public beach accessways / House lawmakers passed a bill aimed at stopping private landowners from planting vegetation that encroaches onto public beaches. While supporters applaud the bill’s intent, they question how it will be enforced and whether the definition of shoreline, which now favors the public, will be changed in the process.

House Bill 1808 requires private landowners to maintain public beach accessways, and imposes financial penalties for noncompliance.

Since the state tends to rely on the vegetation line to determine the public shoreline, artificial plantings enable landowners to build closer to the water and create thick privacy hedges without reducing the size of their front yards. The net result, however, is a narrowing of public beach.

“This is a huge problem that affects this public trust resource,” said Rep. Mina Morita, who introduced the measure.

The Sierra Club and the Hawaii Kai, Waialae-Kahala, Kuliouou-Kalani and Kailua-Lanikai neighborhood boards endorse the bill. State Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) coastal program staff also have embraced the measure, which allows the agency to take action against offending landowners without lengthy hearings. But in testimony before the House Finance Committee, DLNR Director Laura Thielen said the agency offered its support “with the caveat that due to the current budget shortfall, it would be unlikely that the Department would have the resources necessary to actually remove artificially induced vegetation, and would rely almost exclusively on voluntary compliance, or the threat of penalty due to noncompliance.”

Robert Harris, executive director of the Sierra Club, said the bill is meaningless without enforcement. He suggested that perhaps the state could accept donations to a temporary fund that would cover the agency’s cost of removing vegetation, with contributors reimbursed when the state collects penalties from noncomplying landowners.

Others have raised concerns about how lawmakers in the House amended the definition of shoreline, which marks the mauka boundary of the public’s property. The bill’s current language defines it as “the upper reaches of the wash of the waves, other than storm and seismic waves, at high tide during the season of the year in which the highest wash of the waves occurs, usually evidenced by the edge of natural vegetation growth, but never lower than the upper limit of debris left by the wash of the waves.”

Kauai attorney Harold Bronstein, who argued a landmark shoreline case before the Hawaii Supreme Court, urged lawmakers to use language that reflects using “the most mauka evidence to determine the ‘shoreline.’”

Others think the bill shold give DLNR more specific guidance on determining the shoreline, saying the agency’s over-reliance on the vegetation line has contributed to vegetation encroachment problems. The bill now moves to the Senate for consideration.