Maunakea groups discuss transition of powers – West Hawaii Today

Newly inaugurated Mayor Kimo Alameda has joined the board of the Maunakea Stewardship and Oversight Authority.

The MKSOA is the state body formed in 2022 to eventually take over management of the Maunakea Science Reserve, the land on the summit of the mountain where the Maunakea telescopes are located, from the University of Hawaii in July 2028.

The authority’s governing board is made up of 11 voting members, one of which is the Hawaii County mayor or the mayor’s designee. Under the previous mayor Mitch Roth, that seat was filled by Doug Adams, former county Managing Director.

But under the new county administration, Alameda is taking that seat himself. The mayor introduced himself to the board at the MKSOA’s December meeting on Thursday.

“On the campaign trail, Maunakea has come up almost every time,” Alameda said. “So I’d like to share that I bring a lot of information from the community regarding Maunakea, astronomy, (the Thirty Meter Telescope) … all the observatories.”

Alameda said he had urged Roth, during his administration, to take the seat himself, “because it’s our island … it’s special to me, it’s special to all you folks.”

MKSOA Executive Director John De Fries said Alameda’s “intimate knowledge about different parts of the island will prove to be vital in how we engage the community going forward.”

Meanwhile, the Authority’s transition of power is still coming along slowly. Greg Chun, executive director of UH’s Center for Maunakea Stewardship, told the MKSOA it has a written inventory “thousands of pages long” of CMS assets that may be transferred from CMS to MKSOA.

In a presentation, Chun recommended that MKSOA begin the transition process by first shifting UH’s various land agreements over to the state “because those are probably going to be the most challenging and complex to figure out how this assignment and transfer process works.”

These agreements include UH’s general leases for the 19 acres on which sits the Hale Pohaku mid-level facilities and the 13,300-acre Maunakea Science Reserve, the university’s easement for the Maunakea Access Road, and subleases with all Maunakea observatories, including the Thirty Meter Telescope. They also include various land use entitlements, scientific cooperative agreements and site development agreements, which all cover a wide variety of conditions governing the relationships between UH and each specific observatory, Chun said.

Transferring any one of those agreements, Chun explain, will require untangling which parts of the agreement are UH-specific and which would be taken over by MKSOA as it assumes its duties.

Only once that morass is dealt with, Chun recommended, should MKSOA begin taking over actual UH assets, including Hale Pohaku and UH’s observatories.

All of this, Chun said, assumes that MKSOA’s various management plans and administrative rules are actually in place, which they currently are not. De Fries mentioned that the development of MKSOA’s own Maunakea Master Plan to replace UH’s remains in development.

Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.