“Shamelessly lying to exploit the suffering and destruction”
Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi, Maui County rebuke state and corporate lawyers’ false wildfire claims to increase Alexander & Baldwin’s control of East Maui streams
HONOLULU, HAWAIʻI - As the near entirety of Hawaiʻi pulled together to do whatever they could to save lives and ʻāina from the ravages of devastating wildfires, government lawyers in Honolulu worked alongside corporate attorneys for Alexander & Baldwin, to falsely claim that stream protections for East Maui left the island with “not enough water . . . to battle the wildfires.” These claims were submitted to the Hawai‘i Supreme Court on Wednesday, August 9, in an attempt to overturn an environmental court judge’s ruling that temporarily limited the amount of water the real estate investment corporation can divert from East Maui’s watersheds.
Today, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court heard oral arguments over these claims, which were thoroughly debunked yet still stubbornly and inexplicably defended by the attorney general.
As was pointed out in written filings and today’s arguments before the supreme court:
Water from East Maui, stored in Central Maui, would never have been used to fight the devastating wildfires in Lāhainā, in West Maui;
Millions of gallons of water from East Maui were and remain available in Central Maui reservoirs for firefighting, and at least two million gallons of water continue to flow into them every day;
Maui County can only realistically use a few hundred thousand gallons at most to fight a fire;
The County in fact only used 37,000 gallons of water over 5 days to fight the fires in Central Maui; and
The environmental court judge’s ruling had no impact on the county’s ability to fight fires (per Maui County’s corporation counsel).
Despite the blatant factual misrepresentations in the state’s “writ of mandamus,” the deputy attorney general representing the state Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) repeatedly refused to “walk them back,” to the apparent confusion and frustration of at least one justice.
A&B and the state’s main legal argument centered around the authority of the environmental court judge to “maintain jurisdiction” over and modify annual revocable permits the BLNR had issued to A&B, to divert East Maui streams through 2023.
In June, environmental court judge Jeffrey Crabtree ordered the BLNR to uphold Sierra Club of Hawai‘i’s constitutional right to a contested case hearing over the revocable permits. To prevent the permits from being automatically revoked, which would have cut the county and central Maui agricultural operations from receiving any East Maui water, the judge maintained jurisdiction over the permits. In doing so, he reduced the amount of water that could be diverted from East Maui from 40.49 million gallons of water per day, to 31.5 million gallons per day.
This latter amount was above what A&B was already taking, but below what the state Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) had authorized. Judge Crabtree’s ruling fully authorized the 7.5 million gallons per day requested by Maui County, which included water needed for fire fighting. The 31.5 million gallon per day cap was based on A&B’s own reported water uses, and would reduce the unnecessary waste of public trust water while the contested case hearing was pending. It would also motivate the BLNR to actually hold the ordered contested case hearing in a somewhat timely fashion (as of this date, a contested case hearing has yet to be scheduled).
As Sierra Club of Hawai‘i attorney David Kimo Frankel noted, a prior 2001 court order to grant a contested case hearing over stream diversions to Nā Moku ʻAupuni o Koʻolau Hui, an organization of East Maui kalo farmers and community members, was ignored by the BLNR for years and years – while the permits they were contesting were secretly renewed on an annual basis.
“A&B and the BLNR ignored the law, trampled our rights, and drained our streams dry for decades,” said Kyle Nakanelua, an East Maui kalo farmer and resident. “Our kūpuna died waiting for their rights to be upheld, waiting to see water and life flow back into our streams, our loʻi, our estuaries and watersheds. And all throughout that time, BLNR rubber stamped A&B’s permits, A&B raked in profits, and millions of gallons of water were wasted – are still being wasted – every single day.”
“At least now, people can see how far the BLNR will go to give A&B everything it wants, shamelessly lying to exploit the suffering and destruction inflicted by the Maui wildfires – and not even apologizing when they get caught.”
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