Honolulu Weekly

In the early- to mid-1900s, life in Kahuku was simple but not easy. Workers spent long, hot days hauling cane from the fields. The regular hum of the sugar mill, the real and representative heart of town, marked the passage of time as surely as the sunrise. Trucks rattled, roosters crowed and dust settled on the modest furnishings in the breezy plantation homes. The community was the product of their collective work ethic: steadfast and tight. The sugar mill had a movie theater, shops and a clubhouse. At the end of the day, people gathered with family and friends. This was life in the country.

But with increased foreign competition and better investment opportunities in tourism, the sugar industry plummeted. In 1971, the Kahuku Sugar Mill closed, stultifying the local economy. Some people drove to Honolulu to find work; many just stayed home.

Concerned about the welfare of the community, the Kahuku Community Association began talking with the Turtle Bay Hotel down the street about developing a plan to secure Kahuku’s future. The result was the unilateral agreement and declaration of conditional zoning, a long-term expansion plan approved unanimously by the Honolulu City Council in 1986.

‘It was one of my first votes on the council. I listened very closely to the people, because that was my district, and they were in support of it,’ recalls former Councilmember Randy Iwase. ‘The plan was not about creating rich condominiums for rich people. It was about a hotel expansion that would provide jobs with fair pay and fair working conditions for the people on the North Shore.’

As the economy vacillated, the hotel changed hands a number of times. The salt air and the fierce wind at Turtle Bay took its toll, and the turn of the millennium saw the hotel in a rather dilapidated state. In 2001, the Kuilima Resort Company (KRC), an affiliate of Oaktree Capital Management, LLC, acquired the land.

Fast forward to 2006. The number of hotel employees–85 percent of whom live on the North Shore between Waialua and Ko’olau Loa–has doubled from 250 in 2001 to 500 presently. The owners dumped $60 million into improvements: There’s now a grand ballroom, two championship golf courses and a spa. The beach cabanas, which families used to rent for parties on the beach, were transformed into $600-a-night cottages attended by personal butlers. Brad Pitt and Owen Wilson are on the growing list of celebrity guests who have stayed in them.

At the end of February, KRC sought its second subdivision permit, indicating its intention to move forward with the 20-year-old expansion plan. This sounded the neighborhood alarm. Under the zoning granted by the unilateral agreement, KRC can build 3,500 additional resort units in the form of five hotels and 1,000 condos–under certain conditions. They must also develop in tandem four public parks (including dedicated beach parks with comfort stations at Kawela Bay and Kahuku Point) that the resort will maintain, a 100-foot easement and four pedestrian rights-of-way along a 5-mile stretch of shoreline, affordable housing equal to 10 percent of the non-hotel units, and improvements at three Kamahameha Highway intersections. As word in the country tends to travel on the trades, the news from Turtle Bay smacked the island’s proverbial fan and blew west–straight to Sunset Beach.

It’s country, Jim, but not as we know it

Nowadays in this part of the country, good fences separate good neighbors. Fujioka’s, Sagara’s and Kammie’s are gone. Consumers can buy a $5 skinny, no-foam cappuccino, a $10,000 painting of a turtle or a multi-million dollar studio on the beach. Film crews are spotted more often than whales, and lawns are littered with jet skis. Country life on the North Shore is good, and for the largely white community of Pupukea, with a 1999 median household income of $56,146, it’s pretty easy, too.

The Sunset Beach community knows all about battling development. They’ve won some, and they’ve lost some. In the early ’90s, they started ’saving Sunset Beach’–a fight won through a forthcoming conservation purchase of the hillside property known as Pupukea Paumalu. They lost Velzyland but protected Waimea. And so far there’s no mall at Shark’s Cove. The North Shore’s peaceful, easy feeling made it a highly desirable place to be–and as the popularity of surfing soared, so did rents and property values. Funny, the more people who move to the country, the bigger the army to fight development gets. The resistance movement is reinforced by gentrification.

