Shizen was the only bidder, applying an hour before the deadline
Honolulu Civil Beat, whose original reporting was distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press, reported that Hawaii signed a $1 million contract in June with Shizen Consulting Management, a five-year-old engineering firm, to determine what imports are most prone to hosting new invasive species. The Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity awarded the contract to build a methodology it could use in future assessments, according to Jonathan Ho, the manager of the state Plant Quarantine Branch, who managed the solicitation.
Ho wrote in a May letter that the department sent out its request for proposals to find “new and innovative approaches” rather than specify the work an assessment required. The solicitation, posted on the state procurement website on May 21, called for one measurable objective and one outcome. Ho told Civil Beat the request was vague by intention, to allow for “flexibility.”
Ho said the contract is intended to set a foundation for future assessments that would guide agency staff trying to stop the introduction and spread of pests. The risk assessment is meant to help the department better strategize and prioritize at the state’s borders, he said, because the agency does not have sufficient staff to inspect everything and does not have up-to-date information on how pests are reaching the islands. Pest risk assessments like the one the department sought typically focus on potential invasive species, how they can become embedded in new areas and what their impacts might be.
Franny Brewer, program manager for the Big Island Invasive Species Committee, questioned that gap in the department’s records. “I’m surprised that they don’t already have this data,” she said, “I would’ve thought that they’d been collecting it for years.”
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 proposed up to eight risk assessments that would analyze pathways for invasive species to get into or around the state. The proposal says two Shizen staff members, with help from the state and Bishop Museum, could perform the assessments, and that a meeting with biosecurity staff — not yet held — would help design them and decide where and when they would take place. The protocols and results would then form a methodology the department could deploy in the future.
The proposal does not detail how the assessments will be performed or what kinds of organisms will be monitored. It does not indicate what commodities or pathways will be assessed, what will be measured or how data will be collected. Under the plan, Bishop Museum’s zoological staff would identify pests found during the assessments, after which, the proposal says, “it becomes relatively straightforward to search the internet for information on that species.”
Procurement records obtained by Civil Beat showed Shizen was the only outfit to apply, emailing its application an hour before the agency’s deadline. Ho signed off on the proposal the next business day, largely because it ticked his solicitation’s prerequisites — one objective and one outcome — and because of Shizen’s relationship with its more experienced sister company, EKNA Services.
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, 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.
Pest management professionals said the proposal is an exorbitant waste of money, that the contractors are unqualified and that the work may be redundant. Wayne Tanaka of the Sierra Club called the contract “sketchy” and, at best, “gratuitous,” pointing to the agency’s chronic staff shortages and existing pest outbreaks.
Civil Beat also spoke with more than 10 current and former workers in Hawaii’s invasive species sector, including state employees, most of whom asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. They raised concerns about the proposal, the firm conducting the work and why Shizen’s two engineering consultants would receive over $600,000 in pay and fringe benefits as part of the yearlong project.
The award comes against a growing list of arrivals. Little fire ants, coconut rhinoceros beetles and the fungi that cause rapid ʻōhiʻa death and coffee leaf rust have made their way into Hawaii since 2000, and the organisms together threaten to cause billions of dollars in damage and lost ecosystem services. The deal is one of several in recent years to fuel distaste, made worse by concerns that the agency is misusing substantial amounts of new biosecurity-specific funding, Civil Beat reported. That funding arrived recently, following years of complaints that the agency lacked sufficient resources to respond to the islands’ worsening coqui frog, coconut rhinoceros beetle and little fire ant infestations. Hawaii 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’s award extends a run of state work for EKNA Services, formerly Edward K. Noda and Associates, which shares key senior staff and an address with Shizen. EKNA received three biosecurity-related contracts last year worth $678,000, including a one-year, $240,000 agreement to conduct two “mini pest risk assessments” that Ho did not provide after Civil Beat requested copies. The firm also collected about $440,000 for two contracts to design and renovate two agency biosecurity facilities on King and Auiki Streets. The last assessment of its kind was performed in the early 2000s under a contract with Edward K. Noda and Associates.
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, and their work together included the expansion of Kahului Airport and better pest management within the facility, including 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 a pest management database that played a central role in a 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. Shizen’s recent proposal lists EKNA’s work producing a 20-year strategic plan for the Hawaiʻi Floriculture and Nursery Association, using a state agriculture grant, as relevant experience.
The nursery industry is often blamed for pest introductions and outbreaks statewide, and Okada, who was supposed to regulate the sector in her longtime role as Plant Industry Division chief, had close ties to it. “Okada was undoubtedly a good friend of the nursery industry,” former state agriculture director Scott Enright said in 2024. 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. Ishii deferred all questions to the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity. Neither Hurd nor Okada responded to requests for comment.
Transparency is also contested. The final Shizen report could remain confidential, according to the proposal, and previous reports for biosecurity-related contracts executed by EKNA 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.”
The state’s own pursuit of outside money has been limited. The biosecurity agency has failed to apply for a roughly $90 million funding bucket for invasive species initiatives, while the University of Hawaiʻi has received over $5 million from that program over the past five years and the state biosecurity agency has taken just over $800,000. Ho said he was unfamiliar with the federal program.
The department’s case for the contract is that it will supply a foundation for future assessments that staff can use to prioritize what they inspect. What the proposal leaves open — which commodities and pathways will be studied, how the work will be performed and whether the results will be released — is what outside experts and pest management professionals have pressed the department to specify.