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Frustration with the standoff on Mauna Kea and the high cost of policing the protests boiled over Wednesday as the Hawaii County Council voted 9-0 to reject an agreement that would have obligated county police to respond to the protests for up to five more years. Read more

HILO >> Frustration with the standoff on Mauna Kea and the high cost of policing the protests boiled over Wednesday as the Hawaii County Council voted 9-0 to reject an agreement that would have obligated county police to respond to the protests for up to five more years.

The agreement also called for the state to pick up the tab for county police overtime and other protest- related costs, and Council members said they want to recover the millions of dollars that county police already have spent coping with the protests and patrolling the Daniel K. Inouye Highway around the protest camp.

But the Council refused to endorse the deal signed by Mayor Harry Kim, in part because they considered the document to be a “blank check” that would have tasked county police with responding to Mauna Kea protests for years to come.

Puna Council member Matt Kaneali‘i-Kleinfelder, who led the opposition to the agreement, said he wants to teach the Kim administration “a lesson” that it must consult with the Council before making such a deal. And he said he will never agree to taking more state money if it obligates the county to police protests on the mountain for another five years.

Gov. David Ige has said the state and counties have spent $15 million so far coping with nonviolent protests designed to block construction of the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. Much of that cost has been borne by Hawaii County, which has spent more than $4.7 million on police overtime alone.

The state recently reimbursed the county for $3.77 million of the cost of deploying police to Mauna Kea, but it is unclear whether the county will now be able to keep that money without a formal state-county agreement that is approved by the Council.

Police Chief Paul Ferreira said after the Wednesday Council vote that he needs to recoup the money his department has spent on overtime and other costs of policing the protests over the past 22 weeks. “I spent a good chunk of my overtime budget, and it’s on the promise from the attorney general that they’ll reimburse us for any overtime,” he said.

Still, “it’s not going to change our enforcement efforts up on the mountain,” he said. “It’s not going to change our presence up on the mountain. We’ve scaled back our presence greatly over the months.”

That includes officers from the county’s Traffic Enforcement Unit who had been stationed on the mountain earlier this year, but were returned to their regular patrol duties on the highways by Dec. 1 in response to a series of traffic fatalities, he said.

The officers deployed near the protest site at the base of the Mauna Kea Access Road have issued more than 8,000 traffic citations since mid-August, and police say they are patrolling and writing tickets to make the area safer for motorists and the protesters who regularly walk across the highway.

Some members of the Council who were considering the resolution were unimpressed with that explanation.

“For me to vote yes is like saying I’m going to agree to five more years, up to five years of more harassment on the mountain,” said Councilwoman Val Poindexter, who represents the Hamakua area. “I don’t believe we should be up there. We’re wasting our time and our money.”

The protesters, who call themselves kia‘i, or protectors, say building the TMT would be a desecration of a mountain that many Hawaiians consider sacred. They say they will not allow the telescope to be built.

But supporters of the TMT say the project has won the legal right to proceed. Sponsors of the TMT spent a decade obtaining permits and fending off legal challenges, but construction of the telescope remains stalled by the protests.

The Mauna Kea protesters and their supporters strongly opposed the agreement between the state and county.

Retired Hawaii County Police Lt. Juergen Canda described the “so-called traffic enforcement” effort on Mauna Kea as an illegal operation designed to suppress the First Amendment constitutional rights of the protesters. In reality it is “a tactic to intimidate, sanction and punish persons from engaging in a lawful, peaceful protest,” he said.

Canda, who has filed a complaint with the county Police Commission over police operations on the mountain, said the authorities are attempting “to criminalize the population in the public and in the officers’ minds. In law enforcement, this is what we call ‘framing.’”

Canda said the 8,000 citations issued on the mountain since mid-August are more tickets than officers normally issue in the entire district of Puna in a year. That enforcement effort perpetuates the unfair treatment of Hawaiians by the criminal justice system, he said.

“It’s not only perpetuating and exacerbating that unfair treatment, but it’s systemic racism,” he told the Council.

“This movement does not live on the mauna. They come from every community, and every walk of life, and they are your constituents,” Canda said.

Noenoe Wong-Wilson, one of the leaders of the protest on the mountain, also urged Council members to reject the agreement, and reminded them that they are being asked to approve the deal after Kim already has signed it.

“It is a bold step for you to turn away this money, but it’s an important one, and it’s an important message to the state that you will not be held hostage to their unconscionable and immoral actions, because that’s what this is,” said Wong-Wilson, who was arrested with 38 other protesters on July 17.

“We are mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunties and uncles, your next-door neighbors, college student and young people learning their culture and language, and following in the steps of their elders,” she said, choking up.

“Let me also remind you that TMT is a foreign corporation. It’s comprised of major investors from the countries of Japan, Canada, India, China and two U.S. universities. They have no regard for us and the welfare of our communities,” Wong-Wilson said.