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When you’re an appointee of the governor, it might be expected that you’d stick with the party line.

But not Gary Hooser, the former director of the Office of Environmental Quality Control and a staunch environmental advocate who repeatedly clashed with Gov. Neil Abercrombie and his environmental policies.

A week before leaving his post at the end of November, Hooser fired at the Public Land Development Corporation, an agency focused on developing state lands through public-private partnerships that Abercrombie has worked hard to promote. Hooser’s piece was titled, “PLDC creation was a slap in the face of the public and state Constitution.”

Abercrombie’s office was likely accustomed to Hooser’s renegade behavior by this point. Since taking over the environmental office in early 2011, Hooser had spoken out publicly against a number of Abercrombie’s initiatives.

Hooser did take care to note that his remarks about the PLDC were his alone, and did not represent any official position. And he was technically on leave from his post at the time. In what some might call a well-timed exit, Hooser took unpaid leave from his state job in July to run for — and win a seat on — the Kauai County Council.

But Hooser is not the only Hawaii environmentalist who is disenchanted with Abercrombie.

His departure is symbolic of a larger rift between Abercrombie and the environmental community that has been growing since the governor took office two years ago. Many environmental groups supported Abercrombie’s bid for governor, including the Hawaii Sierra Club, which publicly endorsed him.

But the governor’s support for large development projects, exemptions from the environmental review process, and most recently, cuts to the state’s solar tax credits, have rankled the conservation community.

Stuart Coleman, the Hawaii coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation, said that his organization has been disappointed to find that Abercrombie is not aligned with with the group’s philosophies after all.

“When he was first elected we were excited because we thought we were getting one of our own, someone who had a strong, progressive history and environmentally friendly policies as a congressman,” said Coleman, “But slowly and gradually, we were a little dismayed by the number of decisions that he was making that didn’t seem to have the environment in mind.”

The governor’s office didn’t want to talk about Hooser. “Gary Hooser is no longer a member of this administration and we are not going to comment,” Abercrombie spokeswoman, Louise Kim McCoy, said in a recent email.

But she takes exception to the broader notion that Abercrombie hasn’t been a strong advocate for the environment. Kim McCoy stressed that the administration has partnered with an array of agencies to further conservation work.

She noted the governor’s support of watershed protection, beach nourishment restoration projects, patrolling nearshore waters and fisheries on the neighbor islands and restoring Kawainui Marsh on Oahu. The administration also created a climate change adaptation policy for the state and has been a strong proponent of clean energy, she said.

Not In Sync With The Boss

But other environmental policies and initiatives have rankled Hawaii’s strongest environmentalists, a faction that enjoys considerable political power.

Hooser is a prime example of those staunch conservationists who don’t see much room for a middle ground on certain issues.

After a failed bid for lieutenant governor that would have made him Abercrombie’s second-in-command, Hooser was hired by Abercrombie to head the Office of Environmental Quality Control, the agency tasked with overseeing Hawaii’s environmental review law.

Hooser had built a reputation as a strong champion of environmental issues during his time as a state senator and were celebrating Abercrombie’s election to the governorship.

It was an auspicious start to a relationship that quickly grew tense. Hooser began going his own way, a direction that has drawn criticism from some top state officials.

“I think if you are appointed by the administration, you work with the administration,” said Jim Boersema, a former communications director for the governor, who left his post in September.

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz said that Hooser’s advocacy on issues while at the OEQC conflicted with his job description.

“His priority is supposed to be implementation and execution of policy,” said Dela Cruz. “A policymaker is the Legislature or a board member or council member. So maybe because he was in the Legislature for so long, he got those roles confused. I’m not sure.”

“He’s a good guy. I think his heart is in the right place. But you have to agree to disagree.”

But Hooser has a different view of the OEQC position. He notes that he was not a cabinet-level appointee. He says the director of OEQC, although appointed by the governor, was supposed to act independently.

“In my heart, I’m an advocate, and advocacy on these particular issues, environmental issues, land use issues, that’s where I cut my teeth in politics 15 years ago,” he said. “In my role as director of the OEQC, the office was designed to look out for the environment.”

Standing Up For the Environment

Hooser began his political career in 1998, when he was elected to the Kauai County Council. In 2002, he won a seat in the state Senate, serving until 2010 when he left to campaign for lieutenant governor.

His biggest achievement in the Senate was shepherding through legislation that made Hawaii the first state in the country to require solar hot water heating systems on all new construction. He also became known as one of the of the failed Hawaii Superferry.

In need of a job after his losing his run for lieutenant governor, Hooser said that he was grateful to the governor for appointing him to head the OEQC.

But he chafed under the limits of the office.

“I didn’t want to be just managing an office,” he said. “I wanted to help move an agenda forward. I wanted to play a meaningful role.”

