 back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Energy 808, The Cutting Edge. We have Henry Curtis from Life of the Land. I'm going to talk about the lobbying efforts on behalf of Uho Nua, which is the biomass energy project by Jennifer Johnson in Hamakua, the big island. Welcome to the show, Henry. Thank you, Jay. Glad to be here. For some time, Paula Dobbin of Civil Beat has been doing investigative reporting. Lots of news about it, but the really significant things since the last time we spoke, Henry, and Life of the Land is involved in that case is this investigative report in Civil Beat by Paula Dobbin. It's a very interesting story. I'm sure you saw it. Did you see it? Yes, I saw the story. Were you aware of those lobbying efforts as a party to the case? We had some inclination about lobbying efforts, but as we poured through lobbying reports, as we asked information requests of Uho Nua and as we sought information from different state and county agencies, we were stymied as to getting the information. And so Paula was able to get things that we wanted but were never able to see. Yeah. How would you characterize the level of controversy and the level of effort in general by Uho Nua over the best couple of years? It seems to me, from our discussions earlier, that they were very aggressive. Am I right? Yes, they're very, very aggressive, perhaps one of the most aggressive in the state. And certainly what we can see is just the tip of the iceberg. Some lobbyists will go into a committee and publicly testify and others will file written reports and others instead will simply sit in the back room with a legislator and discuss issues. And those are very hard to find because the records don't really exist. Uho Nua was very active according to this article. They touched, I don't want to name all the names, but she was, they touched so many people in the energy office, in the PUC. I guess it all drove off this fellow, Kevin Johnson, who is a basketball player, got to be mayor of Sacramento and came to town with an extraordinary agreement between him and Jenny Johnson. He still does stand to gain an enormous payoff if he succeeds in getting that project approved, but he would walk in on people at every level, quasi-judicial officers, state administrators, high up, you know, people reported to the governor. He spent time with the governor. He spent time with a number of powerful legislators. He conducted fundraising events for them. He was everywhere. I mean, he got a hand into him that he was so active with regard to so many people in such high places over a long period of time. It sounded to me like a real major effort at lobbying. What do you think? We knew that K.J. was in the scene for the last several years. I had done some background research on him, so I knew he was connected to Uho Nua, but the level of lobbying, the numbers of different kinds of people he contacted with, the number of different agencies, the fact that he would approach the PUC commissioner, which is like absolute taboo, that level just is totally shocking. Yeah, the article reported that in response to that one, approaching the PUC commissioner, he received a letter from the attorney general, quote, a polite and quote letter, which really, I don't know if polite was really appropriate because he walked in on her and he tried to lobby her to vote in favor of Uho Nua. That's pretty extraordinary. Try that on a circuit court judge. Try that on any judge, and you'll see what happens to you. It won't be pretty. Commissioner is a quasi-judicial officer, and this case was still pending. It was a live docket. Is there any question about the ethics over that? There is no question in mind over the ethics, but I want to raise one additional point. When the attorney general wrote a letter to one party in a proceeding, it had an obligation to file that letter with all the other parties in the proceeding, so not only is KJ having a problem, but the attorney general was, I think, deficit in their approach to this issue. I don't know what it is with the sports figures who get into politics, and they're famous. They win elections because they're famous, and people think that they're terrific. People, because they're sports figures, and they play basketball and all that, but I don't think that's the way the country ought to operate. He may now be successful in business, I understand. He's opening restaurants and the like, but that still doesn't show that he knows anything about energy. I recall $50,000 a month, and then he's got some kind of contention deal if he succeeds in changing the vote of the commissioner or the court. This opens a whole hand of worms for me, because we have this very controversial case. The stakes are very high. The number of parties, including parties like Life of the Lands, a lot of parties involved. A lot of people are watching it. ThinkTec has covered it many times, and so has the press in general. So has Paul Dobbin at the Civil Beat, but this puts a new light on it to elected officials, appointed officials, officials who hold the public trust are out there talking to a fellow who is obviously trying to persuade them in every way possible. This does not make you talk about confidence in the government. This does not make you feel confident about the government, does it? No. The fact that the legislature was having an investigative committee looking at how to decrease lobbying and how to fix the legislature to make it more open. While at the same time a number of politicians were meeting secretly with Huho Nua, figuring out how to ram something through, that just shows that we're at the very tip of the iceberg, that we need a massive overhaul and cleaning out of the way government is done, and sunshine would be the solution to that, to require far more openness about what is going on. Yeah. I mean, there are those, including you and Life of the Land and me that feel this project is wrong on a number of levels. It's wrong substantively in terms of the environment. It's substantively in terms of climate change and it's wrong procedurally. And if this project gets approved, it will be a statement on the dysfunction of Hawaii state government. I'm sorry to say, Kevin Johnson or not, you say to yourself, gee, are we like that? Can we be