Advertiser's Derrick DePledge Uncovers Superferry-Lingle Dirty Dealings

In State path set in '04 Awana, ferry talks Derrick Depledge uncovers the scoop on how the state got stuck with $40 million dollars of useless barges and the role accused bribe-taker Lingle Chief of Staff played.

The state Department of Transportation's aggressive pursuit to exempt Hawaii Superferry from an environmental review came after a late December 2004 meeting with Superferry executives and Bob Awana, Gov. Linda Lingle's then-chief of staff, state records show.

Awana, in a brief telephone interview on Friday, did not recall the meeting but said he had no part in the state's decision to exempt $40 million worth of state harbor improvements for Superferry from an environmental assessment. "I had no role in that," he said.

But that turns out to be a lie...as is almost everything that was told to us about the Superferry

E-mail between department staff, obtained by The Advertiser through the state's open-records law, shows that staff believed a significant decision had been made at that meeting with Superferry executives and Awana.

Staff in the department's harbors division had thought before the meeting that the department's recommendations were to require a statewide environmental assessment of the project and to get Superferry to install a quarter stern ramp on the vessel to give it more flexibility at Kahului Harbor on Maui.

But Superferry executives, according to an account by a department staffer, told the state that anything but an exemption was a deal-breaker and that they would not be installing any ramps. The department staffer explained what happened to her colleagues in an e-mail following the afternoon meeting at the governor's offices: "Decisions made: We need to pursue EXEMPTION; and HSF will not provide any ramps on vessel."

So not only did Lingle give in to the Superferry by giving them an EIS exemption that she knew was illegal, she also agreed to take on an unnecessary (and it turns out useless) expense of building the ramps for them.

The documents also show that some in the department anticipated a lawsuit challenging the exemption that was eventually filed by environmentalists and ultimately interrupted Superferry's launch last summer. As one harbors division engineer wrote in an e-mail: "Per Bob Awana, if we are going to get challenged, they want to get challenged as soon as possible."

But there were some honorable people at DOT. They tried to argue Lingle's deputy out of violating the law:

Some in the department, documents show, believed the state had given in to Superferry's demands and continued to argue for an environmental review and their preferred harbor improvements up until the time the state's formal decision was made in February 2005 to exempt the project.

We also find out why Maui was kept in the dark about the alternatives being discussed for the Superferry. I remember being in a meeting with Gary Soma of Harbors in (I think) 2005 and asking him directly what the plan was to dock the Superferry and having him be evasive in a strange way...at the time I felt he knew the answer but just wasn't going to tell us.

The stripped-down plans for a barge and ramp for Superferry at Kahului's Pier 2 were seen by the department as interim, a fallback position to qualify for an exemption and meet the project's target launch date. Yet Superferry was so concerned about a trigger that executives pushed the department not to mention the preferred improvements at the harbor.

Fukunaga, in an e-mail to a staffer less than two weeks before the final decision to exempt the project from environmental review, wrote: "Garibaldi called me, he received his letter today and is concerned that identifying both the preferred improvements and the alternatives establishes a linkage and requires our doing the environmental reviews for everything.

All in all, it appears that Lingle through her corrupt chief of Staff Awana set out to deliberately flout the law and deceive the taxpayers. And as we see, this resulted in a lot of huhu and wasted money.