In 1992, Honolulu Advertiser columnist Jan TenBruggengate and friends kayaked along Kaua’i’s Na Pali Coast. Afterward, he wrote:
“We were uniformly appalled at the conditions of the coast.” The tour boat industry “is as incessant as the smell of its exhaust is inescapable. Many of the smaller commercial tour boats, both inflatables and small fiber-glass-hulled craft, roared along at such speeds and so close to non-motorized boats that they threatened to overturn some of us with their wakes.”
Off the coast of Maui, tour boat traffic carrying snorkelers and divers to Molokini has created chaos as well. The situation there is bad enough to make boat operators themselves clamor for regulation. State efforts to regulate the traffic have to date been ineffectual. County efforts to regulate have been vigorous in Kaua’i, altogether lacking in Maui. Yet in both counties, officials have turned to the state for help. So far, help has not been forthcoming.
Kaua`i’s Story
In 1985, responding to a House resolution, the Department of Transportation established an Ad Hoc Committee to come up with recommendations for controlling boat traffic along Kaua’i’s North Shore. That committee’s recommendations, however, were generally ignored by the Board of Land and Natural Resources, which, in 1987, washed its hands of all pretense of regulating boating activity in Hanalei by turning the matter over to the Department of Transportation. (In 1992, the DOT relinquished responsibility back to the DLNR, even as enforcement authority went to the Department of Public Safety.)
The efforts of the County of Kaua’i to get the state to exercise its regulatory powers over the boaters were pretty well frustrated over the next five years. Most activity concerning the level of activity to be permitted occurred in the court.
The County of Kaua’i Planning Department, meanwhile, began sponsoring public meetings in late 1991 and early 1992 on whether, and if so how, the county should attempt to set a ceiling on the number of commercial tour boats operating along the North Shore. In June 1993, the Planning Commission issued permits in accord with the new Hanalei Estuary Management Plan, but several large tour boat operators failed to apply for such permits, while new boats operating without permit moved in.
State regulations require all tour boat operators to comply with all applicable county ordinances and thus, by implication, require all state-permitted boaters operating within the state’s North Shore Kaua’i Ocean Recreation Management Area to have county permits. The state, however, refused to enforce its own regulations, prompting Kaua’i Mayor JoAnn Yukimura to appeal to Governor John Waihe’e for help. Writing to Waihe’e on August 31, 1993, Yukimura said, “Specifically, I ask that you invoke the police powers of the state, including the powers to arrest violators and to confiscate vessels.” She continued:
“While in the past commercial boating operators may have felt some justification that the rules and limits were not clearly defined, and therefore operated in the interim, that is clearly no longer true. Between the county and state rules and regulations, the limits and requirements are completely clear. Those presently operating are in open defiance of the law. The recent resumption of illegal activities by past offenders and the apparent addition of new operators is in clear defiance of government’s right to regulate in the public interest, and makes an immediate and vigorous response imperative.
“The long-term and continued nature of these violations in the past makes a mockery of the law. Less vigorous responses, which we have pursued, such as injunction, citations and fines, have exhausted the financial and legal resources of this county, without producing significant results.”
The relief sought by Yukimura has not yet been granted.
On Maui, Meanwhile
Molokini, the tiny, crescent-shaped isle off the Kihei coast of Maui, is a seabird sanctuary, a Marine Life Conservation District, and popular destination for SCUBA and snorkeling tours. The power to regulate use of its resources lies with the state, which, however, has done little.
Not only is Molokini at risk of being overused, so, too, is the county’s Cove Park in Kihei. There, for more than a decade, boaters have been picking up tourists for trips to Molokini, without blessing of permits from any state or county authority.
The problem of increased tour boat traffic to Molokini has been the subject of two County Council committee meetings in the last two months.
At the first meeting, in September, the council’s Economic Development, Tourism, and Environment Committee urged a representative of the Ocean Resources Branch of DBEDT to come up with a plan to protect Molokini that would limit boats as well as provide for the installation of day-use moorings.
In October, the council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, taking up the matter of the unregulated boating activity at Cove Park, decided to abandon any county involvement in the matter. Again, the state representative – this time Dave Parsons, head of the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation within DLNR – was pressed to come up with some regulatory plan. Parsons informed the committee that he had thought the boats were operating with the county’s consent, according to a report in The Maui News of October 12, 1993. And, indeed, according to the newspaper account, the county’s parks director had told the boat operators at Cove Park that they could use the area pending the county’s establishment of a permit system.
But such a system is not likely to occur anytime soon. At that same meeting, The Maui News reported, an attorney with the county’s Corporation Counsel office told the council members that the county had no jurisdiction over boating operations, “because, technically the activity occurs in the water and not in Cove Park.” On that basis, the council members decided against undertaking any regulatory system of their own and instead pushed the state to do something – quickly.
Volume 4, Number 5 November 1993
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