Hawaii lawmakers will battle it out this session with competing bills dictating the powers of the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority.

Hilo Sen. Lorraine Inouye has reintroduced this year a measure she acknowledged would neuter the power of the state authority, which will take over management of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve from the University of Hawaii in 2028, by making it subservient to the state Board of Natural Resources.

That measure, Senate Bill 6, follows up on a similar one she introduced in 2023, which failed to pass. The 2023 bill would have added minimal language to state laws clarifying that all powers and jurisdiction over state conservation district land, which includes all of the science reserve, will remain with the BLNR.

While SB 6 goes into more detail than the 2023 bill, it serves a similar purpose.

It states that the MKSOA will be “the principal authority for the management of state-managed lands within the Mauna Kea lands; provided that the natural resource management enforcement and emergency response over these lands shall remain the responsibility of … the Department of Land and Natural Resources.”

“Conservation land should remain in the control of the BLNR,” Inouye said Thursday, explaining she considers the matter a public land trust issue.

Inouye noted she was “the only naysayer” when the Legislature passed a measure in 2022 to form the MKSOA in the first place. At the time, she expressed concerns about the ability of the Mauna Kea Observatories to renew their leases with the state between the transition of power in 2028 and the expiration of UH’s master lease in 2033.

In 2023, Inouye also was concerned about what she saw as ambiguity in MKSOA’s jurisdiction. The wording of its powers, she said in 2023, could suggest that the MKSOA has authority over nearly 56,000 acres across Mauna Kea instead of just the 11,000-acre science reserve.

Inouye said Thursday she believes there was no problem with UH’s land management before 2022, and that the bill forming the MKSOA was railroaded into passage for political reasons and without consultation with UH’s Center for Maunakea Stewardship.

But while Inouye said she hopes some of her colleagues in the Legislature have come around to her way of thinking since 2023, she has opponents this time around.

Two bills, House Bill 143 and Senate Bill 769, would clarify the MKSOA’s powers following the 2028 transition, allowing it to approve or deny conservation district use permits and ensure lessees’ compliance with permit requirements.

Kohala Rep. David Tarnas, who introduced HB 143, called his bill “an important refinement” of Act 255, the 2022 law that established the MKSOA. He said Inouye’s bill is an attempt to fundamentally change the purpose of the MKSOA beyond the terms of Act 255, and that he would prefer to keep moving forward with the authority instead of going backward.

HB 143 and SB 769 also specify that the current conservation district use permits for every one of the summit telescopes will not be transferred from UH to the MKSOA in 2028. Hama­kua and Kohala Sen. Tim Richards, co-introducer of SB 769, said where those permits would go is yet to be determined by the MKSOA.

John De Fries, MKSOA board member, said that question is still a hotly debated one.

“But I’m confident we can resolve the issue,” De Fries said. “We’ve got experts in the field working on it and talking about it.”

De Fries said he met with Inouye on Thursday and has “agreed to disagree” about her measure. He said Act 255 has as its central tenet the concept of “mutual stewardship,” whereby representatives of diverse groups including UH, the Mauna Kea Observatories and the Hawaiian community can make decisions about the mountain, which would be undermined by SB 6.

“Sen. Inouye would like the return decision-making power back to BLNR … which would reduce the authority to only an advisory capacity,” De Fries said.

Ultimately, De Fries said, the mutual stewardship concept is what drew him to join the MKSOA board, and he hopes the board can continue to operate as intended.

“What attracted me to this board was this new way of resolving issues this complex and critical to Hawaii’s future,” De Fries said.

Richards said he was not wedded to the specific solutions of SB 769 and that there may well be better solutions for the authority yet to be developed. But, he added, “we’ve got to get something in the pipeline now because we’re running out of time. We have three years, and if we can’t get something started now, we’ll be a year behind.”