 This is Think Tech Hawaii, the Unity Matters here. Okay, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters at the 3 o'clock block, 3 o'clock rock. Okay, we have special guests, Panels Providuros, PhD at the University of Hawaii School of Engineering, but he is the chair, professor and chair of civil engineering at the School of Engineering. Not the College of Engineering. The College of Engineering, C-O-E. Yeah. Holmes Hall. Holmes Hall, you got it. Yeah. Welcome to the show, Panels. Glad to be here. Great to have you. You're a public figure for sure. Sometimes. You were a big figure in rail, and still are, and you ran for mayor, and that was a very interesting election and campaign. And then you're involved in other important issues. I mean, just two of them to come to mind, which I would like to talk with you today. One is TMT, the 30-meter telescope in Manakea, and the other, which is related in some ways conceptually, and that is, gee, I'm blocking on it. That is, oh yeah, the ferry. The super ferry. Yes. The super ferry. Because there's a parallel. There are parallels, yes. So tell us the status of TMT now. Where is it now? You know, after a while, if you keep hearing news about a given subject, and I do not exclude national politics here, you get tired of it, and you don't follow it as closely as you should have, could have, would have. So let's catch up. What is going on? Well, the way I understand it is that there was a contested case of the state of Hawaii approvals for TMT on top of Manakea. The case was heard over weeks and months by Judge May Amano in Hilo, lots and lots of testimony, and then she took a lot of time to go through them, and she rendered her opinion that the TMT should go forward. So now it's up to the state mostly, and perhaps in small part of the county, Big Island, to grant the permits and make it a legal project to construct. Because this is what, you know, the whatever opposition is there, opposing not so much the cancer, but the construction at the top of Manakea. So now it has to become a construction project, a legal project to build. Oh, so many, so many obstacles, so many. It's been a long time. I mean, even in the best of it, even if no contested case, no political opposition, it would take a long time. There are so many permits to do anything in Hawaii. We have to be number one in ridiculous obstructionist permits in this state. It is true that we have among the most prolonged and most complicated environmental laws. I know that's not so much of the TMT, but other things that the state DOT is trying to do. For example, on Maui, there is water coming over the highway, and, you know, a half a million dollar wall can do it, but we cannot do that because of so many environmental issues, so we have to build a 50 million dollar bypass. So how you go from half a million to 50 million, and how you go from solving the problem in three months to needing three years of study, two years of permits, and maybe something will start five years from now. Meanwhile, all the folks from Kahului, they need to go work at the hotels in Lahaina, and, you know, 10% of the time, the highway is flooded. Same thing with TMT, a lot of obstructionists. Yeah, really? And, of course, the subject to that you mentioned, the super ferry, that they took an expeditions route to approve it, and then it came back and beat them because, hey, that shortcut really killed the project. Yeah. So the shortcut got the blessing of Linda Lingo? It did, you're right. She said, Lehman Brothers wants a shortcut approach, so I'm going to make it happen for you guys, but she couldn't make it happen, and somebody bit her, namely environmental groups bit her. And opposing politicians. So it was a whole thing. And all of that, you know, it's amazing how some big projects fail. It was only for the dock, the floating dock at Honolulu Harbour. That was a trigger. That dock wasn't fully environmentally tested via reports and what have you. That took the whole project down. I hope that TMT is not going to go that way because now they need to, you know, dot the I's and cross the T's very carefully. So yeah, there can be protests. The protests can be on the side. Police and other forces will have to do what they need to do. And you know, construction has to resume in a normal schedule. It's not a very large project. I mean, they try to put it out there to look how magnificent it is. Thirty metres is not a big deal. It's a hundred feet. It's a hundred feet. But in the drawings, they make it look like so beautiful and so big that then quite a few people are there, culturally sensitive, they say, oh, this is a monstrosity. No, it's not. No. Again, thirty metres is a hundred feet. I mean, really, Mauna Kea is very big for a hundred feet. If we are talking geometry now, it's not like they're going to take a quarter mile of the mountain or, you know, hectares or whatever. When it's finished, it's not going to be a giant building. A lot of the projections, again, they really brought forward the architectural and the science and they wanted to make it a crown jewel of the crown and the top of Mauna Kea, top for science. They overdid that part. The architectural part, again, thirty metres, which is really the big disk and then there is the surrounding shell. Ninety feet, that's