Board Talk: Sand Island Homeless Facility, Kaua`i Beach Encroachments

Land Board Approves Controversial Lease For Temporary Homeless Facility at Sand Island

If the city is going to soon start shooing the homeless out of Waikiki anyway, what’s the harm in giving them a place to go?

That seemed, in part, to be Board of Land and Natural Resources member Christopher Yuen’s rationale for recommending approval of a City and County of Honolulu request for a right-of-entry permit and a three-year lease for a five-acre industrial lot at Sand Island, which it plans to use as a temporary homeless camp.

At its September 12 meeting, the Land Board approved his motion, 5-1, after receiving hours of testimony mostly against the proposal and discussing matters at length with its deputy attorney general behind closed doors.

Before making his motion, Yuen noted that a lot of the opposition seemed to stem from the city’s pending ordinance (Bill 42) banning people from sitting or lying on the sidewalks of Waikiki. Opponents had criticized the Sand Island proposal as an ill-planned, insufficient attempt at offering a “carrot” to the homeless now that the city council has approved the sit-lie ordinance, e.g., the “stick.”

“If I were a homeless person, I would want to have a carrot rather than just a stick,” Yuen said, adding that the Sand Island camp will give people an option they otherwise wouldn’t have.

In introducing the city’s proposal, Peter Hirai, deputy director for the Department of Emergency Management, explained that the site will be a stable place — with water, electricity, toilets, showers, lockers, and cooling fans — where as many as 100 chronically homeless people may camp and receive referrals for appropriate housing.

The city plans to grade less than one acre of the site, which it will then cover in asphalt to create a more comfortable surface. Pets will be allowed; people convicted of a violent crime within the last two years or who are not legally in Hawai`i will not be, according to one city representative.

Hirai said the city plans to operate the site for only a year while it sets up its Housing First program. Housing First programs place homeless people straight from the streets or shelters into their own housing.

Within two years, the city would give the land back to the DLNR, Hirai said.

Ed Sniffen of Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s office added that the city plans to have 100 units available under the program by the end of the fiscal year.

Opposition

Sniffen said the city had evaluated 25 sites across the island and the Sand Island lot best suited its needs. The site had later been harshly criticized during community meetings for being, among other things, potentially contaminated with hazardous chemicals and heavy metals. City officials, however, issued repeated assurances that if the site is determined to be dangerous, it won’t be used.

Whether or not the Sand Island site is, indeed, the best place to set up a camp, “the alternative would be to do nothing,” Sniffen told the Land Board. “I don’t know that I’m willing to do that.”

Kathryn Xian of the Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery wasn’t buying the city’s arguments. She testified that the services the city will be offering at Sand Island already exist elsewhere and that instead of providing a safe place for the homeless, the city was putting them in danger. (According to Hirai, the site would have only one security guard in addition to a site manager.)

Putting drug addicts and the mentally ill together with families was “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Xian said.

Despite the city’s plan to provide shuttle service to and from the site, Xian argued that the city was purposefully isolating the homeless.

“This is clearly a place to put them to forget about them. Out of sight, out of mind,” she said.

When asked by Maui Land Board member Jimmy Gomes where she would put them, she had no answer but suggested that the city reveal the two dozen sites it had evaluated and rejected.

Bolstering Bill 42

In addition to expressing concern about the safety of the Sand Island site, Xian and others questioned whether the Sand Island project was really an integral component of the Housing First program or merely a hasty, practical and legal solution to problems that may arise once Caldwell signed and began to implement Bill 42.

Even Kaua`i Land Board member Tommy Oi seemed to think the city proposal was simply a reaction to being caught flat-footed.

“The City and County is passing laws that have consequences, not thinking about, ‘Now what we goin’ do with all these people?’” he said.

During a discussion, prompted by Hawai`i island Land Board member Stanley Roehrig, on the constitutionality of Bill 42, city deputy corporation counsel Don Kitaoka admitted that whether or not those displaced by sit-lie ordinances have a place to go is something courts consider when evaluating such laws.

Roherig didn’t seem to like what that suggested.

“Is that part of the impetus for the Sand Island [facility]? … So you can pass muster with the court? Are you using us for that?” he asked.

Kitaoka demurred. “I’m a lawyer, not a policy maker. I can’t answer your question,” he said.

Other city representatives, however, were quick to reiterate that the Sand Island proposal is intended to accelerate the implementation of the Housing First program.

Conditional Approval

“I don’t see how they’re better off if we don’t pass this,” Yuen said after testimony had ended.

His motion to approve the city’s request included conditions to address concerns he shared with many of the testifiers about adequate security, hazardous materials onsite, as well as its long-term use.

Upon his recommendation, the Land Board subjected the lease to the following conditions:

• The state Department of Health must first approve the site for the intended use;
• Any extension of the lease will not be exempt from the state’s environmental review law;
• The city must provide adequate security;
• Prior to occupancy and quarterly thereafter, the city must provide the Land Board chair with a report on its progress in meeting the other conditions.

The board also added a condition, part of a new practice that has surfaced in recent months, regarding contested case hearing requests. In this case, several members of the public had orally requested a contested case hearing. The Land Board made its approval subject to any decision resulting from a contested case hearing.

Xian, public process observer Dan Purcell, and Disappeared News’ Larry Geller were among those who requested a contested case.

Land Board member Vernon Char was the sole opposing vote. Char said he’d rather defer the issuance of the lease until the city is better able to answer some of the questions that had been raised.

A handful of owners of multi-million dollar homes in North Kauai are fighting the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ determination that their shoreline vegetation illegally encroaches onto the public beach.

Last year, the DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands issued 44 notices of violation to landowners in Wainiha and Ha`ena whose shoreline vegetation appeared to violate the state’s 2013 beach transit corridor law. Under the law, the DLNR must require property owners to “ensure that beach transit corridors abutting their lands shall be kept passable and free from the landowner’s human-induced, enhanced or unmaintained vegetation that interferes or encroaches in the beach transit corridors.”
Under the OCCL’s penalty guidelines, a landowner wouldn’t be fined for a first offense and would only be required to remove the encroaching vegetation. The OCCL could impose a fine of $1,000 for a second violation and $2,000 for a third. Landowners receiving a fourth notice of violation would have their cases brought to the Board of Land and Natural Resources for disposition.

Of the landowners who received violation notices, four requested a contested case hearing. They include Stephen and Robin Sedgwick, the Chulack Family Trust, the Burmeister Family Trust — all from California — and Noel F. Gaige of New York. Except for the Chulack Trust’s, all of the homes are vacation rentals.

At its September 12 meeting, the Land Board voted unanimously to grant their contested case hearing requests and authorized the chair to appoint a hearing officer.

Volume 25, Number 4 October 2014