Gov. David Ige’s 11^th hour withdrawal Wednesday of the nomination of Carleton Ching to lead the state Department of Land and Natural Resources may have only disappointed those who were taking bets on the final tally of the Senate vote.

Support for Ching had been steadily evaporating since the Committee on Water and Land last Thursday recommended the nomination be rejected. As the full Senate vote approached on Wednesday, senators critical to Ching’s approval either confirmed they’d be voting no or were rumored to be defecting, leaving Ige with rapidly diminishing options.

In the end, Ige’s decision to wait until the last minute was perhaps the biggest surprise. He released a brief letter to senators, and then held a press conference at which he said he “did not want to put Carleton and his family through a floor vote.”

Gov. David Ige interrupts Sen. Laura Thielen’s questioning of DLNR nominee Carleton Ching during a committee confirmation hearing last week.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

“I do regret the fact that Carleton won’t have the opportunity to serve the people of Hawaii,” Ige told reporters. “He would have made a great chair for the department. I’m disappointed that he won’t have that opportunity.”

We predict Ige will gain far more from this grudging decision, which only came after weeks of increasingly pointed criticism of Ching and the choice to nominate him, than he would have by having had the developer lobbyist narrowly confirmed, at best.

He now has the opportunity to put a major misstep very early in his tenure squarely in the rear-view mirror, so long as he moves forward with a new nominee who has the credentials and sensitivities one would expect for the official who serves as the chief protector of Hawaii’s conservation land and waters.

Ige’s other Cabinet nominees have sailed through confirmation with little or no opposition, many of them on unanimous Senate votes. The governor can put forward a new DLNR nominee who would meet with similar support.

As he considers his options, Ige may want to keep a few points in mind:

• “Environmentalist” can be used as more than a pejorative. Ige did himself no favors when he blamed the Water and Land vote as the product of a “committee … usually filled with people who are conservationists and protectors of the environment…,” and positioned Ching as a local boy with Hawaiian sensibilities. Making confirmation a choice between environmental values and giving a Hawaiian guy a chance was not a winning strategy, to put it nicely, and did nothing to address the many legitimate criticisms that legislators, pundits, interest groups and, yes, environmentalists had of Ching.
• He’s the governor, not a senator. Hanging out for extended periods in the committee hearing signaled that Ige felt Ching couldn’t win on his own and needed a show of support from the governor to succeed. Submitting a nominee whom senators can support, letting them do their work and getting about his own – preferably in the offices on the fifth floor — is the best course of action.
• Preparation is fundamental. Neither the governor’s team nor Ching himself effectively prepared the nominee for meetings with senators and the confirmation hearings. Senators are right to expect a nominee who is well versed in DLNR’s mission, responsibilities, authority, policies and practices. Allowing Ching to go before Thielen, chair of the Water and Land committee and a former DLNR chair herself, without adequate preparation was a recipe for disaster.

In coming days, Ige has the opportunity to quietly vet names of potential new nominees and select one without Ching’s obvious weak spots. If the governor wants his next three years to go better than the last three weeks, he’ll take full advantage of that opportunity.