The first stage in an effort to develop another roadway into Puna lost its state funding after the Hawaii County Council voted Wednesday against accepting the money.
The Puna Makai Alternate Route is a long-gestating proposal to design and build another road into Puna in an effort to decrease traffic congestion on Highway 130, the only main corridor serving the district, as well as improve evacuation routes and access for emergency responders.
Puna Rep. Greggor Ilagan secured in 2021 $1 million in state funds to be used to carry out an initial study for the project. With the county to provide an additional $500,000, the study would identify the most promising options for an alternate route.
The County Council was set to accept those funds through Bill 107, a routine budget bill that does nothing other than move the money between accounts. But that seemingly innocuous bill led to hours of debate and consternation among council members and residents throughout the bill’s life.
The central sticking point with the measure was a perceived lack of specificity: Puna beneficiaries of Hawaiian homestead land were concerned that nothing in the bill would prohibit the state or county from developing an alternate route through property managed by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, potentially displacing Hawaiians and harming communities in the process.
Those fears, expressed during multiple committee and council hearings, led to the council briefly rejecting the bill in December before immediately backtracking and accepting it, and also developing a companion resolution to the bill that would specifically clarify the project would not consider DHHL properties as possible sites for the route.
Nonetheless, despite voting unanimously to pass the resolution, the council again voted Wednesday to reject the bill — decisively killing it this time — which put the future of the entire project in limbo.
“The state screwed up,” said Kailua-Kona Councilwoman Rebecca Villegas. “A million dollars is a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not enough to compromise the sanctity and trust of the community.”
What Villegas and many testifiers wanted was a guarantee, built into the bill itself, that DHHL lands would be exempted from the project. The resolution, which is not legally binding, was not sufficient.
Because it’s considered improper for the council to insert policy stipulations into budget bills — County Corporation Counsel Elizabeth Strance strongly urged the panel against doing exactly that — council members agreed the only choice was to kill the measure.
Not every council member agreed with this assessment, however. Hilo Councilwoman Jenn Kagiwada and Puna Councilwoman Ashley Kierkiewicz both voted in support of the bill (Puna Councilman Matt Kaneali‘i-Kleinfelder was absent during Wednesday’s hearing).
Kierkiewicz acknowledged her frustration with the council’s position, but urged her fellows to not take resolutions so lightly.
“We passed a resolution that acknowledged community needs and issues and also expanded the scope (of the bill),” Kierkiewicz said. “When we pass resolutions as a body … yes, we acknowledge they are nonbinding, but there is so much power … in our unanimous policy directive, and I don’t want the public or even members of this body to diminish the weight that these resolutions carry.”
County Public Works Director Steve Pause said during the meeting that he has been made aware of the wishes of the Puna community and would have, if the bill passed, excluded DHHL lands from the study.
“Why on earth would we pursue an option that meets with such disfavor?” Pause said.
The county had until the end of this June to claim the $1.5 million allocated in Bill 107, money that was earmarked nearly three years earlier.
“That money is going to lapse,” Ilagan told the Tribune-Herald on Thursday. “It’s no longer going to be there.”
Ilagan expressed his deep frustration with the council’s actions, saying their decision was dismissive of the effort necessary to secure funding in the first place, to say nothing of how difficult it will be to secure such funding again.
“It’s very hard to secure funding for anything,” Ilagan said. “I had to use a lot of my political capital just to get that $1.5 million.”
Meanwhile, with so much of this year’s state budget sure to be focused on wildfire recovery projects on Maui, Ilagan said it will probably be even harder to secure funding for Puna for the foreseeable future.
He said the council’s concerns about the scope of the bill would have been assuaged by the very project the bill was intended to fund.
“It was a study,” Ilagan said. “The study was going to talk to all the stakeholders and figure out what people want or don’t want to see. … Without that study, it’s going to be very hard for (the Puna alternate route) to go forward at all.”
Ilagan went even further in a statement released Thursday, saying the council “invoked fear within the Native Hawaiian community, misleading them into believing that the road would cut through their community” in spite of assurances to the contrary by Pause.
“By instilling fear with false claims, the County Council has unnecessarily turned this collaborative effort between the state and county into a divisive situation, pitting Puna against other Hawaiians,” Ilagan’s said in his statement. “The repercussion is that our most disadvantaged residents remain at risk of being trapped in emergencies.”
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.