Sierra Club
Sues Over Marketing of Tourism
By Michele Kayal
© copyright
2000, Gannett Pacific Corp. All rights reserved.
January 13, 2000
The Sierra Club is
seeking a court order to halt the Hawaii Tourism
Authority’s efforts to boost tourism until the
potential impact on the state’s environment can be
determined.
The Hawaii chapter of the
San Francisco-based environmental group filed a petition
with the Hawaii Supreme Court on Tuesday asking that the
authority suspend its tourism marketing efforts until it
prepares an environmental assessment.
The assessment is a
rudimentary study sometimes aimed at determining whether
a more complete environmental impact statement should be
prepared.
The club argues in its
suit that the authority legally was obligated to conduct
an environmental assessment of its marketing plan before
it awarded a three-year, $114 million contract to the
Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau to execute the
plan. But tourism authority officials yesterday
dismissed the lawsuit as an attention-getter.
The Sierra Club and other
environmental groups tenaciously have followed the
plan’s progress since it was rolled out in June. Even
then, they expressed concern over the proposed tourism
growth in the absence of studies that would identify how
many visitors Hawaii actually can handle. But the
lawsuit is significant — and potentially troublesome
— for the authority.
“Overcrowded beaches,
strained natural resources, clogged roadways and
overburdened natural areas — these are the tangible
effects of increasing visitor arrivals,” said Sierra
Club’s Hawaii director Jeff Mikulina.
“While the economic
benefits that may be derived from the expenditure of
these state funds have been established, the
countervailing environmental, ecological and social
adverse impacts caused by an increased number of
visitors were not addressed,” the court filing said.
But tourism authority
Chief Executive Officer Robert Fishman yesterday called
the lawsuit a “PR stunt” and said that it
deliberately misinterprets the intent of the law it
cites.
Interpreting statute
The Sierra Club is citing
a statute that requires government agencies to conduct
an environmental review before spending state money. The
law often applies to construction projects but also
includes “any program or project” planned by an
agency.
“If the claims made are
valid, then every program in the state would require an
environmental assessment,” Fishman said. “Clearly,
that isn’t what the Legislature intended.”
But some legal experts
and environmental lawyers said yesterday that they
believe the case could have merit. They said the law
cited by the Sierra Club can reasonably be applied to
the authority’s comprehensive marketing plan because
it is a program that will use state money.
“I don’t think it’s
frivolous,” said Lea Hong, a partner in the law firm
Alston Hunt Floyd and Ing. “It certainly passes the
laugh test. It is a novel, yet legitimate, use of the
law.”
Hong advises businesses
on environmental regulations but said she has
represented the Sierra Club in the past.
Contract not signed
As for whether the case
will fly, Hong said: “The court is fair. The court is
going to give them a fair hearing as to the merits of
their case.”
The tourism authority
awarded a $38 million-a-year contract to the visitors
bureau in September to promote Hawaii throughout the
world as a vacation and business destination.
The stated goal of the
authority’s marketing plan is not to increase the
number of visitors, but to increase visitor expenditures
in the state, possibly by attracting higher-spending or
longer-staying travelers.
The contract has yet to
be signed, Fishman said. The sides are haggling over
“procedural issues,” he said.
Fishman said that if the
court rules to halt the authority’s marketing efforts,
the results could be serious for the visitor industry
and for the state.
“If the court ordered
the government to stop spending tax dollars on marketing
the industry, the industry would grind to a halt,” he
said. “It may even cause a major hiccup in the
economic revitalization of the state.”
Lots of litigation
Officials at Sierra
Club’s national headquarters said this is the first
time the organization has sued a tourism board. But
staff attorney Aaron Isherwood said the Hawaii lawsuit
is consistent with the group’s other legal efforts.
“We’ve certainly been
involved in lots of litigation involving national parks
and monuments to protect them from the impacts of
development and other types of industrial operations,”
he said. “So in that sense, this is similar to other
types of work we’ve done in the past.”
The Sierra Club files
about 100 lawsuits a year, Isherwood said.
It is up to the Supreme
Court to act on the lawsuit. The court’s options
include granting or denying the request, or asking both
sides to present written arguments on the issue.
As of yesterday, the
court had not indicated what it might do. Court
officials were unavailable for comment, and the time
frame for action was unclear.
Under the law that
created the tourism authority, cases involving the board
can be filed directly with the Supreme Court.
© copyright
2000, Gannett Pacific Corp. All rights reserved.
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