The nomination of Carleton Ching to serve as director of DLNR goes to the Senate floor today for a final confirmation vote.

The report of the Senate Committee on Water and Land on Governor’s Message 514 is long and unusually detailed, and worth reading.

It reads, in part:

The lack of familiarity with the subject matter of the DLNR was not surprising, given that the nominee has no job experience in the subject, nor has he volunteered for any conservation or resource projects.  What was surprising, however, was the nominee’s argument as to why the Committee should not be concerned with this fact, which seemed to be that the Committee members should simply trust him to follow the mission of the DLNR.
 
     A nomination to the position of Chairperson of the BLNR is too important to risk to an improbable candidate having no background in conservation, environmental protection, and historic preservation.
 
     Your Committee did not get a convincing impression that the nominee has an understanding of the constitutional obligations and rights that make Hawaii unique.  Many important day-to-day decisions that the Chairperson makes do not go before the BLNR or the CWRM for a vote.  These seemingly innocuous daily decisions can have an enormous impact on the public’s rights and on Hawaii’s natural, cultural, and historic resources in the short run as well as the long run.
 

Despite the negative committee recommendation, I suspect the item would not have been scheduled if the necessary 13 votes had not been nailed down by the Senate leadership. That said, it may be a close vote, surprises do happen, and internal legislative dynamics are often hard to predict from the outside. We’ll see, though, in just a few hours.

The loud public debate over Ching’s nomination has meant Governor Ige’s nominations of three members to the Board of Land and Natural Resources have been largely overlooked.

The three are Keone Downing, Ulalia Woodside, and Chris Yuen. A small business operator, a land manager, and a Big Island attorney and farmer, as well as former county planning director and a prior land board member.

The nominations provide additional clues to deciphering the governor’s posture towards DLNR. Some comments left here and on other media sites have expressed the view that Ige’s choice of Ching reflects a broader “give the key to the candy store to developers” approach.

These nominations appear to contradict that particular narrative.

Each has strong credentials. All three have track records that bridge the gap between conservation and business in a manner that hasn’t raised the red flags of environmentalists in the same way that Ching did, while reflecting the “balance” that Ige and Ching have spoken of.

In fact, I would suspect that the selection of one of these three to serve as DNLR director, while naming Ching to a seat on the land board, would have made more sense and would have caused far less controversy.

[Correction: An earlier version of this post stated, without attribution, that Ching went to intermediate school with Gov. Ige. According to Ige’s Chief of Staff, Mike McCartney, this is incorrect. They were not friends from school. I should have attributed the statement, which I saw in a post by Henry Curtis last month at his Ililani Media (“Talk Story with Carleton Ching and Kekoa Kaluhiwa“).

A further check shows that Ige graduated from high school in 1975, the same year Ching earned a degree from Boise State University. So the two would not have overlapped in either intermediate or high school.

My apologies for the error.]