As storm recovery continues statewide, only a handful of state proposals are still active in the state Legislature that could address future flooding disasters.
Most pertinently, a budget bill — Senate Bill 2800 — is still alive that would allocate funds to the Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity and the Agribusiness Development Corporation for the acquisition and maintenance of irrigation systems throughout the state.
The initial version of the bill would allocate $31 million to DAB, $14 million to the DLNR and $750,000 to the ADC. However, the current draft of the bill has left the funding amount unspecified pending further discussion.
At last Friday’s meeting of the state Board of Land and Natural Resources, DLNR Land Management Director Lauren Yasaka said some of the bill’s allocation to DLNR could be used for remediation projects and other improvements around the Wahiawā Reservoir once DLNR officially takes over those lands. However, she added that the funds will be split among multiple systems statewide.
While the measure has received uniform support so far — no lawmaker has voted against it at six different committee hearings — several groups have called for drastically increased funding, particularly after the March storms.
ADC Executive Director Wendy Gady recommended in February that the bill’s allocation to ADC be increased to $35 million, and then last week she estimated that the ADC now needs approximately $160 million to address storm impacts to ADC irrigation systems.
Sharon Hurd, chair of the state Board of Agriculture and Biosecurity, made a similar recommendation, estimating last week that DAB now needs $89 million this fiscal year and another $20 million next fiscal year to make spillway improvements to the Wahiawā Dam and other improvements to other irrigation systems across the state.
The bill will go before the House Finance Committee on Thursday for its final committee hearing.
Other bills still active in the Legislature are more concerned with unspecified disasters. For example, SB2151 would amend the state definition of “disaster” to include any number of natural calamities — including flooding — so as to better regulate the governor’s power to declare a state of emergency.
HB2581 would similarly amend the state’s disaster definition, while also establishing a “Hawai‘i Community Resilience Hub Program” within the Hawai‘i Emergency Management Agency to provide funds to various community organizations for disaster preparedness projects, such as installing backup power generation, building food and water storage, and more.
Meanwhile, a pair of bills — House Bill 503 and SB2164 — were introduced this session that would have allowed DLNR to loosen its dam standards if the dam’s owners had dam liability insurance, and would have prohibited the DLNR from declaring a dam as “high hazard” based on engineering risk assessments alone. Neither bill made any progress after their introduction and are long dead.
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