We were driving home last night when the news broke that the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that an updated environmental impact statement will be required before considering expansion of the Turtle Bay Resort. This is very big news for our part of the island, which would be directly impacted by the addition of thousands of new hotel rooms and condinium units at Turtle Bay.

It also continues the court’s series of opinions giving teeth to the state’s environmental laws in the face of strong political opposition from developers and the elected officials they have in tow. The Supreme Court, when presented with these issues, is not giving a lot of wiggle room to agencies when they try to cut corners to accommodate developers’ interests at the expense of environmental concerns.

Although the court’s decision is lengthy, the key point boils down to a simple point: An EIS cannot be valid in perpetuity. Conditions change, predictions are overtaken by events, and at some point the EIS no longer assures that actual environmental conditions will be taken into account in agency decisions. In the court’s view, that point has come and gone for the Turtle Bay EIS.

When we were on Maui, we spent a lot of time in traffic on the narrow highway between Kihei and Kaanapali. But even that highway expands to four lanes in some stretches. By comparison, Kamehameha Highway to Turtle Bay is only two lanes virtually all the way, and traffic will be a significant issue, not only immediately in front of the resort but all through Koolauloa.

There must have been some unhappy moments at the Advertiser early this morning when clicking on the link to the Turtle Bay story, which was the top online story, returned an error message, “Page not found”. That was remedied when I checked back at 5:40 a.m. and the linked worked. By the way, the Advertise story this morning is far more substantive than the Star-Bulletin’s limited effort.

In any case, you can read the court’s opinion, along with a separate concurring opinion by Justice Acoba. Additional background can be found here.

I wonder how the Turtle Bay Resort Blog is going to handle the decision, if at all? No mention of it yet.