The trial in a lawsuit against the State of Hawaii over its stewardship of nearly 23,000 acres of land leased to the Department of Defense as part of the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island wrapped up at the end of last week. The case, which proceeded without a jury, took only four days. Attorneys for both sides were given until October 16 to file their proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, and a decision by Circuit Court Judge Gary Chang will follow.

At issue is a lease of the area by the state for use for military training, and whether the state has done enough to enforce provisions requiring the clean-up of unexploded bullets and bombs following training exercises. The lawsuit seeks to block the state from extending the lease beyond its 2029 expiration.

The Hawaii Independent published a good review of the issues prior to the trial (“Ching v. Ail?: protecting public trust lands at P?hakuloa“).

Of course, this wasn’t a garden variety lease. It was a gun-to-your-head lease signed by the state government not long after Hawaii became a state. In the decades before statehood, land was often taken for military purposes through executive orders signed by the president or the territorial governor. These post-statehood leases were, in part, an effort by the state to retain at least theoretical control of the land, and preserve the future potential to return the area to civilian use.

Here’s part of what I wrote after the lawsuit was filed last year.

There’s a long history here. Leading up to WWII, and during the years Hawaii was under martial law, the military basically took control of any lands that it might be able to use. Sometimes the land was “set aside” for military use by presidential or gubernatorial executive orders. In the post WWII years, there was pushback from the territorial government which wanted to reclaim control of public lands. During that period and up through statehood, many federally controlled lands were converted to leases of fixed duration that required the military to clean up and return the lands in their original condition.

Of course, that’s been routinely violated over the years in many places, Waikane Valley, Kahoolawe, and Pohakuloa among them. The additional issue of the presence of depleted uranium at Pohakuloa and its potential affects on health have become public issues in the past several years as well.

During that post-WWII period, it’s my impression that local Republican leaders took stronger action to reassert local control over military-held land than the emerging Democratic Party. Why? Because Democrats saw the development of the defense industry as a way to break the political control of the plantation elite, an alternative to the plantation economy.

If you’re interested in how Hawaii’s history has shaped these contemporary issues, you might be interested in this article I wrote back in the mid-1980s (“Ring of Steel: Notes on the militarization of Hawaii“). It appeared in the 1984-85 issue of the journal, Social Process in Hawaii (the complete issue can be viewed here).