Honolulu Weekly

What’s to be done when the state doesn’t follow its own rules? And not just the state, but county agencies and the majority of other holders of water use permits?

The question arises in the course of reading the recent report by the Commission on Water Resource Management on the status of water use permits issued in its first two decades, from 1987, when the commission was launched, to June 2007.

Among the permit holders who did not cooperate with the investigation are some of the biggest water users in the state–including state agencies. They include the Agribusiness Development Corp., the state entity that runs the Waiahole Ditch on Oahu; the Kahala Hotel and Resort, H-POWER, the Honolulu departments of Parks and Recreation and Wastewater Management and others.

By far, the majority of violations involved failures to conform with reporting requirements of water use permits. Of the 240 violations noted, 133 permits (37 percent) lacked an approved flow meter, needed to measure withdrawals. Without this, it is impossible to know if amounts of water used exceeded what was allowed. Thirty-one percent (112 permits) did not report water use at all.

“Through this review,” the report states, “several permit holders stated that they did not know of any requirements for reporting water use, chloride concentrations, and water levels as part of their permit conditions despite written documentation.”

“Also,” the report continues, “many permit holders stated that they had received no correspondence or communication from the Commission in years. This applies mainly to smaller private or commercial users; however, 62 of the reporting violations noted are associated with permits held by the municipal water agencies on Oahu, Molokai and Maui.”

Another major compliance snafu was failure to report changes in the location of the source or end use. Brown and Caldwell determined that this was the result of initial failure to record the tax-map key locations on the permit application or in the commission’s data base, or because crop areas had been expanded beyond the original permit area, or as a result of legal subdivision or consolidation of properties.

Over-pumping was defined to occur whenever the 12-month moving average of water withdrawals exceeds the permitted withdrawal rate at any time. On that basis, 47 permit holders–13 percent–were found to have violated their permits at some point over the last four years. The Honolulu Board of Water Supply was far and away the most egregious violator in this area: of the 24 permits it holds where over-pumping was occurring, 13 wells were still being overpumped at the time of the Brown and Caldwell study. In the case of two users (the BWS and the Maui Department of Water Supply), over-pumping had occurred at some of its permitted sources for the entire four-year period reviewed.

One of the most important signals used in monitoring underground water sources is the level of salinity. Here, again, the rule is observed in the breach, with two-thirds of permit holders failing to provide information on chlorides in the water they draw down.

Some of the violators employ commission members. Deborah Ward, the DLNR spokesperson, was asked whether Donna Kiyosaki would be recusing herself, since some of the violations of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply apparently occurred while she was chief engineer, or whether Chiyome Fukino, head of the Department of Health, would recuse herself if violations of the DOH came before the commission. “We will seek the advice of the Ethics Commission and/or the Department of the Attorney General’s office on any recusals,” Ward wrote in an email response.

Water use permits are issued by the commission only in water management areas, which so far have been designated for the islands of Oahu, Molokai and Maui. For the first 20 years of the commission’s existence, the designated WMAs dealt with groundwater. In 2008, the commission designated the surface water of West Maui as a water management area; permits issued under that designation were outside the time frame considered in this report.