UH pushes Mauna Kea management plan

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

The University of Hawai'i yesterday told lawmakers it has improved management of the Mauna Kea observatory complex in the six years since a critical state audit came out, but Hawaiian leaders and environmentalists countered that UH officials still can't assure protection of the ecology or sites sacred to Hawaiian cultural practitioners.

State auditor Marion Higa began yesterday's informational briefing at the State Capitol with a recap of her 1998 audit. In it, she found UH management of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve and the state's stewardship of the summit, now home to 13 telescopes and one antenna array, inadequate to protect natural resources.

Jim Gaines, interim UH vice president for research, followed with a summary of UH responses to the report, including:

• Preparation of a new master plan in 2000, which directed the development of a new management agency. The Office of Mauna Kea Management is headed by a board and advised on cultural issues by a panel of nine Native Hawaiian elders known as Kahu Ku Mauna.
• Designating an area representing 95 percent of the science reserve as off limits to development. Three new developments are proposed for the remaining 5 percent: the upgrade or replacement of up to five facilities; expansion of the Keck Observatory and the Submillimeter Array; and up to three new telescopes at undeveloped sites.
• Closure of a road leading to the top of one sacred site, Pu'u Poliahu, and barring development of any other cinder cones.

However, Kahu Ku Mauna chairman Ed Stevens said the position of his council and of many in the Hawaiian community is that no new sites should be developed. If a new telescope is built, he said, it should replace a site that has become obsolete, not enlarge the "footprint" of development.

"We object to any new construction on the mountain," Stevens said. "We would like to see less emphasis placed on how to build this and that. I would like to see emphasis placed on how to preserve what we got."

Cultural practitioner Kealoha Pisciotta, a former telescope technician at two of the Mauna Kea installations who heads the group Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, said the summit is the burial site for the highest born of the ancients and a location for rituals performed nowhere else.

Litigation over the UH application for a conservation district use permit has turned up evidence of mercury spills at the site, which she said further endanger the environment. However, UH attorney Lisa Munger said those spills occurred within buildings and did not leach into the water table.

Pisciotta and Sierra Club spokeswoman Deborah Ward said the new management plan gives Hawaiian and environmental interests short shrift by placing their advocates in only advisory roles. Ward added that the 2000 master plan never received approval from the state Board of Land and Natural Resources and, as a result, UH can't develop regulations needed to guide the management of the site.

Both opponents also argued that money is needed for the proper monitoring of the environment and added the UH Institute for Astronomy traded away revenue potential from the scientific tenants of the mountain by accepting a share of the use of telescopes in lieu of payment.

Rolf-Peter Kudritzki, institute director, said the telescope viewing time is critical to UH research and added that the partnerships with the science reserve's international investors has brought in $1 billion to a state that otherwise could never afford such facilities.

Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.