Following weeks of escalating public opposition, the Maui County Council now stands in unanimous opposition to the military’s plan to build up to seven telescopes in a state conservation district atop Haleakalā.

The council passed a resolution Friday urging the U.S. Air Force to reject a draft environmental impact statement for the $5.9 million project and called on the National Park Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Land and Natural Resources not to approve any permits.

“As elected officials, we’re entrusted to represent the people’s voice,” said council member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez, who introduced the resolution.

Community members have voiced concerns, she said, about the project’s potential to degrade cultural resources, negatively affect the environment and expand military presence on Maui. “Decisions impacting our lands, waters and sacred sites should not move forward when the communities living here have made their opposition clear,” Rawlins-Fernandez told her colleagues at the meeting.

The resolution is now expected to be sent to the consultant contracted to complete the draft EIS and collect community feedback, as well as to a long list of federal and state officials.

There are already six academic and four space surveillance telescopes near the summit of Haleakalā, the Valley Isle’s highest peak at just over 10,000 feet. Federal officials have said that the new telescopes would be part of a broader space surveillance facility that is needed to enhance the United States’ ability to track and identify potential threats among satellites and other objects orbiting Earth.

Since the EIS was released in January, community members have come out in droves to voice their opposition to the contents of the environmental review and the overall project. More than 100 testified at public hearings held by Air Force officials in Kīhei and Pukalani last month and condemned the draft report at the council meeting Friday, saying it does not lay out a sufficient plan to mitigate the threats to the environment and cultural resources. Many criticized federal officials for giving the community just 45 days to review and comment on the 516-page document.

In response to residents’ feedback, Air Force officials announced on Thursday that the public comment period would be extended an additional 30 days, through April 15.

“It is imperative for us to remain engaged, receptive, and transparent with community members,” U.S. Space Force Lt. Col. Douglas Thornton, 15th Space Surveillance Squadron commander, said in a statement. “As we move through this process, we will continue to have respectful engagements and value the feedback we receive.”

At the end of the comment period, the feedback will be incorporated into the final EIS, which is scheduled to be published in the fall.

The mountaintop is home to numerous endangered or threatened species such as the Hawaiian hoary bat, the band-rumped storm petrel, the Hawaiian goose or nene and a species of silversword that does not grow anywhere else in the world.

The project is expected to have minimal impact on the environmental, according to the draft EIS, but the reporter acknowledges the adverse effects on cultural resources would likely be profound because many Native Hawaiians and others consider Haleakalā’s summit to be a sacred and deeply spiritual place. The latter was the driving force behind major community opposition to the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea on Hawaiʻi island, a project that remains in limbo more than a decade later.

Construction of the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site Small Telescope Advanced Research Facility, or AMOS STAR, is planned to begin later this year or 2027. The domed telescopes — as well as infrastructure improvements including a new paved access road, parking facilities and surface water runoff management measures — would be built on less than 1 acre of land near the existing space surveillance complex on Haleakalā.

Mounting Opposition

Several military and academic telescopes have been built near the top of the volcano since the 1950s, often despite objections from locals. In 2015 and 2017, dozens of protesterswere arrested after laying in the road to block vehicles transporting parts to build the controversial $344 million Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.

When federal officials first unveiled plans to build AMOS STAR in 2024, hundreds of people testified at public meetings in opposition to building the telescopes. That June, the council unanimously passed another resolution calling on the Air Force to “respect the unified and collective voice of community members who testified” and to cease all actions related to the development of the space surveillance facility.

Air Force officials have maintained that the new telescopes are necessary for security and intelligence purposes.

During the council meeting on Friday, testifiers echoed many of the same concerns voiced two years earlier. Tiare Lawrence, a Native Hawaiian community activist who has long been vocal about her opposition to building telescopes on Haleakalā, said expanding the military’s presence near the summit could make Maui a military target, and it would threaten one of the island’s most sacred places.

“For generations, our kūpuna have revered this summit as a place where the heavens and earth meet. It is also one of the most fragile and unique ecosystems in Hawai’i, home to species found nowhere else on Earth,” she said. “Despite this sacred and ecological significance, Haleakalā has already borne the burden of expensive developments.”

Local residents already have their doubts over the military’s claims that the project won’t harm the environment. Lawrence highlighted the spill of 1,300 gallons of firefighting foam containing cancer-causing chemicals at the Navy’s Red Hill fuel complex in November 2022 and to the Army’s decades-long history of pollution in Mākua Valley on Oʻahu. She noted that federal officials have not yet finished cleaning up a 720-gallon diesel fuel spill caused by a lightning strike at the existing space surveillance complex near the summit of Haleakalā in January 2023.

Kula resident Dick Mayer, in his testimony, emphasized that the draft EIS only discusses the roughly 1-acre area where the new facility would be built. The project would add to a community of telescopes and other military and research facilities that has been growing for decades, he said.

“It’s the federal government which controls practically all the activities on the top of the mountain,” he said. “What they need to do is have an environmental document that looks at the cumulative impacts of all of the federal activities on top of the mountain.”

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Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change and the environment is supported by The Healy Foundation, the Marisla Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.

 

 

Story originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

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