Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 4, Number 10, 1 October 1987 — Essential to Agency's Mandate , Funding [ARTICLE]

Essential to Agency's Mandate , Funding

OHA Computerizes State Public Lands lnventory

By Linda Kawai'ono Delaney Land Officer With a little help from legislative money committees and a big change in attitude at the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), the Office of Hawaiian Affairs Lands Division now has the complete State Public Lands lnventory on its office computer system. When OHA submitted its biennium budget to the Legislature last January, it included a request for nearly $30,000 to initiate a two-year manual duplication of the computerized inventory at the agency office. House Finance and Senate Ways and Means Committee members questioned the need for the appropriation if the inventory was already on tape. Couldn't we just "translate and transfer" the information from one computer to another, for a lot less money? Certainly, but for the last five years DLNR refused to do that. Committee members asked OHA Chairman and

Kaua'i T rustee Moses K. Keale Sr. to make the request again. And to eome back to the Legislature if the answer was "no way." Under the new administration of Governor John David Waihe'e III and the DLNR directorship of William Paty, the response was fast and simple. "Yes," the department responded, "you ean have a copy of the eomputer tape. When ean you piek it up?" The only difficulty was that DLNR is on an IBM system OHA uses a mainframe Wang VS. Happily, the Legisiature appropriated the $450 necessary to convert their tape to our disks. Joyfully, that process is now complete. This immediate access to the public lands inventory is essential to both the mandate and funding of OHA. Any error in the identification of lands means money lost. The correction of one such error last year meant an additional $15,000 to OHA.

More important in the long run, though, is that we ean now begin verifying the accuracy of the inventory and segregating the precise lands whieh the State is now saying are outside the OHA trust constraints. Restoring and maintaining the integrity of the inventory is a critical first step to insuring the full entitlement and benefit of the trust to native Hawaiian beneficiaries. Further, the inventory also includes a listing of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. It will now be possible to also plan for a systematic verification of that trust. Also anticipated in the future is coordinating the four-times-a-year reporting of ineome from the lands by parcel and user. This quarterly accounting would take the next step of guaranteeing timely and accurate payment of trust funds to OHA. On-line and on-time: that's the goal of the computerized inventory.