Aloha,
Wow! Did you see Sophie Cocke’s front page article in the Star-Advertiser exposing the “fake goal” of doubling agriculture production by 2020?!! See it below. It’s powerful! People are really waking up. Things are really turning our way.
On Tuesday evening at 6:00 at Kapolei Middle School, the city Department of Planning and Permitting will be presenting the new map of Important Agricultural Lands. We need to have numbers of people there to protest the exclusion of Ho’opili and Koa Ridge from the list and map of Important Agricultural Lands. We need to be there early to hold Stop Ho’opili signs and meet people as they arrive.
This article is a huge help to us. How can we be sacrificing Ho’opili (32%) and Koa Ridge (13%), a total of 45% of the farmlands on O’ahu currently producing food for the local market, when the Finance Chair of the state House of Representatives is exposing the fact that no one knows what or how much we are producing, and the goal to double food production is fake and meaningless? We can’t let this happen.
Below the article is the announcement for Tuesday’s meeting.
Below that is more background material you might use for your statement. Keep your statement to one or two minutes. At the very least, we want them to keep the mapping open until the last effort to save the Ho’opili farmland is exhausted.
Please be there on Tuesday!
Business| Hawaii News
Agriculture director grilled over jobs, food goals
Posted January 08, 2017
January 8, 2017
Updated January 8, 2017 12:23am
STAR-ADVERTISER
Sylvia Luke:
The House Finance Committee chairwoman is known to be tough
STAR-ADVERTISER
Scott Enright:
He cited a struggle to replace retirees and keep millennials
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The state department in charge of managing Hawaii’s agricultural resources has been operating for years with one-third of its staff positions left vacant, prompting House Finance Committee Chairwoman Sylvia Luke to threaten to eliminate the positions altogether.“I don’t know what the problem is, but I don’t know how a department can function with one-third of its positions vacant,” Luke told Department of Agriculture Director Scott Enright during a budget briefing Friday at the state Capitol. “So I’m just thinking that you don’t need the positions.”
Luke also took Enright to task for what she called the “fake goal” of doubling local food production — a campaign promise made by Gov. David Ige that’s been left to the Agriculture Department to fulfill.
About 122 out of 360 positions in the Agriculture Department are unfilled. They include jobs such as environmental health specialists to oversee the enforcement of federal and state laws, plant quarantine inspectors to guard against invasive species and entomologists who can help combat devastating plant pests.
Enright said the Agriculture Department had hired a record 55 people this past year. However, the department also lost 52 employees, many of them due to retirement. He said it was a constant struggle to replace retirees as well as retain millennials who have a tendency to job hop.
Enright said that employees are also lured away by higher-paying jobs.
But Luke, known for her hard questioning of department officials when it comes to budgetary matters, said she was frustrated.
“As far as vacancies, this is the fifth year I have been chair of this committee and this is the fifth year that we talked about the vacancies,” she said. “Congratulations that you filled 50 positions, but it’s been the same for the last five years.”
She suggested that the money for the positions could be allocated elsewhere.
“Every year we gave you a pass and said, ‘OK.’ We negotiated which positions should be given or not,” she said. “Well, we will just eliminate them and we will see where we go.”
Departmental budget briefings have been scheduled in the days leading up to the legislative session, which opens Jan. 18. Ige submitted his proposed two-year budget to the Legislature last month, which will be debated by lawmakers for several months before being sent back to Ige, likely heavily amended.
It’s up to the departmental directors to defend their funding requests, and Enright also came under fire over Ige’s campaign pledge of doubling local food production by 2020.
The Ige administration said earlier this year that the goal had been changed to 2030, but has recently backtracked on that, saying that it is and always has been 2020.
“Does the governor known that 2020 is three years from now?” Luke asked.
“I believe, yes,” Enright responded.
Luke said it didn’t really matter whether the goal was 2020 or 2030 because it was a “fake goal” anyway.
“It’s a fake goal because we don’t even know where we are starting and where we want to end up and how do we get there,” she said.
The Agriculture Department doesn’t have firm statistics on how much food is currently being produced in Hawaii, making the goal of doubling that figure elusive. It’s also not clear what doubling local food production means exactly, such as whether this only includes food that is locally consumed or also includes exports.
“In your vision, what do you want to achieve?” Luke said. “Because food production in and of itself is not the same as food sustainability. You can produce double or triple the mangoes, but we can’t survive on mangoes alone. So what are you trying to achieve? I just don’t understand.”
Enright said that he’s “attempting to create a diversified agricultural economy where it makes economic sense.”
He tried to clarify the administration’s changing target date, saying, “2030 came up when there was a move with staff to align the governor’s …”
But Luke jumped in to finish the sentence: “the governor’s goal with reality, right?”
The Agriculture Department was working with Honolulu’s Ulupono Initiative to come up with a statewide online food metrics platform that would give policymakers a much better picture of food imports and exports and help them better define sustainability goals. But that work, being done by Sustain Hawaii, never met the needs of the Agriculture Department, Enright told lawmakers on Friday.
