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UPDATED: October 28, 2013, 9:00 p.m.

UPDATE: Facing a tough Senate confirmation hearing, Gov. Neil Abercrombie has withdrawn Genevieve Salmonson’s nomination as director of the Office of Environmental Quality Control.

Salmonson has been under fire from environmental groups for her role in the decade-old debacle and the governor’s office told Civil Beat last week that Abercrombie was assessing whether she had enough support in the Senate to be confirmed. The hearing was set for Tuesday.

Salmonson requested that her name be withdrawn for personal reasons, Louise Kim-McCoy, a spokeswoman for the governor told Civil Beat late Monday. “The Governor respects her wish to withdraw and thanks her for her interest in serving,” she said by email.

Salmonson defended her environmental record earlier this week. She told Civil Beat that her involvement in the defunct interisland ferry system that cost the state more than $40 million was being mischaracterized and that her environmental record was strong.

Salmonson was appointed as interim director of the environmental control office in May. It’s an office that she’s very familiar with. She led it from 1999 to 2007, first under Gov. Ben Cayetano and then Gov. Linda Lingle.

But a decision that she made in 2004 prompted a host of environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, The Outdoor Circle, KAHEA, Hawaii’s Thousand Friends, Maui Tomorrow, Save Kahului Harbor, Friends of Lanai and Puna Pono Alliance — to oppose her reappointment.

Salmonson approved the Department of Transportation’s decision to exempt Superferry harbor improvements from environmental review. The exemption outraged environmental groups that sued the state and ultimately won. The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that an environmental impact statement should have been done for Maui’s Kahului Harbor.

“If Ms. Salmonson had asked the right questions and determined that an [Environmental Impact Statement] was necessary, this sordid episode in Hawaii’s history may never have happened and the state might have saved millions of dollars,” Robert Harris wrote in a statement released to the press Friday.

But Salmonson said she was misled by the transportation department when she approved the exemption. (Ultimately, it was the Department of Transportation’s decision to exempt the Superferry from environmental review, but the environmental quality control office, as the state’s expert agency on the law, often provides its opinion.)

The transportation department initially told the environmental control office that the Kahului Harbor improvements would be minor and that they fell within its list of exemptions from environmental review. But the transportation department subsequently changed the scope of the project and didn’t adequately inform the environmental control office, said Salmonson.

“Had I known at the time that they were going to pull a bait-and-switch and expand the project scope, I would absolutely have fought for an (environmental impact statement),” she said by email on Sunday.

Salmonson pointed to a 2008 auditor’s report that found the OEQC was not fully informed about the scope of the improvements. The report says that the transportation department continued to cite the OEQC director’s original opinion even though harbor improvements had changed significantly.

Harris doesn’t buy Salmonson’s explanation, however. He says an environmental impact statement should have been done based on the initial scope of improvements submitted by the Department of Transportation, as well as its final plans for harbor upgrades.

Salmonson insists that the Sierra Club has also misled people about a subsequent vote by the environmental council, which advises the OEQC. The Sierra Club released a statement saying the council voted 9 to 1 that the Superferry should not have been exempt from environmental review, with Salmonson being the sole “nay” vote.


In fact, Salmonson says, she merely abstained from voting on the advice of the state’s lawyers.

“As an officer of the state, I had to abstain,” she said. “I can’t go against the legal counsel.”

Salmonson said that she was disappointed in the Sierra Club for its criticism of her.

“I have always supported Sierra Club,” she wrote by email. “That’s why it’s disappointing that they have chosen to oppose my nomination and are resorting to spreading inaccurate information in the process. I have dedicated my entire career to being a steward of our environment.”

The governor’s appointee to the OEQC is different from other department heads. It is not a cabinet-level appointee position that serves at the will of the governor and is expected to carry out the administration’s policies. The OEQC director is expected to act independently of administration politics and strictly interpret the state’s environmental review laws.

But critics argued that Salmonson was too easily influenced by developers and in the case of the Superferry, Lingle, during her past tenures as OEQC director.

Salmonson denied this. She insisted that she wasn’t pressured by the Lingle administration to approve the Superferry and has a record of standing up to developers. She pointed to a couple of examples.

Under Lingle, a private developer wanted to build a landfill over one of the largest aquifers on Oahu using state revenue bonds. Under state law, an environmental impact statement wasn’t required because the developer was a private entity proposing a project on private land.

“What I did was say [is]: ‘This is not right because the impact is the same,’” she explained.

Salmonson says she successfully shepherded legislation that requires the state’s environmental review law to apply to both public and private entities that propose projects involving waste-water treatment, landfills, oil refineries and power generators.

She also took credit for a bottle bill passed under Cayetano that set a 7-cent tax on all bottles, 5 cents of which is recouped when recycled. Salmonson estimates that this paired landfills of 5 billion.

She said private industry fought both those bills.

“My strength is to get people to the table and say, ‘This is the idea, what can we do, where can we go from here?” Salmonson said.

Environmental groups have sent this letter to state senators asking them to vote “no” on Salmonson: