Noted: The deaths yesterday of Kauai Mayor Bryan Baptiste and comedian and commentator George Carlin.
We sat outside our small room at the Maui Seaside late yesterday and watched the Superferry’s Sunday evening arrival. I couldn’t see passengers coming off the ferry, but counted just short of 100 vehicles, including a couple of commercial trucks. NCL’s pride of America was also in port, making for a busy afternoon and evening.
Did I mention that there’s a big water line project going on next to the Seaside? This is the view from the other side of the hotel. Our room is on the far side, away from the current construction, but you can fairly call the Seaside “ambiance impaired” at this point in time. But inside the hotel is another story and a very different view. Just click on the photo for both pictures.
A story on the K5 news at 9 p.m. last night reported on what was characterized as Kahala beach homeowners fighting for their rights by opposing a state demand that they remove plants along the shoreline.
Residents along a stretch of Kahala Beach are being asked by the state to cut away an indigenous plant to create better beach-access for the public, but some feel it will do more harm than good.
The plant in question is the Naupaka. Over the years it has grown closer to the water’s edge making it difficult for people to walk along the beach. Some residents are concerned with how cutting it away might affect their property.
The problem with the story is that it fails to credit the mass of scientific evidence and legal precedent that has identified artificial plantings along the shore as sources of erosion. Like seawalls, which are a last line of defense for oceanfront land but are generally banned because they cause serious long term erosion, property owners think they are protecting the beach by encouraging plants to grow onto the sand but in fact they are causing erosion by interfering with the natural circulation of sand.
In Kahala, the neighborhood board and community association have been pushing the state for years to enforce its coastal rules, which prohibit plantings seaward of the legal shoreline. Kahala homeowners have planted and watered in order to get naupaka and other plants to grow towards the water, in the process extending their own properties while damaging the beach.
This has been a problem statewide for years, a history ignored by the K5 report. It led to a landmark Hawaii Supreme Court decision in 2006, discussed here in Juan Wilson’s Island Breath blog.
For more information, explanations, and references, you can refer to DLNR’s Hawaii Coastal Erosion Management Plan.
The Department of Land and Natural Resources should be getting credit for finally taking comprehensive enforcement action in a coastal area rather than simply responding to complaints about individual homeowners. Instead, K5 ignored history, law, and science with its “homeowner’s rights” approach to the issue.
Not good.
We spent a couple of hours on Sunday wandering through the various little stores in Paia.
Meda got hung up in a bead shop located in back of a local artists’ co-op. That gave me an opportunity to spend time with the store’s cat, who happily joined me on a chair just outside. I’m have to admit feeling cat deprived. Time to head home.
I saw that report- lazy journalism at best. I wouldn’t give DOCARE too much credit- they protected these beach-grabbing homeowners- many are vacation rentals, at least here on Kaua`i- by refusing to stop the practice years because DLNR was regarding it with a tortured reading of the definitions of the high water and vegetation lines. They’re only doing it now because they are forced to after Caren Diamond and Harold Bronstein fought for many years to get the SC ruling.