Editorial

Is a Golf Course Worth a Beach?

The County of Kaua`i makes no bones about the fact that it wants to maintain its Wailua golf course, even at the expense of the public beach that fronts it.

In support of the golf course, the county has engaged in a decades-long assault on the beach. First, the beach was mined for sand, an action that might well have hastened the erosion of the shoreline. When the shore began receding and the beach began to reclaim some of the dunes on which the golf course had been built, the county declared war on the ocean.

As early as the 1970s, the county was dumping sludge and soil along the beach boundary of the golf course, apparently in an effort to encourage the vegetation line to move seaward. By the 1980s, the defensive line had been hardened, literally, with a 3,100-foot-long wall of boulders and stones.

The wall was improperly built and, in any event, would probably not have held long anyway. There seems to be no dispute that by the time Hurricane `Iniki struck the island in 1992, the revetment was little more than a heap of rocks at the base of the scarp fronting the golf course.

Recent efforts by the county to rebuild the revetment suggest the county is not only persisting in its foolish belief in the power of seawalls, but may be verging into a new area of misconduct: fraud. The county’s claim to have “lost” the Wailua revetment to Hurricane `Iniki was not made until three years after the storm swept Kaua`i. In meetings between state and county officials, time and again, one of the chief “common goals” was said to be hanging on to the $1 million-plus that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had allocated for the project.

And to fraud, add arrogance. As our lengthy reconstruction of this sad chapter in Kaua`i’s history shows, the county has attempted to lock out the public from its decision-making process. From the county attorney on down, agencies have acted as though the public had no right to hold them to account. And not only the public. The Army Corps of Engineers was also left in the cold when the county decided to alter in significant manner its “reconstruction” plans, as was the Department of Land and Natural Resources. The county knew full well that the revetment extended into state beach land — and had done so since 1987. Yet the state was the last to be informed of the county’s plans to rebuild the wall.

To be sure, part of this is the fault of the state, which has had what can only be called as a relaxed approach to enforcing compliance with its rules by sister governmental agencies. But in the end, the county itself has to be held accountable for the loss of its beaches. Kaua`i County has dumped everything from rubbish to rebar, from soil to sludge, from pilings to sheet metal on its beach at Wailua, and the golf course is no more or less at risk than it was at the start.

If any other party were to do the same, there’d be hell to pay. But for Kaua`i County, apparently, a round of golf is worth trashing a beach any day.

“In a democracy, the people are vested with the ultimate decision-making power. Government agencies exist to aid the people in the formation and conduct of public policy. Opening up the governmental processes to public scrutiny and participation is the only viable and reasonable method of protecting the public’s interest. Therefore, the legislature declares that it is the policy of this state that the formation and conduct of public policy — the discussions, deliberations, decisions, and action of government agencies — shall be conducted as openly as possible.”
So reads the opening paragraph of the state’s Sunshine Law, Chapter 92 of Hawai`i Revised Statutes. We would commend it to the attention of Chairman Mike Wilson and the other members of the Board of Land and Natural Resources who, it appears, routinely conduct “briefings” to which the public is not invited.

Oh, to be sure, there’s a rationalization for the failure to send out public notice as required in the statute. Wilson, a lawyer by training, makes a distinction between “briefings” and meetings, although no such fine line is found in the law. Nor, we would suggest, is one appropriate. Even though votes may not be made at these “briefings,” and, according to Wilson, no quorum is required, they are precisely the discussions and deliberations that the Sunshine Law calls out as the sort of thing that democracy requires be opened to public view.

The very fact that Wilson has devised an alternate approach to satisfying the demands of the Sunshine Law — filing “briefing” agendas with the lieutenant governor’s office, though not mailing them out to those members of the public who have requested notification of board meetings — indicates he must have a guilty conscience on this point.

At the two briefings held on November 21, there was no formal record made (although such is required by law). There was, for that matter, no informal record either (apart from that made by Environment Hawai`i).

The fact that past board may not have sent out agenda notices for “briefings” is hardly justification for continuing the practice. Past boards, we would note, were notorious for arriving at decisions behind closed doors at their Thursday evening “dress rehearsal” briefings. The only way Wilson can assure the public that his administration is not engaging in similar practices is to follow scrupulously the letter of the law and embrace gladly its spirit. Until he does, suspicions will remain that the bad old days are still with us.

As an aside, with respect to Wilson’s claim that no decisions are made at these illegal meetings, we would note that, in fact, a decision was reached at the board’s first “briefing” of November 21. While David Parsons had informed the board that the new accounting system would be in full operation by July 1997, the board determined that this was unacceptable and Parsons was instructed to move up the schedule.

Volume 7, Number 6 December 1996