East of Kuilima, growth is afoot in Kahuku, too. The city is considering condemning 200 acres belonging to Kahuku Village and Kahuku Golf Course to save residents from eviction when Campbell Estate sells the land to a private developer. There’s another smaller hotel planned as well as 400 new single-family homes.

Does Kahuku still want the Turtle Bay expansion? On March 2, the Kahuku Community Association board of directors voted unanimously to endorse the 20-year-old plan. The promise of nearby jobs still appeals to many in the Kahuku community, where, according to 2000 census data, 90.4 percent of the labor force commutes to work by vehicle or bus, and the mean travel time is 30.3 minutes.

But are these resort jobs what Kahuku needs? The median household income in Kahuku is $39,135. According to a 2005 study on the economic impact of the early care and education industry in Hawai’i prepared by the National Economic Development and Law Center, a single parent with a pre-schooler and an infant in 2003 required a $43,481 annual salary to remain self-sufficient. Nine of the 10 average annual wages for Hawai’i occupations with the most openings projected between 2002 and 2012–including janitors, maids, food prep, security guards, cafeteria workers, counter attendants, retail sales and office clerks–will be below $25,000 a year, not enough to build a sustainable living let alone a sustainable community.

One local observer says that this is a battle between the rich white people who’ve gentrified the North Shore and the really rich white people who own the resort. The convoluted question then becomes: Can the rich white people and the really rich white people come to a compromise that will actually benefit the non-rich, non-white community that needed the jobs in the first place?

The Kuilima resort plan

Planning for growth

City planners recognize that population growth is inevitable. More people require more housing, more jobs and more schools. So they tried to figure out a way to accommodate the growth and still keep the country, country. Such is the job of the O’ahu General Plan, a set of guidelines by which the city and the department of planning and permitting determine what should be built (or not built).

Neither new nor secret, pages 40 and 41 of the Ko’olau Loa Sustainable Communities Plan, submitted in October 1999, clearly spells out the development plan for Kuilima. It states: ‘Located at the north end of Ko’olau Loa, this is one of two major resort destinations, the other being Ko’olina in ‘Ewa, planned for O’ahu as supplemental to the resort experience offered by Waikiki.’ It highlights the numbers–five hotels, 4,000 resort units, 1,000 resort condos and two 18-hole golf courses–and lays out general policy for the area. According to the guidelines, ‘Plans to establish a major resort destination at Kuilima should be maintained. It will provide a major source of jobsÖsignificantly improve shoreline access and use opportunities for residents, and include other amenities that can be enjoyed by residents and visitors alike.’

With this in mind, just where were the opponents in 1999?

But that was then and this is now.

During last week’s public meetings, people drove from as far as Wai’anae and Makiki to hear KRC outline its plan. Attendance at both meetings left standing room-only. It must be pointed out that there was more support for the proposed resort at the Ko’olau Loa Neighborhood Board meeting, where the audience was much more reflective of Kahuku’s demographic–11.1 percent white, 26.8 percent Asian, 27.3 percent native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, with 38.7 percent of households speaking a language other than English at home–than of Pupukea’s demographic–56.0 percent white, 14.6 percent Asian, 6.5 percent native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander. At the Sunset Beach Community Association meeting a few days later in Pupukea, two hours of public comment saw only one supporter and less than a handful of native Hawaiians.

That said, the resort has been impugned for having an anti-local vibe and exploiting Hawaiian values: A radio station skewered them for selling ‘aloha’ to hotel guests after reprimanding a bellman for throwing a shaka; they’ve blocked access to local fishing spots; their diacritically impaired website proclaims ‘This Is True Hawaii’ right above ‘maluhia: Hawai’ian for peace.’

But there are also reports that Turtle Bay Resort’s a good neighbor. They outfitted the Kahuku High golf team with uniforms and golf bags. They just wrote a check for $11,425 to the Friends of the Kahuku Library for a North Shore bookmobile.

For better or worse, whether people like Turtle Bay doesn’t affect the expansion’s legal viability. Nor does the ongoing union battle. Decisions made by the Department of Permit Planning (DPP) are strictly based on land use impacts, not the integrity of the applicant or the popularity of its project.

Remember Golf Course 5 and 6?

