for the building and would have gone to waste if it wasn’t built."

The unused ferry terminal was part of a $25 million grant shared by Hawaii and Alaska to help intrastate transportation, Lynch reported at the time.

Actually, the Superferry ran sporadically between 2007 and 2009, but went bankrupt after the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the needed environmental permits were not properly granted. During that time the terminal was an adjunct to the operation.

Since 2009, the terminal has been largely unused.

This brings up the darkest of Hawaii’s black holes: the Princess Victoria Kamamalu Building. State workers left the building in 2003 for a new office across the street.

A decade later, the eight-story, more-than-half-century-old building is still empty.

It is something of the Sargasso Sea of state plans, where Hawaii governors go to call for costly new planning schemes, none of which are ever seen again.

The Kamamalu Building has been proposed as the new home for the state Health Department, or the Human Resources Department. Since 2003 the building has been gutted and scrubbed of asbestos.

Last year, the Legislature, at Abercrombie’s request, appropriated more than $30 million to rehab the structure, but an actual starting date is unclear.

Doing nothing with what you have is apparently becoming a new skill set for the state of Hawaii.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.