April 22, 2008

A meeting was held Thursday evening, April 10, 2008, at The Haiku Community Center before the Commission on Water Resources Management to address the East Maui taro farmers’ petition to restore their streams. It was phenomenal!

The Haiku Community Center was jam packed with grassroots Hawaiians, and their testimonies were filled with great pride, intensity, passion, anger and tears. For too long, the enormity and grand scale of EMI’s crimes – wholesale theft of water out of over 100 streams in the East Maui watershed, have gone largely unnoticed and under-publicized in the Hawai‘i community. It is well known that East Maui taro farmers have been lodging formal protests against these diversions for nearly 120 years, most recently through the filing of legal petitions.

This meeting was truly uplifting, because Hawaiians turned out in force, and many other members of the community came out to support them. The members of Na Moku Aupuni o Ko‘olau Hui (Keanae-Wailuanui) and Honopou taro growing families played a great role, but there was broad support from throughout our Maui community. This meeting competed with an Aha Moku Council meeting in Hana that same night, but there was an awesome turnout in spite of that.

The big disappointment of the evening was that none of the Commissioners attended – only three staffers. There were many complaints throughout the evening that these Commissioners did not, for whatever reason, attend in person, which was justly felt by attendees to be disrespectful.

Finally, there were a few representatives of Alexander & Baldwin / East Maui Irrigation who have been unapologetic and matter-of-fact about diverting all of the water out of the East Maui Watershed. At this meeting, the people rebuked and openly challenged them.

Let us hope that this fact-finding meeting by the Commission on Water Resources management ultimately results in ending EMI’s long-standing unlawful diversions.

Ed and Mahealani Wendt