VIDEO: Critical Of Mayor’s “Way Forward”, TMT Opponents Have Their Own Plan
From BIVN, October 4, 2019 (Comments in parenthesis to induce accuracy.)
Kealoha Pisciotta, president of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou and active opponent of the Thirty Meter Telescope, was not satisfied with Mayor Harry Kim’s “A Way Forward” for Mauna Kea.
(Pisciotta has been OHA's key anti-telescope person for alomst two decades.)
“I’m quite critical, actually,” Pisciotta said during an interview conducted on Thursday afternoon. “It was really hard to even get through. I feel it’s disingenuous and really kind of offensive in many ways.” …
“It still includes the TMT, number one,” Pisciotta said. “The first rule of hoʻoponopono is you have to remove the injury.”…
Currently, the management of Mauna Kea is handled by the University of Hawaiʻi. “The university is not lawfully allowed to manage what they’re not constitutionally mandated to manage,” Pisciotta says. “So, [the state land board] is unlawfully delegating to the university the right to manage not only our land, but the people.”
During the interview, Pisciotta made reference to a report of her own: “Mauna Kea – The Temple: Protecting the Sacred Resource”, which was put together by the Royal Order of Kamehameha and Mauna Kea Anaina Hou in 2001. She says the report was developed as a function of stopping the Keck / NASA Outrigger telescope expansion, as well as the university’s introduction of the 2000 Master Plan.
(According to Pisciotta, this 2001 report demands $50M in annual rent from the telescopes.)
The report makes three primary suggestions, Pisciotta said. “No further development, because the mountain has reached its carrying capacity,” she said.
“The second thing was to get the observatories to pay lawful rent,” she continued.
(Translation: OHA, through Pisciotta, is demanding $50M/year in 'rent' from the existing telescopes. In this 2008 statement, referring back to the same 2001 report, she makes the amount explicit.)
“The last and final thing was that we needed a community-based management authority that placed right holders in positions of decision-making, not in advisory positions,” she said.
“A lot of people don’t understand,” Pisciotta added, “we submitted this to lawmakers, we submitted this to all of the governor’s, and mayors, for Hawaiʻi. I’m pretty sure Mayor Kim got it.”
“One of the things that’s so offensive is that he doesn’t even mention this,” she said, “as if it doesn’t even exist.”
“This document needs to be updated, yeah” Pisciotta said of the Temple report, “and I think the protectors would be the first to start looking at it and begin looking at how we would want to do things in the future.”…
“I think the chair of the TMT board needs to come out here,” Pisciotta said, “and they need to face the people that they’re actually threatening.”
read …TMT Opponents Have Their Own Plan
BACKGROUND YOU WON'T GET ANYWHERE ELSE: Previously supportive of the Thirty Meter Telescope, OHA in April, 2015, welshed on a $1M cash deal and switched to a neutral position. In late 2017, OHA sued the University of Hawaii in hopes of snatching control of the master lease for the top of Mauna Kea. OHA’s point person on the telescope protests, Kealoha Pisciotta, has publicly demanded $50M rent. Obviously OHA’s money-motivated position sharply contrasts the ‘sacred’ rhetoric emanating from the protesters' camp.
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