STAND. COM. REP. NO. 2168

Honolulu, Hawaii

RE:    S.B. No. 2904

Honorable Ronald D. Kouchi

President of the Senate

Twenty-Eighth State Legislature

Regular Session of 2016

State of Hawaii

Sir:

     Your Committee on Water, Land, and Agriculture, to which was referred S.B. No. 2904 entitled:

"A BILL FOR AN ACT RELATING TO AQUATIC MITIGATION BANKS,"

begs leave to report as follows:

     The purpose and intent of this measure is to authorize the Department of Land and Natural Resources to establish and operate aquatic mitigation banks to restore, create, enhance, or preserve aquatic habitats or resources as compensatory mitigation, where a person is required to provide compensatory mitigation prospectively and the use of banked mitigation is approved by the agency requiring mitigation, or for past damages to aquatic habitats or resources.

     Your Committee received testimony in support of this measure from the Department of Land and Natural Resources, Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and three individuals.

     Your Committee finds that aquatic mitigation banks restore, create, enhance, or preserve aquatic habitats or resources to recover the ecological functions, services, and value of aquatic resources lost by adverse impacts to other similar aquatic habitats.  Mitigation banks serve as a mechanism to restore or replace aquatic resources and ecological functions of aquatic habitats either prospectively or after they have been damaged; therefore, your Committee finds that mitigation banks are a first step in the process of creating innovative mechanisms for aquatic resource conservation in the State.

     As affirmed by the record of votes of the members of your Committee on Water, Land, and Agriculture that is attached to this report, your Committee is in accord with the intent and purpose of S.B. No. 2904 and recommends that it pass Second Reading and be referred to your Committee on Ways and Means.

Respectfully submitted on behalf of the members of the Committee on Water, Land, and Agriculture,

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MIKE GABBARD, Chair