Everyone’s busy comparing Kuilima to Ko’olina and Ka’anapali, but where they really ought to look is Sandy Beach. As emotionally charged as the opponent’s pleas are, the fight against Turtle Bay cannot be reduced to a popularity vote. They tried that in 1988–remember Golf Course 5 and 6? Here’s a short recap: Landowner Bishop Estate and leaseholder Kaiser had land use approvals to build 171 homes across from Sandy’s. The Save Sandy Beach coalition was formed to stop it, and they sparked a referendum in which 160,000 people voted against the development. The Hawai’i Supreme Court ruled that the referendum was illegal. In response, the City Council enacted a moratorium on issuing permits for the project and downzoned the parcels from resort/residential to preservation. Victory? Not exactly.

In 1989 the developers sued the city for approximately $120 million in damages, arguing that their vested rights to proceed with the project had been violated. In March 2000, Circuit Judge Sabrina McKenna ruled that the City Council’s actions were unconstitutional because they violated the developer’s vested right to build homes based on permits that were issued before the parcels downzoned. Landowners, whether big or small, are entitled to protection against seizure without compensation. The judge also ruled that revoking the special management permit without proper procedure violated the developer’s due process rights.

That’s a powerful precedent. The lawsuit was settled in 2002 for about $70 million by selling 46 acres of land in Pearl City (including 20 acres worth $17.5 million to Wal-Mart) and handing over the proceeds to the plaintiffs–in addition to other property and $5.4 million–in exchange for Golf Course 5 and 6.

If the city learned its lesson, there will be no downzoning or revocation of permits for the Kuilima resort. As Iwase remembers it, there was no timeline set when the unilateral agreement was made in 1986. According to Bob Stanfield, the chief of development plans of the zone change branch of the DDP, many development projects take decades to complete. ‘When they go in, they know they’re into it 20 to 30 years before they come out the other end.’ Mililani Mauka, for example, was zoned in ‘89, Hawai’i Kai in ‘86, Makakilo in ‘83.

Any lawsuit from the developers who believe they have been denied their property rights could turn into an enormous burden to taxpayers. Are the project opponents willing to put their money where their mouths are and shell out for a settlement?

The legal approach to changing the unilateral agreement held by KRC is the same process as amending a land-use ordinance. The City Council can submit a resolution urging the director of planning and permitting to initiate an amendment. The developer can also request a change, but the director is not obligated to accept either. It’s ultimately up to the director (or by order of his boss, the mayor) to prepare an application for a zone-change amendment, a lengthy process that could include an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement, public hearings and a presentation to the neighborhood board. If that happens, the proposed amendment is then reviewed by the Planning Commission, which can add its own changes, and subsequently sent to the city council for final approval or denial.

Recognizing all the public opposition to the project, will the mayor consider brokering a deal? Ironically, by filing a lawsuit to seek an injunction that would prevent KRC from obtaining its permits, the labor union has muzzled a very necessary ally in the city. As a result, city officials are not allowed to comment on the Kuilima development for fear of increasing the city’s liability.

Without any assurances from the city, the community’s efforts to stop the development appear futile.

But victory is still a possibility for resort opponents. But they will need to sharpen their bargaining skills and look for creative ways to accommodate all parties. Would the developers consider building fewer but much more exclusive Four Seasons Hualalai-style billionaire bungalows that would derive similar profits with a lesser environmental impact? Could they turn part of the resort into a working organic farm that would serve as a destination for eco-tourists? North Shore resident Bob Leinau proposed that the owners could facilitate a much-needed sewage treatment facility for the North Shore on the mauka side of Kamehameha Highway. So far, nobody else has proposed any kind of workable compromise. Even if they did, the developers have not said they’re willing to listen.

The closest thing to a resolution anyone had to offer at either of last week’s public meetings was when a Ko’olau Loa resident stood up and said, ‘We seem to like Turtle Bay the way it is. Just make the one you have good, and then sell the land and get out.’ However, as the last 20 years of growth on the North Shore have shown, it’s going to take a lot more than words to keep the country, country.