State officials are still seeking to restore funds for a study of alternate traffic routes into Puna, even as Hawaii County officials try to figure out what went wrong.
Puna Rep. Greggor Ilagan on Feb. 1 announced that a $1 million allocation of state funds to develop a Puna Makai Alternate Route Study had lapsed in June 2024, apparently without anybody in the county noticing. Those funds, awarded in 2022, would have been used to develop a study of potential locations for a second access route into Puna to relieve traffic congestion on Highway 130.
The project was initially proposed with the county required to contribute $500,000 of its own. Some debate among the County Council in late 2023 and early 2024 increased the county’s share to $1 million, changing the project’s scope to study possible routes both mauka and makai of Highway 130.
Despite this, the county apparently failed to release its share of the funds before they lapsed, leaving the project unfunded.
Since then, state officials have been trying to re-secure the state funding share, while county officials are determining what happened to the county’s share.
“We know the county funds were allocated,” said Puna Councilwoman Ashley Kierkiewicz. “And after that, we don’t know.”
Kierkiewicz said the current director of the county Department of Public Works, Hugh Ono, will make a presentation to the council on March 6 discussing how the funding lapsed.
Ono was not the director when the funding deadline passed — that was Steve Pause, who had assured the Tribune-Herald well after the June 2024 deadline that the project was still on track. Kierkiewicz said Ono is “very upset” that such an important project was dropped.
“It’s inexcusable,” Kierkiewicz said Friday, adding that every county department accepts state funding regularly, and if a department can fail such a common task with nobody the wiser, then the process must be more transparent.
Kierkiewicz said she wants the county to develop a dashboard where users can easily track financial allocations, where the money is, what projects it’s going toward, and more. Ono, she said, “loves” that idea and is pursuing it as a possibility.
Meanwhile, she said, state Department of Transportation Director Ed Sniffen has said he will advocate for an item in the state budget bill this legislative session to restore the state’s share of the funding.
That budgetary amendment, however, won’t happen for another few months. Puna Rep. Greggor Ilagan, who arranged for the 2022 funding allocation, said such budget items don’t happen until conference committee hearings, at the tail end of the legislative session in May.
“I’m definitely still committed to getting the study,” Ilagan said, adding that he’s willing to listen to colleagues advocating for the study to investigate lands mauka of Highway 130.
“I hope (Sniffen) can get the funds so the state can do the study itself, and we won’t have to go through the county,” Ilagan said.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
