Hawaii County and the National Park Service appear as far apart as ever on the question of how the Keauhou aquifer should be managed.
And while two other county water departments from Oahu and Maui report a positive experience with their aquifers being overseen by the state Commission on Water Resource Management, concerns about how that management scenario would impact development in Kailua-Kona remained very much alive on Wednesday.
Water managers concur it’s likely that there will be a one- to two-year period where new water permits cannot be issued while the state sorts out existing uses.
“It does take time to establish existing uses,” said Roy Hardy, water program manager for CWRM, during a lengthy public meeting at the West Hawaii Civic Center.
Milton Pavao, a commissioner from Keaau who is strongly against changing management of the aquifer, seized on that delay.
“It will cripple the economy in this area,” he told Hardy after pressing him for information on how long it would take for new developments to get water approval if a designation is put in place.
“That’s always a possibility,” Hardy said.
Officials with Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park petitioned CWRM in the fall of 2013 to designate the Keauhou aquifer a state water management area. The agency claimed that the county does not have adequate controls over pumping to guarantee that future withdrawals will not harm park ecosystems and cultural practices that rely on the groundwater.
Barry Usagawa, program administrator for the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, told commissioners that so much conflict had developed over water use on windward Oahu that designation of the region as a state water management area in 1992 was the only way to get anything done.
The designation — sprung from concerns about groundwater pumping reducing stream flows — gave a consistent management framework across the island, helped draw other agencies into water-use decisions, and didn’t lead to a suspension of new permits, Usugawa said.
But Usagawa acknowledged that water demand hit a low point at the time that the state took over the permitting process on windward Oahu. Development stalled due to a downturn in the Japanese economy, the sugar plantations closed and increased water conservation measures like low-flow toilets helped foster a trend in declining use.
“We didn’t need to stop growth,” he said.
Pavao pointed out that Kona isn’t facing those kinds of declines.
“You guys got lucky because you didn’t need the water. Everything fell through,” Pavao said. “You had the right circumstances, you could afford to integrate (different water systems). The circumstances here are totally different.”
On Maui, 90 percent of the 30 million-gallon-per-day sustained yield of the Iao aquifer was either pumped or spoken for when the system was designated for state control in 2003. The approval of new water meters didn’t drop under the designation, said Eva Blumenstein, planning program manager for the Maui Department of Water Supply.
“There was never a moratorium on permitting,” she said.
But her words did little to appease skeptics, and both the county and NPS were holding to their positions following two meetings in March that failed to yield a compromise solution. Hawaii County Mayor Billy Kenoi told commissioners that additional science and study and further dialog is needed before a decision is made.
“The science, the facts and the law, at this point in time, do not warrant designation,” Kenoi told commissioners. “The facts haven’t changed. We believe a regulatory framework is in place that protects this resource.”
Kenoi said the county does in fact plan for the future in weighing development and water availability. Commissioner Jonathan Starr, a former member of the Maui’s board of water supply, pressed the county to put that plan for managing the aquifer and future wells on paper.
“The real issue is what’s going to happen long term,” Starr said. “I want to see a plan of where wells are going to be drilled in the next 20 to 30 years so they don’t interact with each other and don’t interact with the park, and that the county is moving forward to find a way to do that and not sitting back and hoping developers will be kind and give them some leftover water.”
If the county can create that blueprint, Starr said, there will be no need to designate.