In a post on his Ililani Media blog, Henry Curtis described the scene at Friday’s meeting of the Board of Land and Natural Resources, which administers the state’s public lands (“BLNR hearings lack space for community attendees“).

This is a board that has a long history of failing to comply fully with the sunshine law.

Curtis hits one issue that lies in a gray area–holding regular meetings in a venue that lacks sufficient space and facilities to accommodate the public.

The Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) published a nine page agenda for their Friday June 27, 2014 meeting. The agenda consisted of 39 items.

About seventy-five people showed up. They sat in the forty chairs and on the floor. The rest had to sit or stand outside on the cement.

The meeting lasted for hours. Although a television was set up outside to allow people to track what was happening in the meeting, Curtis reports that the sound didn’t always work.

Sometimes the DLNR staff and BLNR members did not speak into their microphones and then only garbled noise came out of the outdoor speaker system.

It’s not like this is a new problem. The land board’s meetings have been held in the department’s conference room for decades, and the problems of insufficient capacity are chronic.

The board also continues to be a chronic violator of the state’s sunshine law when it comes to producing timely minutes.

Here’s what the law requires, in part: “The minutes shall be public records and shall be available within thirty days after the meeting….”

At Friday’s meeting, the agenda includes approval of minutes from four previous meetings.

1. Approval of April 11, 2014 Minutes

2. Approval of April 25, 2014 Minutes

3. Approval of May 9, 2014 Minutes

4. Approval of May 23, 2014 Minutes

Every one of those sets of minutes exceeded the 30-day requirement.

The board’s website describes its policy on minutes.

Minutes: BLNR generally meets twice a month to review DLNR division presentations and make decisions on specific issues. In a regularly scheduled BLNR meeting, discussions are recorded and later transcribed. All meeting minutes must be unanimously approved at the subsequent BLNR meeting. The minutes will be posted on this page once they are approved.

The most recent minutes posted as of this morning (6/28/2014) date from the March 14, 2014 meeting. I don’t know whether additional, up-to-date minutes are available on request from the board.

Late minutes have been a long-standing problem. I wrote about a lawsuit filed by Common Cause and Environment Hawaii back in 1997 (“Suit demands timely land board records/Common Cause and Environment Hawaii head to court to obtain delayed meeting notes“). And that lawsuit alleged the problem had been ongoing since at least 1987.

Henry Curtis flags other problems, like the practice of routinely changing the agenda to let agency representatives put their issues up front. That means the public can’t rely on the official agenda to estimate when a matter will actually be discussed by the board, undermining one of the reasons for requiring agendas to be published in advance. And it also means regular people have to wait, and wait, and wait before their items are taken up by the board.

In any case, these are important issues. Thanks to Henry for raising them once again.