It is hard to know if Department of Land and Natural Resources Chairwoman Suzanne Case is purposely being disingenuous, is just flat uninformed, or has drunk the Kool-Aid mixed by her Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation (DOBOR), but her My Turn in the Feb. 7 issue of West Hawaii Today suggests that perhaps “alternative facts,” are now being embraced outside the Trump administration.
The most egregious disinformation in her editorial is the suggestion that Honokohau Small Boat Harbor operates at a loss. The truth is that DOBOR opted to change its bookkeeping practices a few years back, separating the revenue generated by Honokohau’s land-based businesses, from the revenue generated by the boats berthed in the harbor. One would not exist without the other! By cooking the books, the DOBOR administrator changed Honokohau Harbor from a facility that was generating over $800,000 a year in surplus revenues, to a loser. Those of us who use the harbor for recreation and business groused about the inequity when the substantial revenues we generated went to places like Lanai (to build palatial facilities for around 30 boats), when the money we had generated was needed here to complete our facility. To blunt those arguments, DOBOR’s administrator changed the math, inventing a loss.
DOBOR has also failed to respond to a number of individuals and organizations ready to pay DOBOR to lease their land, to build or extend boating related facilities near the harbor. The DOBOR administrator told one potential developer, “we don’t know if that’s our land and we don’t have a map,” and that’s as far as it went. Case now seems to be determined to thwart any adjacent development by taking a big chunk of prime DOBOR land for a new, non-revenue-generating, multi-agency administration building and motor pool.
The other important fact that Case chose to leave out of her piece is that Honokohau Harbor has never been finished. The original master plan has never been completed. The state committed to the feds, who paid the majority of the costs to build Honokohau, that the state would finish it. Never happened. So to imply that we should be grateful that the state is spending money for maintenance and repairs is duplicitous to say the least.
Moreover, the roughly 175 commercial operators at Honokohau Harbor pay fees that substantially exceed those of recreation boaters, and also generate significant general excise tax revenues for the state, which would suggest that we very much deserve a return of some of our tax dollars to our harbor.
Case describes the work that has been undertaken in the past five years at Honokohau as “improvements and upgrades,” when in reality virtually all of the money invested here has been spent on maintenance (she lists: lighting replacements, waterline replacements, comfort station repairs, concrete replacements, etc.).
There are other half-truths and distortions in Case’s editorial, too many to respond to here. Case would be aware of all this, and more, if she or her DOBOR administrator ever spent any time communicating with the boating community and ocean recreation industry in West Hawaii. We have asked her to open that line of communication, but she pawned us off on her first deputy, and he has not even tried.
Honokohau Small Boat Harbor, West Hawaii’s “ocean gateway,” is essential to the recreational, sustenance and commercial needs of this community, and supports over 250 small businesses and thousands of recreational boaters. The boating community deserves to be heard, included in management decisions and supported, not chastised, ignored and lied to.
Rick Gaffney is president the Hawaii Fishing and Boating Association