Mission Unclear: A $1 Million Contract In Hawaii Involving Invasive Species

Invasive species experts are alarmed by the state’s signing of a vague $1 million contract with engineers who will be tasked with figuring out what imports are most prone to hosting new invasive species.

The contract, signed in June, was awarded to Shizen Consulting Management, a five-year-old engineering firm. Pest management professionals say the proposal for a pest risk assessment is an exorbitant waste of money, the contractors are unqualified and the work may be redundant.

Others point to the contractors’ close historical relationship with senior Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity staff, its past work with them and the contractor’s relationship with the nursery industry, which is often blamed for pest introductions and outbreaks statewide.

The deal is one of several to fuel distaste in recent years, made worse by concerns the agriculture and biosecurity agency is misusing substantial amounts of new biosecurity-specific funding . That funding came recently, following years of complaints the agency wasn’t receiving sufficient resources to respond to the islands’ worsening coqui frog , coconut rhinoceros beetle and little fire ant infestations.

Wayne Tanaka of Sierra Club said the contract is “sketchy” and, at best, “gratuitous.” He highlighted how the agency is facing chronic issues, including staff shortages and existing pest outbreaks.

Shizen’s $1 million contract adds to three biosecurity-related deals signed last year, worth $678,000, awarded to its sister engineering firm EKNA Services. EKNA, formerly known as Edward K. Noda and Associates, shares key senior staff and an address with Shizen.

Civil Beat spoke to more than 10 current and former workers in Hawaiʻi’s invasive species sector, including state employees, most of whom did not want to be named for fear of reprisal. Still, they shared concerns about the company’s proposal, the firm conducting it and why Shizen’s two engineering consultants would be receiving over $600,000 in pay and fringe benefits as part of the yearlong project.

Pest risk assessments like those sought by the state biosecurity department typically focus on potential invasive species, how they can become embedded in new areas and what their impacts might be.

State Plant Quarantine Branch manager Jonathan Ho, who managed the state’s solicitation, said the Shizen contract is intended to set a foundation for future assessments, to guide agency staff as they try to stop the introduction and spread of pests.

Rather than specifying the work needed for an assessment, the department chose to send out its request for proposals so it could find “new and innovative approaches,” Ho wrote in a May letter.

The solicitation, posted on the state procurement website on May 21, called for just one measurable objective and outcome. It was vague by intention, Ho told Civil Beat, to allow for “flexibility.”

Shizen proposed up to eight risk assessments that would form the basis of a methodology that the biosecurity department could deploy in the future.

The consultants’ proposal was still too obscure for many biosecurity stakeholders.

Civil Beat shared the proposal with Mark Burgman, director of the University of Hawaiʻi School of Life Sciences and a seasoned ecologist who was integral to the establishment of Australia’s Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis.

He said such assessments can be a bit ambiguous and dependent on context, and that conversations can happen offline to clarify intent. With the Shizen proposal, he said, there is “simply no detail about what was intended, what they’re going to look at, what they’re going to measure.”

“There’s a million things that they could be doing,” he said, adding that he would have a lot of questions about the proposal.

Hawaiʻi is home to several pest management and invasive species organizations, from grassroots community groups and nonprofits to consultancy groups, formed over the years to combat the persistent threat of pests in the islands.

Shizen was the only outfit to apply, according to records obtained by Civil Beat, emailing its application an hour before the agency’s deadline.

Ho signed off on the proposal the next business day, largely justifying the award because Shizen’s proposal ticked his solicitation’s prerequisites – one objective and one outcome – and Shizen’s relationship with its more experienced sister company, EKNA.

A long and growing list of invasive pests and plant pathogens have made their way into Hawaiʻi since 2000, including little fire ants, coconut rhinoceros beetles and the fungi that cause rapid ʻōhiʻa death and coffee leaf rust.

The organisms together threaten to cause billions of dollars in damage and lost ecosystem services, underscoring a need for the state to pony up for programs like pest risk assessments. But execution matters.

