A bill that would have transitioned management of Maunakea away from the University of Hawaii will now keep UH in charge, to an extent.
House Bill 2024 was, at one point, a proposal that would create a new state agency to manage Maunakea lands above the 6,500-foot level, consolidating authority over those lands into a single entity and removing UH as the managing agency of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve.
However, after a Senate committee hearing that began Tuesday afternoon and ended Wednesday, the bill has been amended to keep the new agency — now called the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority — within UH-Hilo “for administrative purposes.”
According to the amendments proposed by Oahu Sen. Donna Kim, chair of the Senate Committee on Higher Education, the Authority “will replace the role of the University of Hawaii Board of Regents and the University of Hawaii President,” but will retain most of the responsibilities delineated in previous drafts of the bill.
Kim told the Tribune-Herald on Wednesday that the previous draft of the bill was “set up to fail,” that the countless responsibilities of managing the mountain could not be shifted over to a wholly new entity in the three years allotted by the bill.
“When I took on this bill, I had to look at the biggest stumbling block people have with UH’s management and that seemed to be their slow pace in making decisions and poor communication,” Kim said.
Kim spent much of her committee’s hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday lambasting UH representatives about precisely that.
“We found that the management of Maunakea has become very divisive in part due to the University’s snail pace in addressing the management deficiencies and lack of community engagement,” Kim said Wednesday. “When the (Thirty Meter Telescope protests) began, the Board of Regents was paralyzed instead of developing a sense of urgency to carry out their responsibilities.”
In particular, Kim highlighted how long UH took to develop administrative rules for Maunakea lands. While work on those rules began in 2014, they were only ratified by Gov. David Ige in 2020, although UH President David Lassner said Tuesday that Ige had told UH to suspend work on the rules during the TMT protests.
“If this was a corporation in the private sector, those in charge — the Regents and UH President — would have been held accountable and probably terminated,” Kim said.
By shifting responsibility for the mountain away from UH leadership and onto a new entity within the university, Kim told the Tribune-Herald she hopes the new draft of the bill will “bridge the gap” between the university and those critical of its prior management.
The Authority’s responsibilities remain largely unchanged under the new amendments, and include developing a framework for astronomy on the mountain, limiting commercial and other activities on the mountain, and decommissioning the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory and the UH-Hilo Hoku Kea teaching telescope, both of which are slated for removal this year.
The new draft also makes changes to the makeup of the Authority’s board. Under the bill, the Authority will consist of 11 voting members, including the chairs of the state Board of Land and Natural Resources, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs’ Board of Trustees and the UH Board of Regents, a Mauna Kea Observatories representative, a “recognized practitioner” of Native Hawaiian cultural practices and a lineal descendent of a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner.
Kim said the changes to the board avoid concerns raised by the state Office of the Attorney General, which criticized the previous draft for requiring that some of the board members be Native Hawaiian, a requirement that could be considered racial discrimination. However, at least three members must be Big Island residents, Kim said.
Should the bill pass, a three-year transition period will take place beginning July 1, 2023. Throughout those three years — and beyond, should the Authority so choose — day-to-day operations of the Authority will be managed by the Executive Director of UH’s Center for Mauna Kea Stewardship.
Seven years into the Authority’s life span, the entity will be subjected to an audit. Should the audit find the Authority unfit to continue, management of Maunakea will revert to UH.
The scope of the Authority has been reduced from previous drafts: previously, the Authority would have managed all lands above the 6,500-foot level, but now that area has been reduced to just above the 9,200-foot level.
“At the 6,500-foot level, that involved lands managed by the DLNR, the (Department of Hawaiian Home Lands), and we wanted to just focus on the UH lands,” Kim said.
The new draft also removes recurring language in the previous draft that referred to the mountain exclusively as “Mauna a Wakea,” a traditional name for the mountain. Kim said that unilaterally renaming a landmark with an extremely well-established name was probably a decision better suited for an entity like the Authority.
The Higher Education Committee voted unanimously in favor of the amended bill, even Oahu Sen. Kurt Fevella, who was highly critical of UH management at Tuesday’s hearing. Fevella said Wednesday he was “satisfied” with the changes.
The bill next will go before the Senate Ways and Means Committee. No hearing for that committee has yet been scheduled.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.