Members of the state Land Use Commission last month threw the question of keeping open Oahu’s only public landfill back to the Honolulu Planning Commission to clear up technical errors, but not before criticizing city officials for foot-dragging.

It was only the latest display of frustration over the fate of the West Oahu Sanitary Landfill, an issue that’s been festering for decades.

The city is asking the LUC for a special use permit to extend the use of the landfill.

With the issue tossed back to the city, LUC Commissioner Nancy Cabral joined several colleagues who urged the Planning Commission to act quickly to resolve issues over procedural errors it made in March when it approved recommending an extension. “I almost feel like it’s been somewhat of a shell game or something intentional,” she said last month. “One has to wonder if there’s not conversation over the water cooler that, ‘Oh well, we’ll just keep pushing this around legally, and we’ll never have to close this landfill or have to deal with it.’”

The Waimanalo Gulch facility is in West Oahu next to Hawaiian Electric Co.’s Kahe Point power plant and across Farrington Highway from Ko Olina Resort.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell and Environmental Services Director Lori Kahikina acknowledge that they’d rather there not be another municipal landfill to replace it, but Kahikina denied intentionally delaying selection of an alternative site.

Caldwell and Kahikina also insisted last month that they’ve taken steps to reduce the amount going into the landfill, thus minimizing its impact on the community.

Parties representing West Oahu residents and businesses have argued for decades that the landfill’s continued existence has stuck them with an ongoing health hazard and financial detriment. It was opened in 1989 and expected to last 15 years. Four consecutive mayors have taken steps to expand it and extend its life while five different West Oahu Council members have opposed it.

The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in May 2012 that the LUC erred in 2009 by granting an approval that included a July 31, 2012, closure deadline that justices said was not based on the facts presented. The matter was sent back to the LUC, which, in turn, remanded it back to the Planning Commission.

At the Planning Commission’s first hearing in December 2012, city attorneys asked for a continuance to allow Caldwell, then the incoming mayor, to decide how to proceed. In February 2013 city attorneys were joined by the Ko Olina Community Association, U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa and state Sen. Maile Shimabukuro (D, Kalaeloa-­Wai­anae-Makaha) in asking for a continuance to come up with a settlement agreement on their own.

No formal arguments were heard until March, when the commission voted to forward to the LUC its recommendation that the state panel approve an extension until the landfill is at capacity, regardless of when that may be, with the stipulation that the city select a future landfill location by Dec. 31, 2022.

But Calvert Chipchase, attorney for the Ko Olina Community Association, and Shimabukuro argue that the Planning Commission made several procedural errors.

Among the errors was the Planning Commission’s failure to provide all parties its proposed decision in written form before the vote, thus violating its own rules stating that in cases where any commissioner has not heard and examined all the evidence, a proposed decision needs be physically filed in advance and distributed to not just commission members, but also to the different parties. Those parties, Chipchase said, must also be given a chance to respond.

Given the years the issue has been pending, none of the current Planning Commission had attended all the proceedings, Chipchase said.

Hanabusa attorney Richard N. Wurdeman said that as far as he could tell, the city has not made a serious effort to identify a new site despite a Planning Commission directive that the city begin that process in 2010.

“It appears to me that they’ve made absolutely no effort whatsoever to look for an alternative site since the Land Use Commission decision in 2009 required them to do so,” Wurdeman said.

Consultant R.M. Towill Corp. has been doing technical studies on the sites selected by the advisory committee in 2012. Some of the sites cannot be used, including ones placing it in Kahuku. “That’s illogical,” she said, citing its distance from urban Honolulu and the narrow, two-lane highway leading to the North Shore. Other locations were on federal lands that the U.S. government would not hand over to the city, she said.

A final report, expected by June 30, 2018, would also look at Waimanalo Gulch, which the advisory committee did not identify, Kahikina said.

A very limited-use landfill is still necessary to deal with the short period of time the HPOWER waste-to-energy plant is closed for maintenance each year, as well as any unforeseen circumstances caused by natural disasters, Kahikina said.

Caldwell said his administration’s focus has been on reducing the need for a landfill. “No 21st-century city or island should have a landfill, and we’re working really hard to reduce the need for an everyday landfill,” he said.

Less than 10 percent of the city’s solid-waste stream is now going into the landfill, “and we’re working on things to reduce that even more,” Caldwell said. If Kahikina’s department can figure out what to do with ash, “you’re down to like 2 or 3 percent left. And then we can accomplish the goal of not needing it and tell the Land Use Commission we don’t need to re-site another location, which would take another 10 years, and put whatever community it’s going to under great stress.

“This is a complicated, difficult issue that is not going to be answered by saying overnight, ‘We’re not going to have any opala to put into the landfill,’” he said. “It’s going to take as long as it takes to get it right.”

But that’s little consolation to West Oahu leaders.

City Councilwoman Kymberly Pine pushed through a resolution in 2015 declaring the city’s intention to shut down the landfill. “For more than a decade the residents of my district have urged the city to close Waimanalo Gulch,” Pine said.

“Since 2003, legal action and objections to extending the size and life of the landfill have occurred every time the operators applied for a new permit,” she said, “and each time we hear more promises from government and private interests that we are moving closer to closing it. Enough already.”

Cynthia Rezentes, chairwoman of the Nanakuli-Maili Neighborhood Board, said the community’s diligence in fighting the landfill has resulted in closer scrutiny of it as well as some improvements. But that didn’t stop used syringes from washing up on the beach in 2011, she said.

“The thing that’s bothering me is, if you listen carefully … they’re still going to be pushing to leave it there until it reaches capacity,” Rezentes said. “Well, we know that capacity is a sliding scale.”

The original capacity was supposed to be only 60-some acres of the 200-acre site, at which point it would close, Rezentes said. “Then they come back and say, ‘Well, we can dig a bigger hole and put more trash in there now.’ So now we’re faced with looking at the entire 200-plus acres. I think the doublespeak does not sit well with people who have analyzed what has been said and done over the years, and it’s just led to a lack of credibility on the city’s part, and mistrust.”