had? And I'm concerned not only about Huho Nua, but about any project which can be lobbied into conclusion, into approval, simply on the basis of big bucks. This is a concern that I'm sure you agree. I'm going to ask you if you do agree. This is of concern not only to Huho Nua, but to any project. It is absolutely of concern to us. And it really raises, I think, two issues. One, whether we let money control how we decide things, whether simply the person with the biggest bucks in their pocket gets to decide what we do. And second, how much of it is required to be reported? So for example, if you said to a corporation, if you do this kind of lobbying and you don't report it, it's a felony for the senior members of the management of the company. That would send a really strong shockwave towards corporations, not to the corporations that are doing the right thing. And many businesses are part of the right process. But it would take the stinking apples and say, if you get caught, you're going to be in serious trouble and your officers are going to risk jail time. And that may send a message that we need to be focused on the issues and not who can buy whom. You know, there's a apparent vagary about exactly what lobbying is in the state. I don't know all that much about it, but I suspect that there are people who are saying, people on the Jennifer Johnson side of the equation who are saying, oh, no, no, this wasn't lobbying. He's just a very friendly guy. Right. So the clearest signs of lobbying are either when you give money to a politician or when you talk about language for specific bills, like the bill moving through the government this past session, the legislature, which called for requiring firm power energy. That was being pushed by who knew a behind the scenes. What is the state of the law on officials accepting the lobby? In my mind, we have fairly weak laws on really disclosing all the information. There are a number of loopholes that you could drive huge cement trucks through in getting out of things. I remember decades ago going to a single fundraiser. We rarely ever attend a fundraiser, but we went to a fundraiser and I saw a lobbyist hand a politician, a stack of an envelope full of checks, but each of the checks was like a dollar or two less than the limit that you would have to report it at. So it was a way of and I didn't see the individual checks, but if you go back and look at the financial forms filed by the legislator and compare it to the fact that one person handed them the envelope. We have serious flaws in reporting requirements and there are many ways of strengthening that, but unfortunately the politicians who are in office do not want to see the system changed because many of some of them are very comfortable in the way things operate. It was very interesting that within this year, there were some indictments of sitting legislators who took money and envelopes and all that. What is interesting about that is that they were federal indictments. Who's missing from this? Where are the ethics organizations that's supposed to govern the legislature and state government? Why is it necessary for the FBI to come over here from the mainland and investigate things that are happening under our noses? Why is it necessary for the United States attorney to prosecute when we have state agencies that could themselves prosecute and do other kinds of investigations, but they seem to be missing from the stage? Do you have any feelings about that, Henry? Yes, I strongly believe that the state ethics commissions do not have the legal authority or the will to crack down. There are ways of significantly strengthening it. One would be to put it into the state constitution, certain requirements that would both be on reporting and would also be on at least some level of public discussions about the legislative process. I mean, I can remember seeing hearing notices posted for the first time after a hearing was over and you get all kinds of excuses about why it happened and everything, but that's not a seven-day sunshine. That's a negative sunshine. We'll tell you about it after it's happened. Right now, we know what KJ did, but they were around a long time before KJ and we don't know who the other people were who were lobbying for them and what they did. So I think the exposure by Civil Beat and Paula Dobbin is just sort of the tip of the iceberg. They may be much more that she doesn't know and that certainly we don't know either. It doesn't feel good in terms of keeping the state honest to get all these comments by officials about how they're going to clean it up, but they don't. I mean, have you followed? Is there any news on those state legislators who were indicted earlier this year? I haven't heard too much. Anything happen? No, I haven't heard much either. I think it's ironic, even though we need more of a two-party or three-party or five-party state, it's ironic that two Democratic legislators were caught and the Democratic leadership turned a blind eye and the voters had to vote in Republicans to replace the Democrats. It's time for all parties really to face up to the fact that we need to clean house and the way to clean house is really to pass meaningful disclosure laws with real penalties. So, in the case of Hu Ho Nua, what's the current status and do you think, this is really an important question, do you think what Paula Dobbin reported had any effect on the ultimate decision-making in that case? The consumer advocate, the PUC, Tahiri, and Life of Land filed our answering briefs on December 14th and Hu Ho Nua will then respond to them on the 28th of this month. I don't think Paula Dobbin's article may have much impact on the outcome of this case as it's going to the Supreme Court for the fourth time, but I think it will greatly impact legislators who are becoming increasingly aware of the brazen activities of Hu Ho Nua. Effect them how? Effect them in favor of the lobbying effort or against it? I think they're going to move away from supporting Hu Ho Nua. I think Hu Ho Nua has demonstrated over and over again that when you don't have the facts on your side and you don't have the laws on your side, what you really need to use your money to see how much you can buy and as long as that's hidden, it may be okay from