The history of Maunalua Bay is a fascinating one. Once home to a fertile, 523-acre fish pond — reportedly the largest in Polynesia — the bay’s waters lapped against a verdant, rural coastal area that included marshes and swamps, farmland, small, artesian-fed ponds and the dominating presence of Koko Head’s dormant tuff cone.

Back then, the surrounding area was known as Maunalua — Native Hawaiians had called it by that name for more than 1,000 years, historians say. All of that changed, however, in the late 1950s when industrialist Henry Kaiser dredged more than a half-million square feet of beach coral to create a watercraft channel and rechristened the area Hawaii Kai.

What was left of the Maunalua Pond is what is now known as the Hawaii Kai Marina, where it’s far easier to get a bowl of Zippy’s chili than to catch one of the mullet that once were so plentiful in those waters.

The man-created environment of Hawaii Kai and the damage to the bay that has been done in service of sustaining that environment has resulted in the somewhat barren body of water we know today as Maunalua Bay. Beneath the light turquoise near-coastal waters, largely absent of coral, live comparatively few fish and other marine animals compared to other areas around Oahu.

A draft plan from NOAA would bring new regulation to Hawaii Kai’s Maunalua Bay, but some residents aren’t happy with the proposal.

Richard Wiens/Civil Beat

In recent years, however, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the bay has begun to show signs of recovery, according to Malia Chow, superintendent of NOAA’s Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, which includes Maunalua Bay. That’s why NOAA wants to increase interagency work and regulation toward “continuing to heal the Bay.”

Chow shared those thoughts at the beginning of a prickly, three-hour meeting in Hawaii Kai on Tuesday night that brought out about 350 community members. Many had deep concerns about NOAA’s interest in designating the bay a “special sanctuary management area” and what that might mean for their businesses, their leisure activities, their home values and their general relationship with Maunalua Bay.

As Civil Beat’s Nathan Eagle reported, Chow was accompanied by state Department of Land and Natural Resources Chair Suzanne Case and multiple state legislators. But if attendees were favorably impressed by the assembled brass, it didn’t show in the Q&A.

“We don’t need more regulation. We don’t need our state waters taken over by the federal government,” fumed Robin Jones, vice president of the Hawaii Kai Marina Association, to loud applause.

“Why should we have NOAA tell us what we can and can’t do out there?” demanded Hawaii Kai Boat Club President Todd Carle, to an even more boisterous response.

It’s a good question (though its delivery might have been a bit more civil), and one with multiple answers.

Maunalua Bay is one of three proposed SSMAs that NOAA seeks to create in this process (the other two are at Penguin Bank off the southwest shore of Molokai and the Maui Nui area between the islands of Lanai and Kahoolawe). The genesis for all three was a management plan review of the humpback whale sanctuary in 2002; thoughts of the SSMAs began to crystalize in a 2010 public scoping process that encompassed 10 public meetings throughout the islands and elicited more than 12,000 public comments.

Many commenters suggested NOAA expand the humpback sanctuary “to conserve additional marine species and habitats,” address human threats to the marine environment and more. NOAA, which has included Maunalua Bay in the humpback sanctuary for the past 18 years, saw great value in that, as “pressures on the Bay have grown in the last few decades,” said Chow.

Though the draft management plan and environmental review of the proposal have been circulating for months, a basic lack of clarity continues around what activities the plan would allow and prohibit. And neither Chow nor DLNR’s Case — who, to be fair, has only been on the job for 10 weeks — were very helpful Tuesday in bringing things into focus.

Questioners who wondered why the subject of overfishing isn’t addressed in the plan were met with the explanation that NOAA is a large agency and that NOAA Fisheries, which wasn’t represented at the meeting, is the proper office to speak to that question.

Similarly, questions about who is financially responsible for runoff going into the Bay and whether the marina would still be able to be dredged, keeping it navigable for boats, received elliptical, murky answers that left audience members jeering or sneering retorts back at Chow and other leaders.

State Rep. Gene Ward, who facilitated the meeting, did his best to keep tempers tamped down, and had it not been for his personal familiarity with many of the community groups and leaders testifying, things could have been worse.

Basic questions about the Maunalua Bay SSMA deserve clear, direct answers delivered in consistent language. Such answers ought to be readily accessible on the NOAA and DLNR websites, and made easily sharable for social media.

And that would have been a real shame. Hawaii Kai community members and NOAA and DLNR leaders share a common interest in a Maunalua Bay that is clean, healthy and alive. How to nurture that shared interest while allowing the community to responsibly enjoy one of the area’s most iconic natural resources is what NOAA’s draft plan ought to do.

Chow said numerous times on Tuesday night that “nothing we do in finalizing our plan will be done without the State of Hawaii” and promised further modifications to the plan, the more than 3,000 public comments on which are only beginning to be analyzed.

But NOAA must do more than that. Public meetings such as Tuesday’s only fuel characterizations that federal agencies are led by out-of-touch bureaucrats, disconnected from the wants and needs of the public, and who sometimes speak a sort of governmentalese unintelligible to other humans.

Basic questions about the Maunalua Bay SSMA deserve clear, direct answers delivered in consistent language. Such answers ought to be readily accessible on the NOAA and DLNR websites, and made easily sharable for social media. And any future meetings ought to include representatives of all relevant federal and state offices with a place in the conversation. Anything less disrespects the collective time and energy invested in the opportunity for public dialogue.

Participants in Tuesday’s meeting ought to reflect on their contributions, as well. While many were understandably concerned about how the management plan would affect them, shouting angry insults runs counter to the aloha for which we all ought to be known.

Perhaps even more offensive was the idea, advanced by some attendees, that they can do whatever they damn well please in Maunalua Bay, and NOAA can’t tell them otherwise. Well, no. The bay is a shared natural resource, and regulation that rightly applies to all of us is critical to its success, no matter our zip code or tax bracket.

The splendor of Maunalua’s storied past isn’t likely to return, no matter what NOAA and DLNR do. But that doesn’t mean that, with our collective efforts, it can’t have a healthy and vital future marked by a thriving natural environment enjoyed by residents, visitors and the creatures that live there.

Toward that end, NOAA and DLNR should take immediate steps toward refining the SSMA plan and work toward building the public confidence in the document that it so clearly lacks now.