Such assessments could focus on a commodity, an airport, certain flights, a sea port and certain states of origin, leaving a wide scope of possibilities. Shizen’s proposal does little to firm up details.

The Shizen proposal suggested its two staff, with help from the state and Bishop Museum, could perform eight risk assessments, to analyze pathways for invasive species to get into or around the state.

The proposal does not detail how the assessments will be performed or what kinds of organisms will be monitored. It doesn’t indicate what commodities or pathways will be assessed, what will be measured or how data will be collected.

The contract does include the Bishop Museum’s zoological staff, who will be enlisted to identify pests found during the assessments. From that point, according to the document, “it becomes relatively straightforward to search the internet for information on that species.”

Shizen is pinning its approach on a yet-to-be-held meeting with biosecurity agency staff, who would help the firm design its assessments and decide where and when they would take place. Those protocols and the results of the assessments would then result in a methodology for the department to use in the future, according to the proposal.

The risk assessment is intended to help the department better strategize and prioritize at the state’s borders, Ho said, because the department lacks sufficient staff to inspect everything. And the department does not have up-to-date information on how pests are coming into the islands.

“I’m surprised that they don’t already have this data,” said Franny Brewer, program manager for the Big Island Invasive Species Committee, “I would’ve thought that they’d been collecting it for years.”

The last assessment of its kind was performed in the early 2000s, under a contract with Edward K. Noda and Associates.

The final Shizen report could remain confidential, according to the proposal. Previous reports for biosecurity-related contracts executed by EKNA, Shizen’s sister company, are not readily available.

“When reports aren’t released, or we don’t get to understand how contracts turn out, we can’t improve and learn from them,” said Christy Martin of the Coordination Group on Invasive Pest Species. “It’s taxpayer dollars. We’re reliant on agencies in the system to make sure that (contractors) are delivering.”

Meanwhile, the state agency has failed to apply for a roughly $90 million bucket of funding for invasive species initiatives like Shizen’s. The University of Hawaiʻi has received over $5 million over the past five years from the program. The state biosecurity agency has taken just over $800,000.

Ho said he was unfamiliar with the federal program.

EKNA and Shizen Vice President Brian Ishii has a long history with the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity and the state, spanning about 20 years. Ishii spent years working closely with longtime state agriculture worker Carol Okada, a formerly retired and controversial figure in the department.

Their work together included the expansion of Kahului Airport and the implementation of better pest management within the facility. That also included work to replace imported goods, such as flowers, with local alternatives. Okada signed off on a $350,000 contract with EKNA in 2006 for a pest risk assessment.

One result of that work was the creation of a failed pest management database, which played a central role in a scathing 2017 state audit of the agency’s Plant Quarantine Branch. The data management system took almost 10 years and $4.2 million to develop but still failed to meet the agency’s needs and was eventually replaced.

Last year, EKNA was awarded three contracts for biosecurity, which included a one-year $240,000 agreement to conduct two “mini pest risk assessments.” Civil Beat requested copies of those assessments, but Ho did not provide them.

The firm also received about $440,000 for two contracts, to design and renovate two agency biosecurity facilities on King and Auiki Streets.

In Shizen’s recent proposal, under relevant experience, Shizen lists EKNA’s work producing 20-year strategic plan for the Hawaiʻi Floriculture and Nursery Association, using a state agriculture grant. The floriculture industry’s connections with Okada, who was supposed to regulate the sector in her longtime role as Plant Industry Division chief, are the main reason she is considered divisive.

Okada was undoubtedly a good friend of the nursery industry, former state agriculture director Scott Enright said in 2024 .

Ishii deferred all questions to the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity. Neither Hurd or Okada responded to requests for comment.

Okada was reemployed by the department in 2023 after retiring in 2019, following almost a decade of being sidelined by previous departmental leadership over concerns about her work.

She has remained employed sporadically on short-term contracts since, despite the Governor’s Office stating in 2024 – under a different chief of staff – that she would not be rehired.

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.