everybody's perspective, but once the as Paula Dobbin releases this information, people will be nervous to side with Hu Ho Nua. Yeah, it's out in the open now, isn't it? And but good. That was a really important article, not only in the context of Hu Ho Nua, but in the context of investigative reporting in our state. We need that kind of article. We need that kind of reporting, kudos to her and civil beat for that. You know, one of the things she wrote about Henry is the problem with the permits. Warren Lee is the chief executive, I think of Hu Ho Nua in the Big Island. He has a history in energy and a history as the as the chief of the Department of Public Works. So he knows the people in the Department of Public Works. And Paula reported on what she called quote, a mess and quote, with regard to the permits over there for this very same project. Well, on the one hand, we have been searching for and trying to get the records on all the outstanding permits that Hu Ho Nua has for both the County of Hawaii and the Department of Health and maybe others. I think her article really highlighted how at fault Hu Ho Nua is in getting numerous permits to construct buildings, to inspect them, to occupy them. And they had simply, as they say, gotten verbal assurances from somebody or other who no longer works at the Department. But this is a real mess. It's something we've been trying to get at at a long time. And it's something I think the Public Utilities Commission is actually moving forward correctly. They are now requiring all applications before them to basically lay out all the permits they need from different agencies. And there's a docket open at the PUC where you can look at projects, figure out what permits they need and figure out how people and entities can make comments on those documents. So I think the PUC is moving in the right direction. And Hu Ho Nua will highlight the fact that they need to move even further to avoid something like Hu Ho Nua from happening again. Is it so serious, this lack of permitting, lack of maintenance on permitting, could this be fatal to the project? From what we know now, how much is necessary to correct the problem, the mess in the permits? And is it correctable? What I don't know is how many of the permits are simply ministerial that the county will sign off on. How many of them can be questioned on different ways? We have been seeking this information for a long time and Hu Ho Nua has been hiding it from us, refusing to answer questions. So I don't know, what one thing I do know is they said the project could come online in 2019 if only the PUC had approved it. And with the fact that they didn't have injection wells, they have problems with other DOH permits, and they have all these outstanding counting permits. Obviously that was an error on their part. And we need truth. Businesses that tell the truth should have an advantage over companies that intentionally lie and hide stuff. Well, that raises an interesting question. Your life of the land has opposed many projects on the basis of larger issues, environmental issues primarily, I guess, and cultural issues and climate change issues. And so some of these failures are technical failures. And they don't really go, correct me if you disagree, they don't really go to the heart of the matter. And yet they're useful in terms of opposing the project. How do you look at that, Henry? I mean, if it's a technical violation, are you going to raise it in order to use it as a way to stop the project? Or is there a line that you don't cross there? As an activist, as an environmentalist, we say, I'm not going to play this. This card can wait for some other time. I care more about the substantive issues about the project, burning biomass and smoke and contaminating the atmosphere. That's what I care about, rather than technical issues. What's your approach, your philosophy about that, Henry? Absolutely. There is a line, we don't cross a line where we can't put in meaningful input, or where we can't influence the outcome, or it's a trivial matter. We seek to focus on substantive major issues. The majority of renewable energy projects proposed in the state, we have never objected to. A few of them we do object to. Some of them we seek to strengthen and to modify. A few like who Honewa just need to be buried. Yeah. So, hard question, last question. Reading that article and seeing the other article about the permitting, there are many lessons in those articles. Lessons the public should know. And indeed, my suggestion to the public is they should hide the hints and read those articles because they're important not only for this particular project, they're important for state process, state truth-seeking, if you will, state ethics at the same time, or other projects. Who knows how many projects. And so, I ask you what we have learned from Honewa. What we as a state have learned, or put it this way, what should we have learned as a state from observing this from your vantage and from the vantage of those two articles? I would say what we should learn from this is that as who Honewa has demonstrated, there are many ways of bypassing or hiding from Hawaii's ethics laws. And therefore, the laws need to be strengthened and the penalties need to be strengthened so that if who Honewa had done this after the modifications to the law were in place, they would have been caught instead of having to wait for an investigative reporter to really delve into the issues. Thank God for the media, no? Yes. It's a great thing to have people in the media speak up on these issues. And I hope that it falls on good listeners in the legislature, in the ethical organizations that are supposed to govern this, including the committees, the auditors, and the Attorney General. We should be sharpest attack on this sort of thing. Not only because we want to avoid corruption, but because we want to have people in the state care about state government and care and believe in it and be confident in it in our democracy. Well, thank you, Henry. Is there anything else you'd like to tell our listeners before we go? Just thank you for all your investigations and all the great work that you have done. Mahalo. Mahalo to you, Henry, for your work. Henry Curtis, live for the land, Aloha. kawaii.com Mahalo