Aloha
Mahalo to everyone who testified Wednesday October 19th for the county's review of Hawaii County Civil Defense preparedness and response. We had at least 19 people testify in Pahoa and more in Hilo and Kona. Testimony showed the community is knowledgeable and akamai on the issues. The testimony was to the point and hard to ignore with resident after resident telling about the very serious impacts their families face living near the PGV power plant.
We need your help again with one more very important hearing in Hilo
, the
November 3rd Windward Planning Commission meeting will be at 9:30 a.m. in the Aging and Disability Resource Center training room located at
1055 Kinoole Street in Hilo (click the link for a map, it is not their usual place).
What happens at this hearing will help determine if we get independent health studies the residents can have confidence in or if the money we have gotten appropriated for them is wasted on a study the community does not trust.
We are asking people from the community to come with us before the Windward Planning Commission one more time. We have discovered that despite our best efforts the county administration never intended to negotiate with the community in good faith on the community health study. Mayor Kenoi's administration has chosen to subvert the process covertly at key points. Our power to fix this comes from you, the community, we need you now, please come if you can and tell your friends and neighbors we need help.
PPA has been working on getting two geothermal health studies for years. The results to date are that a community health study was funded and a request for proposals (RFP) was issued and got responses. However there are problems with the way the county administration is handling that study. Funding for the other, a
psycho-social study, will be considered at the same meeting and
we support that contract (see the last paragraph, below).
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Community Health Study
The November 3rd hearing will consider Mayor Kenoi's request for additional funding for a community
health study that PPA initiated and has worked on for many years. Originally PPA chose Dr. Kaye Kilburn, who died on the evening of Hurricane Iselle, to do the study. Of all the researchers who have done studies on exposure to hydrogen sulfide, only Dr. Kilburn developed a methodology that consistently identified neurological damage from hydrogen sulfide and that provided repeatable, quantitative results. Giving the study to anyone who does not use the Kilburn or a similar methodology will at best result in ambiguous findings and at worst cover up the health effects that geothermal has caused.
Although money for the proposed health study was approved, the process to select who will lead the study has been tainted. A decision has been made to funnel the money away from the study PPA trusts. To stop them we will need your help.
In the last eighteen months, we found
a video of Mayor Kenoi's consultant Jeff Melrose telling a U.H. workshop that the purpose behind the Geothermal Public Health Assessment with Peter Adler (the Adler Group) was to prevent awarding the community health study to Dr. Kilburn or someone using his methodology. Now, despite the fact that a Kilburn methodology study was proposed that met the original purpose of the study for less than the funding ceiling, Mayor Kenoi is trying to gain approval for an increase in funding to award a more expensive contract that is less likely to identify health problems to another group, probably the University of Hawai`i. We need to stop him or the money for an unbiased geothermal health study we all worked so hard to get will be gone.
Talking points:
- The Adler Group was set up by Mayor Kenoi in 2012 to ensure Dr. Kilburn did not do the study. Even though PPA members agreed to participate with Peter Adler's group based on a promise that a Kilburn study would be fairly considered, Jeff Melrose discussed those events at a U.H. workshop in March of 2014 and said (see video at 5:20 to 5:27), "Clearly if a scientist like [Dr. Kilburn or someone who uses his methodology] took on a project, under their direction you'd end up with a very blame oriented response that the report would give you to undercut the credibility of the geothermal and the growth of this potentially useful energy and resource.”
- Members from the community who favored the Kilburn study were excluded from the RFP Community selection group, simply because they favored the Kilburn study. After two years of review, Tom Travis offered that he believed a study using the Kilburn method should be chosen. Jeff Melrose responded that that meant Travis could not be on the selection committee.
- The UH study was too expensive to meet original RFP funding. To avoid giving the Study to the Kilburn methodology group, the Mayor’s office is now asking for more money, allowing them to give the study to the UH.
- The community objects to back room dealing. The process needs to be reviewed and fairness needs to be ensured. We have waited over three years since the mayor said he would do a study -- jamming this tainted study through now is an attempt to prevent us from getting a real look at what has been happening in our community since 1981.
At the end of the
video, Jeff Melrose describes how Mayor Kenoi "chose to say we're going to keep these [community] guys inside. We're going to
hold on to them... [W]hat it's done is allow us to have an ongoing conversation so that as we work into the study we can
actually include them in a little bit of the selection process and ultimately the outcome won't be a decide, announce and defend kind of solution, but something that they were involved in" (emphasis added).
Community members have contended for years that government agencies avoided serious efforts to study geothermal health issues so as not to undercut their desire for public credibility and the growth of PGV and geothermal energy. Treatment of the community health study to date tends to affirm that contention.
Thank you for your support all these years, please spread the word that we need help again and try to come if you can.
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Psycho-Social Study