all it is. Yes. You don't want to make them too big because when you make them too big, they differentially start expanding with the sun or the cold side and then they start distorting. So there is limits of how big you want to make them. Again, let's stop arguing about a hundred feet. Yeah, really, it's not so much for the gods at the top of Mauna Kea. It's a little jewel there. When it's built, it's not going to be anywhere near a monstrosity or a huge thing. They've been trying to get permission to build this thing since, I want to say 2008 or 2007, right in there somewhere. We're closing in on ten years here. Yeah, and since that, I mean, at the time, my understanding was that it was the frontier of technology on this kind of telescope. However, since that time, I think the technology has probably moved ahead, moved beyond them. Well, it would have moved, and it's always moving. And of course, that's the advantage, because actually, the mirror doesn't change. Nobody else has built another mirror like that. So it's not like all of a sudden we have competition from Chile. It's either here or in Chile, or the Canary Islands, whatever the three options are. Since those guys didn't go, it's the same group focused on Hawaii, because they want to bring it on American soil, good services, reliable. It's a big investment. They want it to be nice, protected. The scientists can come in and out and say to me. Attract the scientists. This is an attraction to the scientists. Yeah, and transportation means you fly safely to Honolulu. You fly safely to Hilo. You have proper road network to go up. All of these safes are top of the line from Japan, Canada, Europe, the US. They want safety. I mean, these are all top scientists that they have fine jobs at the Princeton, at the Berglings, at the University of Hawaii. They don't want risks in whatever islands and in whatever Chile. Too cold roads are too mountainous, too dangerous. It's not good for science. They want to do the work comfortably and safely. It's wonderful for the university to have this. Oh, definitely. So as to school, ocean, or science, technology is world-known for this kind of examination of the phenomenon around the Earth, and especially here in the oceans and the mountains and the sky. And it's only natural. And every astronomer will tell you it's only natural that the telescope be here and nowhere else. And yet, and if we can do that, it helps build our reputation, consolidate our position, corner the science, if you will. And this is what many times, like Wall Street, Mauna Kea is the Wall Street in a good sense of astronomy because there is the center of astronomy. You have the astronomers fertilizing each other, putting all the ideas and getting the most of the discoveries. If you diffuse them, part in Greece, part in Chile, part in the Canary, there is no critical mass. We have achieved critical mass in Hawaii, thanks to Mauna Kea. Big thumbs up to Mauna Kea. And yes, indeed, as the governor said, and we can talk about the governor a little bit, but the governor says he will ask for the decommission of the field. Good. Some of them really are there for pretty much training purposes, for purposes that they are marginally obsolete already. OK. One new one, maybe one, two, or three decommission, a win-win. Yeah, yeah. So let's go to the beginning. Let's go to the time when, I guess, when they first got their permit. They got a permit. They actually got a permit from DLNR. And at that point, the protests began because there had been very subtle protests up to that point. And the protests began, and David E. Gay appeared on the scene. Can you talk about that? Well, David came into the start of the game. David has been a cover for only two years. This project started with essentially helicopter. People went to see Senator Inou. Senator Inou died in 2012. So this project, as you said, started in 2007. President of the university, if you remember, was Marcy Greenwood. She was sort of handpicked because she actually supported this project. And internally, they had to create a critical mass to start pushing it. Eventually, after Abercrombie, E. Gay came to the head because the work that Abercrombie had done had some environmental weaknesses. It wasn't really a quick path. They have done the environmental work. Unfortunately, for some reason, the dissemination wasn't sufficient. It reminds you of rail and movie. Yeah, sounds like that, doesn't it? Try to do it quick, yeah? But on the up and up, the environmental studies had been done. But then the community settled all of a sudden. They woke up, like now with the construction of the rail, and they said, where is the environmental about that? So they look at the environmental, and they start finding hope. Obviously, if you don't engage the community vigorously throughout the environmental process, then they read what you did. And they say, well, but you haven't done that, and you haven't done that, and you haven't done that. Suppose I suggest to you, the whole environmental issue is really not the point. It's the point that anyone who has opposed this, it has not really been on environmental issues. That's a bit of a ruse. In fact, what is driving this is cultural understanding or misunderstanding of what the mountain means, yeah? Well, then the EIS has a chapter on culture. That's what I meant, environmental. So it's not really pollution, sewage, et cetera. But it's the cultural identity and everything that is included in the EIS. It's not about traffic, minor impacts about construction. Those things were addressed, but then the bigger cultural picture was not really addressed. It took it for granted. Like, you know, we have X telescopes, we add one more. What's the big deal? I didn't understand that. You've got 12 telescopes up there. This would be number 13. Not to say if that's a lucky or unlucky number. Yeah, right. And all of a sudden there's a big tumult about cultural issue. 