The County of Hawaii Planning Department has issued Memorandum No. 07-20 (Oct. 3, 2007) setting forth the County’s reevaluated practices in reviewing development applications “to see whether an environmental assessment is needed under Chap. 343 [the Hawaii Environmental Policy Act.]” The bottom line is set forth on page 2:
Planners will have to review the application to see if there is construction on state or county land involved. This may be shown on the site plan. Planners also have to use common sense in looking at the application. For example, if access to the property will require constructing a new road over a “paper” government road, this will trigger this Chap. 343 review.
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The end result of this is likely that more applications will need environmental assessments, and, because the entire project has to be considered, some will need full EIS’s, even though the only “trigger” is a minor construction on the state or county right-of-way.
The memorandum is based in part on the Hawaii Supreme Court’s opinion in the “Hawaii Superferry EIS case,” Sierra Club v. State of Hawaii Dep’t of Trans., No. 27407 (Aug. 31, 2007), which, as I noted in this post, requires an agency to review an entire project — not just the portion of the project that would trigger chapter 343 processes — to determine whether it is categorically exempt from environmental assessments.