Koa Ridge project sabotages our investment in rail

The Koa Ridge monster refuses to die.

This Wednesday, there’s a good chance the nine members of the Honolulu City Council will abjectly fail in their responsibility to spend our tax money responsibly by giving final approval to Koa Ridge — the huge sprawl project that will put 3,500 homes, a hotel, a hospital and hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial space atop the second-most productive food farm in the entire state.

If they do so, they will be sabotaging our $5.2 billion investment in a rail system and saddling us with traffic problems that will cost tens of millions to fix.

We can still stop this foolishness, but it’s the 11th hour.

The traffic generated by Koa Ridge — located between Mililani and Waipio — is expected to be so great that the federally funded Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization estimates that by 2030, the commute from Mililani to Ala Moana will take two hours, one way. That’s nuts. Once the extra traffic from the H-2 freeway hits the merge, H-1 will be a parking lot.

Our traffic nightmare was a good part of the reason a majority voted to approve the Oahu rail project five years ago.

We were told the investment would allow us to break the development pattern that gave us the most congested freeways in the nation. In future, we were told, all major new housing projects would be built along the rail route, halting the toxic spill of suburban sprawl over farmland and preventing traffic becoming much worse.

To meet budget projections, the train needs 119,000 riders a day. It is the Council’s duty to protect our $5 billion investment by ensuring that all major new housing projects are built within a half-mile radius of the new train stations — to deliver the riders the system needs and to ensure the city grows as our investment intended, within the urban growth corridor.

But Koa Ridge is three miles from the rail line. There’s zero chance residents would ever walk to the nearest station in Pearl Ridge.

If the proposed 3,500 housing units and commercial space were moved instead to infill sites near the rail route, the 7,000 or so people who would live in them, and the thousands who would work and shop in them, would help create the ridership the train needs to ensure its success.

The city and state own many sites along the rail route where the Koa Ridge housing could be placed instead. Why not swap Koa Ridge lands for these publicly owned urban sites? The state could then sell or lease the farmlands with easements to keep them in food production in perpetuity. Demand for affordable ag land far exceeds supply.

The Sierra Club has repeatedly urged our elected officials to follow this course. The response has been that it would be "a lot of work," "it would be complicated," "the project is too far advanced." These are lame excuses.

Lobbyists for David Murdock, the billionaire owner of Koa Ridge, have been working Council members for years, visiting their offices, singing the praises of the development, encouraging construction unions to tout the new jobs the project would create.

Murdock has even hired a Texas-based operative of the Saint Consulting Group, a man who can’t even pronounce our place names, to come practice his black arts here.

Saint has a history of creating fake grass-roots movements and paying people to attend public meetings. These are the tactics the Council is falling for.

If you think Council members aren’t listening to you, send them an e-mail at SaveKoaRidge.org/ petition, or attend the Council meeting at Honolulu Hale at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.