Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 26, Number 9, 1 September 2009 — OHA and Mauna Kea [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

OHA and Mauna Kea

On July 2, the OHA Board of Trustees, by resolution, registered its support for Mauna Kea as the site for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). On July 21, the Board of Directors of the Thirty Meter Telescope Corp. announced that it had indeed selected Mauna Kea rather than a mountaintop in Chile. OHA's TMT resolution was only one of three actions recently taken by the Board in support of initiatives relating to Mauna Kea. We had previously supported legislation to authorize the University of Hawai'i Hilo's Office of Mauna Kea Management (OMKM) to promulgate administrative rules regulating public activities in the Mauna Kea Science Reserve, and encouraged the Board of Land and Natural Resources to approve the Comprehensive Management Plan for the Reserve submitted by the OMKM. The public reaction to OHA's support of those initiatives has been mixed, but more favorable than not. The University of Hawai'i, the business conununity and labor organizations, have welcomed the decision: the administration rules will enhanee OMKM's ability to regulate public access to the Science Reserve; the Management Plan will provide a clear preview of what the university has in mind for further activities on Mauna Kea; and the TMT project will contribute monumentally to Hawai'i's educational capacity as well as its eeonomie enviromnent in the short run, during construction, and in the long run, during operation. On the other hand, OHA's decisions were strongly resisted by "enviromnental" groups and Hawaiian rights advocates. The argument advanced by the Native Hawaiian advocates is primarily that another telescope on the mountain, particularly one as large as the TMT, will further damage the sacred mountain and diminish Native Hawaiians' access to sacred

sites located there. During the discussion of the Management Plan, Kahea issued a statement asking, "Where is OHA on Mauna Kea?" Kahea's question has greater implications than just Mauna Kea. It really begs the larger question of "just what is OHA's role in matters of contention between its kuleana of preserving Hawaiian culture and tradition and the need to provide for the eeonomie well-being of the Native Hawaiian community?" That question has confronted the Board many times in the past on a variety of issues and implicates that "dual responsibility." For me, the answer is found in "halanee." "Can we find a way of balancing cultural preservation with eeonomie advancement?" And the next question is, "Will that halanee improve the conditions of Native Hawaiians?" In my view, OHA's decisions answer those questions in the affinnative. OHA could have acquiesced in the demands of the environmentalists and the Hawaiian activists and said that the TMT would curtail their access to sacred sites on the mountain. My experience as a former Director of OMKM convinces me that will not happen. On the other hand, a number of labor unions whose membership includes Native Hawaiians voiced strong support for the project. Those Native Hawaiians are truck drivers, carpenters, masons, stevedores, plumbers and electricians. I have Native Hawaiian friends and family who are union members. Those union members provide for their families with incomes earned on development projects; the TMT project will improve their conditions. In addition, they pay federal taxes, whieh provide funds to support federal entitlement programs for Native Hawaiian heahh, education and housing. They also pay state and county taxes, whieh support programs benefieial to Native Hawaiians. In fact, some of those state taxes eome back to OHA in the form of the annual legislative appropriation toward OHA's budget. I don't know what motivated the other OHA trustees, but my "balancing of the equities" fell in favor of the TMT. ■

I Walter M. Heen TrustEE, O'ahu