12 was okay, but the one more is sort of broke the camel's back, I guess. And all this controversy comes out of the woodwork. Yeah, that was not right. And it was not really, there was no science behind it. I would have agreed with them if there was a duplication. Like, you know, we had the Subaru phase one and now we need the Subaru phase two. No, this is a completely different type of thing. So scientifically, it's very well founded. So it's needed there. It doesn't duplicate work. And as I said, it's part of the deal now that one or two or maybe three will be decommissioned. So we're gonna drop back to 10 or 11. Again, a win-win. So, you know, from the beginning, when I saw it, when I understood the impact on science, what it does for jobs, what it does for construction, what it does for permanent jobs, for the University of Hawaii, Hilo, I know. And why are we opposing that? I mean, Hawaiian guys would be proud to have that diamond on top of it. It's really not desecrating, it's beautifying. It's something we can be proud of, really proud. That's right. So, okay, David E. Gay gets involved. And this is really precious. He gets involved early on. I think it was when the protests started, which would have been after the permit, you know, was originally granted. And he arrives on the scene. He's just been elected, just takes office. And he makes some statements. And I wanna do a cliffhanger, if you don't mind, Panos. I wanna take a break now. Okay. And when we come back from this break, we're gonna talk about what David E. Gay said and how it affected the project and how that has all cast a shadow on things subsequent. That's Panos Premaduros. He is professor and chair of civil engineering at the University of Hawaii College of Engineering. And we're talking about TMT. Still a very important issue and one not without controversy. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. They walk. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4pm and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters. And we're talking with Panos Premaduros, who is professor and chair of civil engineering at the College of Engineering at UH Manoa. And we're talking about TMT, which is an issue that needs further discussion because it is still in controversy. Okay, so David E. Gay comes. He makes some statements. What does he say? Why does he say that? And what effect does it have? Well, he actually said that we need to be very sensitive about what we are doing here. It was an opportunity to actually push for the project. I was hoping that, you know, he will try to not sell it. Try to represent it because that's what it is. A gigantic step forward for science, a gigantic step forward for the UAE and a very big step forward for the state of Hawaii. Overall, and the county, the island of the big island, because of the jobs and other economic opportunities. If they didn't care about the science, there were positives for their community. PS, PS, I'd like to add that I have been to the big island. I know people on the big island in that area and around that area, and I have talked to them and most of the people I have talked to support the project. It's only a handful of protesters. The rest of the people that you talk to are universally in favor of the project. Yeah, so people have common sense. They know what a good thing, when a good thing is that they want it. But, again, unfortunately, it was the early days it's part of his character. He was quite soft about it. And he opened the avenue for a contested case. Yeah, let me add too that there was following his remarks and the report made about that in the local paper and I guess a star advertiser at the time. The New York Times wrote an editorial about David E. Gaye and they criticized him for being amorphous about it. They criticized, and they said, will he please take a position on this one way or the other? Because not taking a position, and this is so in the case of Donald Trump and the issue in Charlottesville, not taking a position leaves a vacuum. And then people fill the vacuum with whatever they want and it's usually bad. Yes, and that's what happened. And you know, that really gave a hold to the opposition because they said, hey, the governor is going to know, don't go in for this thing. So, well, the governor is not for it. Well, he's okay. He didn't say he's opposed, but he's not for it. Therefore, there is a clear case for us to be against it. And we may even convince him to be against it. So he actually created something out of nothing. And, you know, a group of 50 became 250 and it's still clearly under a thousand people and the big island has over 100,000 