Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 9, Number 6, 1 June 1992 — Mai Wakinekona [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Mai Wakinekona

By Paul Alexander Washington, D.C. Counsel for OHA

Native Hawaiian issues heading for success

In this presidential election year, the second session of the 102nd Congress does not have that many legislative days left. Most observers expect a long summer recess as the election campaigns head into high gear, and then an early October

end to the Congress Several issues relevant to Native Hawaiians appear heading for successful resolution, while others will carry over to the 103rd Congress in January 1993. Legislation, appropriations, and oversight related to the Hawaiian Homes Commission have been a focus of this Congress. The administration had targeted $1.2 million in infrastructure development for Hawaiian Home Lands in its budget reduction (recision) request to Congress. At this point it does not appear that Congress will go along. The House Appropriations Committee has produced its own budget reduction package whieh, among numerous other differences, limits the recision request for Home Lands infrastructure to 4.2 percent. This bill (H.R. 4990) passed the House of Representatives on May 7. The Senate is working on a similar bili whieh is expected to protect the Home Lands funds as well as protect the other Hawaiian programs. The Senate has passed Senate Joint Resolution 154, as amended, whieh grants United States approval to various acts of the legislature of Hawai'i relating to the Home Lands Trust. SJR 154 is now pending in the House of Representatives, where it has been referred to the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. The committee is expected to hold hearings in mid-June. Although the state acts are themselves relatively non-controversial, SJR 154 has been focus for the continuing dispute between the administration, and the state of Hawai'i and

Native Hawaiian organizations, including OHA and the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation. The dispute, with its many ramifications, is over the extent of the United States' responsibilities to Native Hawaiians — the trust responsibility issue. In a 1991 hearing of the Senate Energy Committee, Tim Glidden, counselor to the Secretary of the Interior, while taking a fairly narrow view of the Interior's obligations, announced that the department had requested an Inspector General's audit of the Hawaiian Homes Commission. On April 21, the Inspector General forwarded the Report (No. 92-1-641) to the Secretary of the Interior. In what was surely no surprise to anyone familiar with the 70 year history of the Homes Lands Commission, the report was very critical, it found that: (1) only 16 percent of available land has been awarded to Native Hawaiians for homesteading; Home Lands have been illegally made available for public use by federal and state agencies; and many Native Hawaiians have been waiting as long as 30 years and some have died before receiving homesteads. The general conclusion was: "Both federal and state governments eontributed over years to the current deficient eondition of the Homes Lands program by not acting in the best interests of native Hawaiians when administering the program and through insufficient funding, inadequate planning and management, and inaehon." The standard practice with Inspector General reports is to make the report and recommendations available for comment or corrective action by the affected parties at least 30 days before publication. The recommendations to the Interior Department were to establish an oversight system for monitoring the state of Hawaii's activities and obligations; to inform the state as to whatever assistance the department is willing to provide (upon request of the state); and not to defer to Hawai'i on amendments to the Act, but inform Congress if any amendments diminish

benefits to Native Hawaiians or are contrary to the intent of the Act. By the time of publication, the Inspector General had rejected Interior's claims that it had an adequate oversight system in plaee and that it provided appropriate information to Congress. The Inspector General recommended to the governor of Hawai'i that the Homes Commission be directed to develop a comprehensive home lands infrastructure developments plan that provides for systematic preparation of lots for use and occupancy; that such a plan be legislatively enacted; and that adequate funding be provided to the Homes Commission's home loan fund. The governor, in response to the Inspector General, disagrees with some of the underlying analysis in the report. For example, questioning the significance of the calculations leading to the 16 percent figure, pointing out that the calculation did not consider how mueh of homestead land is suitable for homesteading. However, in the view of the Inspector General, the response was not related to recommendations and the recommendations were therefore unchanged in the final report. Perhaps the most striking recommendation of the Inspector General was to the Home Lands Commission itself, calling for it to suspend the implementation of its 10 year plan until a viable needs assessment is conducted and the plan is demonstrated to be financially viable. The Hawaiian Homes Commission did not concur with the recommendations of the Inspector General, indicating that rather than adopting a definitive plan it had set goals and is diligently seeking to achieve these goals. Another outgrowth of the multiple hearings on the SJR 154 has been for Sen. Daniel Akaka to request that the General Accounting Office of the United States' research a series of questions pertaining to the United States obligations to Native Hawaiians. This critical area of controversy permeates most legislative items relating to Native Hawaiians. More on that issue in the next eolumn.