In 2019, the Legislature passed a law that Hawaiʻi’s small-boat harbor managers said was urgently needed to recoup costs whenever a privately owned boat gets stranded, runs aground or sinks along the coast. 

The law was necessary, Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation officials said, to ensure those public dollars got spent on small harbor improvements — not to remove damaged and derelict boats that were someone else’s responsibility.  

Six years later, it’s unclear whether that law did any good, the state auditor’s office found, or whether it was necessary in the first place.

That’s because the boating division doesn’t keep detailed records of how much it spends on those vessels’ removals or the amount it has been reimbursed by their private owners, according to a report released Friday.

The state auditor’s report also found that the boating division’s efforts to recoup money from the responsible owners have been “almost non-existent,” both before the 2019 law was passed and afterward.

The law required that vessel owners get insurance to cover such strandings and groundings. However, the auditor found that requirement “has done little, if anything” to help protect the public dollars dedicated to small boat harbors.

The law “most likely has not resulted in more vessel owners paying costs that are their responsibility,” the report concluded. And if it did help recoup more money the boating division wouldn’t know.

The boating division is part of the state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources. In his response to a draft of the report, Acting DLNR Chair Ryan Kanakaʻole, called most of the auditor’s findings “partially accurate” but also needing more context and, in some cases, overblown.

The boating division does keep data on the costs to remove sunken and grounded vessels and what he called “outstanding balances” owed to the division. Nonetheless, the division’s dated accounting system lacks the ability to turn that data into a detailed report showing how much it’s spent on the removals and how much it’s been reimbursed, Kanakaʻole added.

The boating division knows that there’s some sort of fiscal impact from the unrecouped removal costs, Kanakaʻole said, even if it doesn’t know the exact amount. He disagreed with the finding that the boating division does little to try and collect those dollars.

On Friday, the division declined to comment further.

Hawaiʻi frequently sees private boat groundings and strandings, including several on Maui in recent years that have threatened to damage the fragile coastal environment.

In her 2019 testimony, Suzanne Case, then the DLNR’s director, testified that the department had recorded some 373 vessels that had either sunk, grounded or been stranded along the coast since 2002. The state, she said, spent nearly $2.3 million to remove 91 vessels, which were uninsured.

Nonetheless, the auditor found the boating division isn’t keeping regular track of how much it’s spending or recouping.

“We discovered that DOBOR did not know then – and still does not know today – the net amount that it incurred to remove and salvage vessels grounded in state ocean waters,” the report stated.