The dashed line is what federal fair-share treatment would look like — roughly matching Puna’s share of the island’s population. Neither spending measure even comes close (graphic by Tam Hunt)

The Feds found major discrimination against Puna residents in 2000. Then everyone just forgot!

[I am running for state House District 4 to represent Puna at the state level: www.Hunt4House.com]

A remarkable set of public documents recently came into my hands, and I think every Puna resident should know what’s in them.

When you run for office you can be frequently surprised what people tell you about long-forgotten events!

In May of 1998, a small group of Puna and Volcano residents calling themselves the Sustainability Committee — Bonnie Goodell, Jon Olson of the Puna Community Council, John Luchau, Ron Reilly, Roger Evans of Hawaiian Paradise Park, and others — filed a formal civil rights complaint with the Federal Highway Administration.

Their claim was simple: the Hawai‘i Long Range Transportation Plan, produced by the state DOT with Hawai‘i County as a subrecipient, systematically ignored the 80,000-plus parcels in Puna and Ka‘u’s “substandard subdivisions” — home to the most socio-economically at-risk communities in the state and the fastest-growing concentration of Native Hawaiians.

They ignored our actual population. Ignored our economic development needs. Planned around us as if we didn’t exist.

Here’s the part almost nobody remembers: the federal government investigated, and Puna won! Bonnie Goodell and her small band of social justice warriors won!

In September 2000, the FHWA’s Office of Civil Rights completed its investigation and concluded, in writing, that “the evidence supports the allegations raised in the complaint of discrimination.”

The receipt: the FHWA Office of Civil Rights letter to the HDOT Director reporting that “the evidence supports the allegations raised in the complaint of discrimination” (2000).

The report found that the Hawai‘i DOT and Hawai‘i County were not in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Executive Order 12898 on environmental justice.

The details are almost comically bad. HDOT had no viable Title VI plan in operation. Its designated Title VI Specialist admitted he spent about 5% of his time on Title VI — working from a position description written in 1970 that didn’t actually mention Title VI.

Population projections used to justify the plan came from outside consultants whose numbers officials couldn’t explain and never verified. The FHWA ordered corrective action within 90 days.

Key findings from the federal civil rights determination in 2000 (graphic by Tam Hunt)

This was not a lawsuit that settled quietly, or an activist’s opinion. It was a formal finding by a federal civil rights office that the State of Hawai‘i and Hawai‘i County discriminated against the low-income and Native Hawaiian communities of Puna and Ka‘u in how they planned — and therefore how they spent.

So what happened next?

Sixteen years later: 26% of the people, 5% of the money

In October 2016, many of the same residents wrote again — this time to the EPA, FEMA, the Department of Justice, the Department of Transportation, and Health & Human Services — documenting that nothing had meaningfully changed. Their letter compiled the county’s own published budgets from fiscal years 2000 through 2016 and found that Puna, with roughly 26% of Hawai‘i County’s population, had received about 5.13% of the county’s capital improvement spending over those sixteen years.

On the operating side, Puna’s share of dedicated police, highway, and grant spending from 2013–2017 was 13.76% — for a district with over a quarter of the county’s people spread across an area 84% the size of O‘ahu.

The dashed line is what federal fair-share treatment would look like — roughly matching Puna’s share of population. Neither spending measure comes close.

The 2016 letter reads like a checklist of everything Puna still lacks: no hospita, no public wastewater treatment in Pāhoa or Kea‘au — the county council had unanimously approved a Pāhoa wastewater feasibility study in 2014 that was simply never conducted. Only two two-lane highways in and out of the entire district. Most residents still on catchment water and cesspools. Only three buses a day through Kalapana, the poorest part of the district. Violent crime near Pāhoa at almost three times the state average.

And the 2005 General Plan saying the quiet part out loud: Puna “will continue to serve as a residential area for people working in Hilo,” with its resident economy limited to “papayas, macadamia nuts and flowers.”

The federal agencies were asked to investigate ongoing violations of Title VI and Executive Order 12898. As far as I can determine, no meaningful enforcement has happened since 2016.

Ten more years later: run the checklist again

It is now 2026 — twenty-eight years after the original complaint, twenty-six years after the federal finding. Ten years after the 2016 checklist. Run that checklist again today and here is where we stand:

Wastewater treatment: Still none. Roughly 16,000 cesspools in the Puna project area discharge an estimated 8.5 million gallons of raw sewage into our groundwater every single day. The county issued an environmental review notice for future Puna wastewater service in 2022 — planning documents, again — while state law gives everyone until 2050 to convert cesspools largely at their own expense (which is simply not going to happen).

Hospital: Still none. The most promising healthcare project in the district — a proposed medical campus in Kea‘au — is moving forward substantially because of a $25 million private commitment from a billionaire philanthropist. I’m grateful for it. But think about what it means that the fastest-growing district in the county, after seven decades of paying taxes, is waiting on private charity for what the government never built, and was required to build, based on civil rights laws.

Roads: Highway 130 is still the same bottleneck, carrying one of the heaviest two-lane traffic loads in the state, with alternate-route studies that never seem to be built.

The numbers move. The pattern doesn’t. Almost nothing has changed.

Twenty-eight years. Two formal complaints. One federal finding. Zero course corrections.

This isn’t a grievance. It’s a civil rights lawsuit-in-waiting.

When Puna residents say the county treats us as a tax farm (HPP’s tax base has tripled since 2010, but our services have stayed roughly the same), collecting revenue from our subdivisions for seventy years while funneling investment everywhere else, we are routinely dismissed or just ignored.

That’s what makes this paper trail so important. In 2000, after a formal investigation, the federal government’s own civil rights office looked at the evidence and agreed with us. The discrimination was documented, the corrective actions were ordered, and then the system counted on what it always counts on: that we’d get tired, that the complainants would age out, that nobody would follow up.

The people who filed these complaints — many of them now gone from the fight — did their part. They built the record. The least we can do is use it.

Here’s what I’ll push for when I’m in the House representing Puna: an annual, public report showing tax revenue contributed and capital investment received by district, so this disparity can never again hide in budget documents that take a forensic accountant to decode. A capital improvement program that ties spending to population and need, not to which districts have the loudest lobbyists. And actual completion of the wastewater and infrastructure planning that has been “in progress” since before some Puna voters were born.

And I am looking into litigation as well as policy. This is very likely the basis for a strong civil rights lawsuit.

Twenty-eight years is long enough to be patient. Puna doesn’t need another study. It needs its fair share, and now we have the receipts, going back decades, to prove it.

This post draws on the 1998 Sustainability Committee complaint, the FHWA Office of Civil Rights investigative report (approved September 27, 2000), and the October 11, 2016 follow-up complaint letter to federal agencies, along with current county and state budget reporting.

[Claude helped to write this post]