Pests in the crosshairs

HILO — As the state Legislature approaches a major deadline for bills moving between chambers, an unprecedented amount of measures relating to invasive species control are on track to move forward.

“We’ve definitely seen a lot more interest from our legislators this year,” said Franny Kinslow Brewer of the Big Island Invasive Species Committee.

Many of the bills are Big Island-specific, focusing on problems like rapid ohia death and little fire ants.

Some of the invasive species bills that have cleared all of their House committees are:

• House Bill 1006, appropriating funding for the Hawaii Ant Lab;
• House Bill 1339, creating a Hawaii Invasive Species Authority;
• House Bill 606, allowing counties to access private property in order to control or eradicate invasive species;
• House Bill 172, allowing property owners to access neighboring abandoned property in order to control albizia trees;
• House Bill 481, creating a coupon voucher program for pesticide treatment of little fire ants;
• House Bill 1359, allowing counties to create ordinances relating to invasive species;
• House Bill 904, establishing a rapid response fund for combating newly arrived invasives;
• House Bill 186, extending a subsidy program for pesticide treatment of coffee berry borer.

Two Senate bills that also are on track to cross over are SB 272 and SB 1239, which appropriate funds for rat lungworm disease research and rapid ohia death research, respectively.

BIISC was keeping particularly close tabs on six of the measures, which were set to be heard by the House Finance Committee.

“You kind of go in hoping, ‘I hope one or two of these makes it through,’” Kinslow Brewer said. “Five made it through … the House Finance Committee is often where our bills go to die.”

Finance Committee chair Sylvia Luke, D-Oahu, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Several factors appear to have led to the large number of active bills.

Kinslow Brewer said that more residents were also reaching out to their representatives, particularly about issues such as little fire ants and rapid ohia death.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work to try and raise awareness, but I think the response from the legislators comes from the constituents saying, ‘We want you to work on this,’” she said.

The approval of Hawaii’s first state biosecurity plan also has driven awareness about the scope of the problems.

Rep. Joy San Buenaventura, D- Puna, said the plan’s all-encompassing nature helped generate interest among legislators.

Kinslow Brewer said that the plan may have “brought things into focus, (especially) this understanding that it’s a series of things that are interlinked.”

“The goal of this is to get people to cooperate with each other,” said state Rep. Richard Creagan, D- Naalehu, Ocean View, Capt. Cook, Kealakekua, Kailua-Kona, who also chairs the House Committee on Agriculture. “When you look at it (invasive species) as a totality, of all these issues together, you realize each issue in itself is bad enough. When you combine them, it’s overwhelming, so you need something to be done here.”

He said there also was more “working on the same page” between legislators.

“I think Oahu recognizes they’re going to be affected by these invasive species on the Neighbor Islands if they don’t stop them,” he said.

Little fire ants, for example, are one of Hawaii Island’s biggest pest problems, but exist only in small scatterings in other parts of the state.

Creagan introduced the Hawaii Ant Lab funding bill as well as the invasive species authority bill.

The authority was one of the components in the biosecurity plan, and restructures the existing Hawaii Invasive Species Council to better manage resources.

“I think there’s a lot of will to fund it,” Creagan said.

Kinslow Brewer said she was particularly excited about the possibility of establishing a rapid response fund (HB 904).

“It’s money that’s going to be there, so that if something new comes in, it’s like Boom, we can act,” she said. “When you’re waiting on funding cycles that can take months or years … you can’t wait that long with some of these species.”

Effective measures to combat invasives species don’t always require that money be spent, however. San Buenaventura’s albizia control bill, HB 172, for example, is a policy change.

Aside from HB 172, albizia measures have had a mixed record in session. A bill that would establish a tax credit for albizia removal and one requiring homeowners to disclose the presence of albizia on their property if they are selling it both died in committee.

Still, Creagan said he felt things were moving in the right direction and that Hawaii was in a unique position to address the invasive species problem.

“If we can get rid of it, we can keep it away,” he said. “It’s not like on the mainland where it’ll go to the next state over.”

Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.