The Agriculture Department spent $90,000 on the computer program, with Ulupono contributing $160,000.
Enright said that he gave up on the project in December after waiting more than a year for it to be finished. He said he will be looking for a new contractor to pick up the work.
More background info for your talk:
Why is this so important to you personally? Over the last decade, almost every year, the temperature world-wide has increased. People don’t realize that there is also far less rain in many places around the world, and there is less water seeping down into aquifers. Projections are that many places will run completely out of water. Millions will die of thirst. High temperatures are already having a devastating effect on crops around the world. Places are drying up just as the Central Valley of California (America’s breadbasket) is beginning to do. Many scientists are saying that we will have mass starvation in the world in a few decades. The time is coming when there won’t be any food for us to import. Any food at all. We will need to produce our own. We currently import 90% of our food. The governor is pushing his plan to double food production back another ten years, from 2020 till 2030. He’s failed so far. He will fail again. We are headed in the wrong direction. The Ho’opili farmland right now produces 32% of the crops grown on O’ahu for the local market. Koa Ridge produces 13%. Together they produce 45%, almost half of what the island produces for local markets. We can’t afford to sacrifice these lands; we will need them for our survival in the future.
We also all need to clearly understand that Ho’opili is the last agricultural land in full sun on the island. Most of the crops that grow there will not grow in the higher elevations which frequently have cloud cover and rain. Anyone who tells you the opposite is flat-out lying. When that farmland is gone, we will never again be able to produce those crops for our million people.
There is also the problem of traffic. Honolulu is consistently ranked among the three worst situations in the United States. We currently have 70,000 more new homes zoned and ready to build in Central and Ewa. Even with planned new freeway lanes and a very successful rail, we will still have 30,000 people in Leeward and Central without any accommodation, who will need to get to work in the city each day, cramming onto already full roads, bringing traffic to a standstill. Our west-side people now spend between three and five hours a day in traffic. This will double. How can we do this to our people?
The state Dept. of Land and Natural Resources issued a report last year saying we will need only 25,000 new homes on O’ahu in the next twenty years. We already have 58,000 zoned on the West side alone, without Ho’opili. Ho’opili is not being built for locals, let alone the homeless. We don’t need the jobs; employment is at an all time high. There is, then, no reason to build Ho’opili beyond satisfying the greed of D.R. Horton, an out-of-state builder.
We believe that we have the backing to re-purchase the Ho’opili property at its original price and create a circumstance where Horton could walk away with all expenses covered and a profit.
The Ho’opili project first came before the state Land Use Commission. That commission was created to preserve farmland and open space, but the governor had appointed pro-development commissioners to fill eight of its nine seats. They voted to support the project. Then it came to the city where the mayor had been elected with $3.5 million in support from PRP. It whizzed through his Department of Planning and Permitting and through the Planning Commission. Then it came to the City Council where all members had received between 43% and 91% of their campaign support from entities that would profit directly from a Yes vote. Finally, the case has come before the City Ethics Commission which has gone through a year of restructuring. This is a difficult situations. Those who have appointed you have expectations. But they shouldn’t. This is an independent Ethics Commission that, like the City Council, is obligated to follow RCH 11.101-104, and “shall not use their official positions to secure or grant special consideration, treatment, advantage, privilege or exemption to themselves or any person beyond that which is available to every other person.”(104)
The people of Hawai’i, like the people across the nation, have lost faith in their government. In addressing Part One of this Argument, and deciding for the people, this Commission could do much to restore that faith. In closing, let me quote 11-101: “Elected and appointed officers and employees shall demonstrate by their example the highest standards of ethical conduct, to the end that the public may justifiably have trust and confidence in the integrity of government.”
A little background on IAL: The state Constitution of 1978 required the preservation of Important Agricultural Lands. Each island was supposed to designate its Important Agricultural Lands decades ago, so that those Important Agricultural Lands would be kept in ag in perpetuity. All islands stalled and stalled. About five years ago on O’ahu, pressure eventually began to mount to get the job done, but just at the same time the Ho’opili and Koa Ridge projects came on the scene. This caused problems for city council which had been bought by the developer community. They needed to somehow keep them off of the list. The Council decided to push for getting the lands designated, while excluding Ho’opili and Koa Ridge from consideration. Tom Berg was on the Council at the time, however, and, with Ann Kobayashi’s help, he and I got the Council to insert wording into their Resolution that instructed the Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP) to include both Ho’opili and Koa Ridge in their study, even though they were within the Urban Growth Boundary. This was Resolution 12-023 found at http://www4.honolulu.gov/
Today we have lands on this island that can produce the crops for all of our basic needs. If we have any concern for our children and grandchildren, we need to stand up and protect these lands for them. Let us not surrender our future to the greed of developers. Too much is at stake.
We need to speak up. We need you to stand with protest signs as people enter. To stand with them inside as the meeting goes on. And to go up to the mike and give them your mana’o.
Please pass this info on.
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