20 Jan 2016.
By Bret Yager West Hawaii Today byager@westhawaiitoday.com
Don’t hold your breath.
The last major decision on whether control of the water should be placed in state hands happened last August. That was when the state Commission on Water Resource Management declined a National Park Service request to create a smaller water use management area within the larger aquifer.
Since then, the war over water has gone quiet.
Peter Young — a former chairman of the state Board of Land and Natural Resources who is now a consultant opposing the designation — said that no news in good news.
“It’s not over, which is relatively good, because in the beginning there was a push to get it done fast,” Young said at a meeting last week in Kailua-Kona.
Jonathan Scheuer, a consultant for NPS on the aquifer designation, said on Tuesday that it took nearly 20 years for the Iao aquifer on Maui to be designated a state water management area. The designation places control of pumping and permits in the hands of CWRM rather than the county departments of water supply.
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