Last week a bill surfaced in the legislature to put rail projects on a “fast track.” That means suspending regulatory and permitting process to allow those projects to proceed to an unhampered and rapid conclusion. A few days later, a number of senators in a bill notably numbered 2012 floated the idea of putting state projects on a fast track. Coincidence, or is there a problem underlying both.

Of course there is. Hawaii is one of the great bureaucracies of the world. With a government exceeding 25% of the population, all those employees have to have something to do. What do they do, but regulate? They justify their positions by sitting on applications and finding things wrong with them, and ultimately rejecting them. That’s the nature of bureaucracy in general.

The bigger you make government, the more regulation you get, the more delay and the more denials. The larger number of employees and supporting staff and apparatus the more it costs you. The more delays and denials the more it costs those who are filing applications, and that takes a piece, a huge piece, out of them and out of our economy. That’s just basic Government 101.

But in Hawaii it goes beyond that. We live in a special place and that includes a great number of people who see themselves as the owners and stewards of the environment and who are determined to protect their interest in that environment. It’s not environmentalism in the classical sense, it’s more like personal environmentalism. Over the years, they have achieved a body of laws that supports them.

Taking it a step further, the government itself includes a great number of people who are determined to protect their interest in the environment and who actually go beyond that body of laws to do so. As a bureaucracy by definition, they have great power, but as a bureaucracy bent on environmental protection their power is greater still. This protects the environment, of course, and it also opposes all development in a state that very often says no.

And there’s a step after that. The environmentalists of Hawaii feel very strongly. When there is a controversy about an environmental issue or stopping a given development, they are likely not to accede to a decision adverse to their position. If a permit is granted, they appeal it. If they fail in the appeal, they continue their campaign anyway. They keep fighting long after their legal rights, which are prodigious in the first place, are exhausted. It never ends. This does not encourage development.

The result, of course, is the developers can hardly win. It takes decades and millions to get their projects approved. The only certainty is that every project will be faced with those decades and dollars. Developers know this going in, but even then many controversies exceed their expectations and fail. The quiet and more deadly side of it is that many developers never start in the first place, and many investors and entrepreneurs who might become developers don’t.

And that’s the landscape for development in Hawaii, a place where you can bet on bureaucracy, delay, expense and in many cases never-ending controversy. And with all that, the process often results in huge mistakes. Look at Kakaako, with dozens of multimillion condos approved without attention to the requisite infrastructure or aesthetics, in full view of the thousands of homeless who are swept from one of the neighborhood to the other every day and who will never be able to afford any of it.

With all this bureaucracy, we’ve done permitting without planning administration after administration, and the city shows it. Kakaako is a perfect example of non-planning, where Ozymandias shows himself over and over again all through the heart of the city, blocking the mountains from the sea and the sea from the mountains and the people from both. When you add rail, it will be far worse and hard to recognize Hawaii as a place of beauty.

These projects will last for hundreds of years and will take billions to remove. Omissions and mistakes in planning are long term and under our system are difficult or impossible to reverse. That’s why we have to be extremely careful in permitting and planning. Clearly, we have not been careful so far.

So it’s really scary on two levels when the legislature talks about fast track development. On the one hand, it reveals and acknowledges how impediments to development have clogged the system. Yes, we can be sympathetic to all those developers who have been stopped. They do need relief and hopefully there will be a better day for them sometime before the 22nd Century.

On the other hand, it raises the prospect of unrestricted development without any controls, which is deep water all by itself, and something we cannot afford. The answer is more difficult than status quo or knocking off all regulations. The answer is a thoughtful reevaluation of the planning and permitting process in general. We don’t need so many agencies making the same decisions. We don’t need so many bureaucrats all blocking the way. But we do need qualified and trained government officials with an understanding and a vision of how things should be, with due regard for environment and process.

That we simply don’t have. A “fast track” at this point seems more like a punt, and is not likely to make any progress toward doing the homework we should have done years ago.