Hooser used the clout of the office to advocate on matters he felt were important to the environment. Many of those positions mirrored the views of the broader environmental community, especially when it came to large developments and legislation that was seen as weakening environmental oversight of projects.

One of those issues was Hoopili, the planned 12,000-home development in Ewa that is expected to cover hundreds of acres of prime farmland. The state Land Use Commission held extensive hearings on the developer’s request to reclassify the land from agricultural to urban so it could be developedt. The Abercrombie administration backed the development.

But in July 2011, just a few months after accepting the OEQC job, Hooser submitted testimony to the LUC saying development of the property would be “a mind-boggling direct contradiction of State values and priorities.” He said that the project flouted state goals of local food production and the protection of prime agricultural lands.

Hooser said that at the time he didn’t know that the Abercrombie administration was in favor of the development, a project strongly opposed by many environmental groups.

During the most recent legislative session, Hooser also came out against a host of bills that circumvented the environmental review process, including streamlining geothermal exploration. He said not all of the bills were part of Abercrombie’s official legislative package, but it was clear that the governor supported them.

“The perception and feeling was that these were administration bills,” he said. “But technically, they were not.”

In a January 2012 op-ed in Civil Beat he wrote that by all indications the session “will feature a full frontal assault on environmental protections.”

In March, Hooser testified against , a measure that environmentalists hated. The bill would have helped pave the way for one of the governor’s top legislative priorities: to promote economic revitalization through expenditures on public infrastructure projects.

The bill, aimed at streamlining projects, included exemptions from Hawaii’s environmental review law.

Hooser took exception, registering the OEQC’s “strong opposition” to the bill. In written testimony, he said that if SB 755 passed, “it would result in irreparable harm to Hawaii’s environment.”

The bill, one of the most contentious of the year, died in the last days of the session.

Abercrombie spokeswoman Kim McCoy pointed out that most of the exemption bills this past session were introduced by the House. She said that Abercrombie supported them because he believed they would help streamline public projects and shore up infrastructure for local communities, as well as bolster the economy and create jobs. But his view was not a wholesale support of exemptions, particularly for private development, she said.

The “governor generally supported those that gave streamlined and additional authority for government projects (i.e. not any and all, or private projects) because he genuinely trusts his directors to do the right thing and find the appropriate balance between environmental protection, public participation and expediting projects,” she wrote by email.

A Parting of Ways

Hooser’s opposition to Abercrombie initiatives began to catch the attention of the governor and his top advisors. Hooser said that he was asked to rein in his public commentary.

The governor’s office won’t comment on that. But Kim McCoy emphasized that he was never at risk of being fired.

Hooser acknowledges he was never threatened with dismissal.

“I had meetings with the governor, the governor’s office and his chief of staff where they expressed concerns where I might have been a little too vocal,” he said. “But I was never asked to leave.”

Still, Hooser said policy disagreements were a major factor in his decision to leave the administration on his own.

Now, he says, the conflicts surprised him.

“I think generally, the perception was that Gov. Abercrombie was coming in, he was a progressive, a solid Democrat, and by extension was strong on the environment,” said Hooser. “But that proved not to be the case.”

That’s a view shared by others in the environmental community.

Paul Achitoff, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, says Abercrombie has shown a flagrant disregard for federal and state environmental laws.

“He seems to have embraced the developer’s mantra that these types of laws are simply a nuisance, and he is going to do what he can to get rid of them,” Achitoff said.

Achitoff criticized the governor for dismissing opponents of his policies as “a bunch of rabble rousing, naysaying hippies.”

But the governor also has made policy decisions that are serving Hawaii’s environment well, according to at least one environmental organization, the Hawaii chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

Mark Fox, director of external affairs for the organization, pointed out that Abercrombie has backed watershed protection and made strong appointments to head Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources, the agency that the group works most closely with on conservation issues.

“We have found the leadership that has been put into place by the Abercrombie administration to be very strong and very positive in terms of the kind of conservation work that we focus on, in particular native systems and coral reefs,” he said.

One of the most visible points of contention between Abercrombie and environmental groups has been over the PLDC. In hearings throughout the state earlier this year, hundreds of people showed up to oppose the agency, many urging that it be abolished. At one particularly heated meeting on Kauai, Abercrombie was booed.

Kim McCoy notes that Abercrombie has asked the PLDC “after hearing several concerns about the agency.”

While environmental groups have raised alarm about the agency’s ability to sidestep environmental controls, she said that the governor’s support for the PLDC stems from his focus on improving neglected state facilities.

“The state faces decades of deferred maintenance and that’s why the governor has said proper stewardship of public land does not mean simply leaving land untouched,” she said in the email. “Many state parks, facilities and forest areas require much needed attention.”