people. So as you said, it's a very small minority. They're quite vocal. They're vocal of the media and the Facebook and what have you, but at some point, and now it's a good point, Judge May Amano said, enough already. I heard everything and this is something that should be called. Well, it went to the Supreme Court. Yes. Right around the time that David E. Gay spoke. Yeah, that's right. It went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court said, no, you know, you can't issue the permit before the contested case hearing is resolved. You can't run parallel tracks. You have to do one for the other. I thought that was pretty technical myself and that they could have ruled the other way just as well, but they chose to stop it. Just the way they chose to stop the super ferry on two separate occasions. And anyway, okay, so now Ricky May Amano is appointed and she serves as a, what, an arbitrator, was it? Did you determine this by agreement? Did you determine this issue? What happens? Well, now there are some undercurrents that they say that she may have had conflict. So they may be building a case for further delays to essentially partially or fully invalidate her opinion. So it's not a clear cut. This is another point in time that you should step in and say, enough is enough. We have had months of hearings and all. The conflict, whatever it exists, is minuscule. Everybody has a conflict in Hawaii where a state of 1.2 million people, we pretty much know everybody. Directly, I have nothing to do with TMT, but I've been employed by the US for 27 years. Automatically, I have a conflict. Whatever I'm saying now here is conflicted, right? Indirectly, I already bought the thing with TMT. Come on, therefore I'm incapable to testify anywhere because I have 27 years of years to buy it. So you never get anything done that way. Anything done. Clearly, I mean, how can we find people in the hooey of engineers, lawyers, and all that they don't have any conflict? It's like, you know, we never lived in Hawaii. It's impossible. She's born and raised in Hilo. I mean, obviously she has all the conflict in the world. She's tried to support her island the way she... So let me stop that. Was she a good pick though? She was a reasonable pick. I didn't have a big, you know, a lot of this matter is legal so I try to not step into that. I don't have a clear understanding of things. She gave it a lot of time, a lot of attention. She listened to, I don't know, hundreds of witnesses who repeated themselves ad nauseam, saying the same things. Same thing, yeah. And it was all rhetoric. It was not really evidence anyway. But was she too patient? Well, it's good that she was too patient because nobody can accuse her now that she took a shortcut. Not being patient enough, yeah. No more shortcut. There was no shortcut. Nobody was muzzled. Well, the other legal strata, if there are any, they shouldn't be finding any evidence that there was any wrongdoing. So clear the path already. I think coming, well, next year is only four months away but we should be going and issue them the permits so 2018 would be a good year for them because I believe that if we don't make any clear decisions by the end of the year, the consortium may decide to jump. It's been, there is so much that Hawaii can do, being so obstinate and delay tactics and everything. Enough already, I mean. So status is that she has ruled after a long, long, long hearing process and as I recall, it was a long decision to which she really thought it through and dealt with all of the possible appeal points that might have come out of it. And so now it's been, now the problem raised by the Supreme Court has been resolved that the parties or rather the TMT consortium is ready to go ahead and they have to do the next thing. The next thing is to get all the permits. That's right, because they have the money. They are not dependent on any of our money, which is very significant. What about the Azores or every other venue they were considering? They entered into an agreement a few months ago and they have, I wouldn't say threatened but the word on the street has been for a long time that they were gonna go somewhere else. What's their present thinking? I think that they have already started pre-planning at one or two sites because they need to have a plan B at this point. Plan A is not so secure for them. And obviously, we know that business cannot trust Hawaii. And this is like, they approach it like a business. They have the investment, they need to do it. Another black eye for us. It's another black eye. So it's, yes, it's necessary when you try to do something in Hawaii you have to have a plan B. So now the TMT group has to go and get a number of permits. It's not so easy because permits take a long time. It puts further stress on the timeline for TMT and there's other options. But the opposition continues. They don't necessarily abide by Ricky May's decision. Right. And they are out and trying to what? Find problems with the permit applications for the construction. And then I think some of the problems will be down at the street. I think the permits will be issued again. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the structure. The structure is relatively simple. It's not meant, it's not a hotel that's gonna have a lot of people. It's 20, 30 people that there will be regularly taking turns to occupy minimum environmental impact. The foot, the size of the property is reasonable. Constructability is reasonable. So a lot of these things can happen once they start moving. So what are they gonna do is blockage. They'll try to do the blockage because everything is important. Still, even now? Well, they tried on Maui too, for the repairs on Halei Hala. So anything goes, we should expect that. I was happy to see that they protested, but also the police took the line they should and they removed the protesters. It strikes me that the protesters never give up. That when the law is decided, the decision is made, it's settled as a matter of law. They still protest, they never stop. It's essentially conduct and becoming because we had tens of thousands of protesters against the rail, none of us chained ourselves to go stop the bulldozers or out there. I mean, you have to realize, it's a civilized society, right? We're supposed to act like that. We're supposed to respect institutions. Respect decisions and institutions. So I mean, they do disrespect to their own culture and heritage. Okay, so what happens now? We're in the circuit, making the circuit for permits and the permits hopefully will be granted and that would permit construction to go forward. I know it's not gonna be right away, it's gonna be years anyway before they get all the permits. Yes, I should hope that DLNR is not gonna request an updated EIS or the updated EIS has been happening and it's ready for final signature because if for some reason now the EEG government begins to ask for things I knew that could be a significant delay because you cannot come up with an EIS within a couple of months, six months plus. Sure, lots of delay. So I mean, what I inherited, what you said is that he has not yet bought into this, he has not yet come out and said, yes, I support the project, our respective decisions that have been made, I think it should go forward. Not said that? Probably he doesn't wanna step into the DLNR territory because right now the DLNR has to make the final determinations and brief him. It should be a decision, should be coming up fairly quickly. And it doesn't have to be from the top because then it doesn't look good. It looks like an executive decision. No, we have to follow process. That's why I'm saying that hopefully we don't have to repeat process and whatever the EIS is, quick updates with some lessons learned, put a new date on it and sign it. Well, I think this is, we're at an important point because yes, we've lost ground, we've had another black eye, but we could redeem ourselves on this. What do you think will happen and flip side, what will happen if we somehow bollocks this project up again? Well, it's gonna be a permanent black eye if we lose the TMT. I mean, the scientific world knows what is going on. And if we manage after all the steps we took to completely botch at one time, particularly after the May Amana decision, all these months of hearings, the judge prefers an opinion that says TMT should move forward and we found ways, political, cultural or whatever you wanna call it to stop it and essentially raise enough obstacles to make it so unproductive and undesirable that they moved elsewhere. Yeah. What's your message? There's camera, there's camera two, four. I know there's a camera out there somewhere. Well, DLNR, Mayor Harry Kim, very respectable gentleman, I think he's in favor. And the governor, DLNR, mayor and governor, get together, get it done. Facilitate the permits. The public wants it. The contested case is power ready. Supreme Court says have the contested case. So we did that. Let's pull out the stops now and get it done. It's a small project. Remember folks, 30 meter telescope is 100 feet. Really on a giant mountain that has other telescopes, some of which may be decommissioned. So actually the net impact would be positive for the mountain. It's a win-win. Yeah. Okay, well, I sure hope we do it. I hope we won't have another contested case with the necessity of appointing a judge like Ricky May yet again, because that would take a lot of time. But is it possible that we will? Is it possible that this will all be transmuted into yet another contested case hearing? Every time before, immediately after the signature of the revised EIS, the window opens to contest it. That's always the path. That's all. You have to accept an EIS, meaning the governor. Or the department has to accept an EIS for you and I or anybody to sue. That's why, for example, during the rail, we had a time that beyond before this, we can't sue because not, but once you accept something, you sue for it. So one last question, Panos. And that is, you ran for mayor. You ran on a rail issue there. You've been a citizen journalist and a spokesman. You have many community ideas and positions to advance. Why are you, as an engineer and chair and professor in the College of Engineering, why are you interested in this? Because it's scientific infrastructure. It's my baby too. Engineers build all these scientific babies. So I wanna see that one. It's a nice jewel of infrastructure and we wanna have a part in it. Okay, I do too. Thank you, Panos. You're very welcome. Panos Previduros, aloha. Thank you.