The owners of Turtle Bay Resort are advancing a new expansion plan for the North Shore property that represents a scaled-back version of a previous owner’s plan.
Turtle Bay Resort LLC, a group of investment firms that owns the 880-acre property between Kahuku and Sunset Beach, intends to seek permits next year that would allow the addition of 1,375 hotel rooms and residences to the largely undeveloped coastal site.
The proposed density is about 60 percent less than a plan with 3,500 units and five hotels pushed by former property owner Oaktree Capital Management LLC in 2005, and 40 percent less than a draft plan with 2,345 units floated by Turtle Bay Resort LLC in March.
Drew Stotesbury, asset manager for the property, said the new plan is an attempt to balance the interests of the owners with the community and the environment.
“It’s not going to be dense,” he said.
Some community leaders, however, say they can’t support the latest version of development at Turtle Bay, and will seek to block what they view as a plan that will worsen already unbearable traffic and spoil the undeveloped coastline on either side of the existing 443-room Turtle Bay hotel.
“We’re a little disappointed,” said Kathleen Pahinui, vice chairwoman of the North Shore Neighborhood Board. “They’ve done some nice things, but at the end of the day, we don’t think they’ve addressed the bigger picture.”
Pahinui said the landowner has reduced the number of hotel and condo units but still would develop roughly the same amount of acreage. “It takes up the entire coastline,” she said.
The resort owner proposes to add two hotels or time-share complexes with a combined 625 units on either side of the existing beachfront hotel, and 750 residences spread over five sites that include three within Turtle Bay’s existing golf courses, one beachfront site near Kahuku Point and one site fronting Kawela Bay.
Other elements of the plan include five parks — four along the shoreline — spread over 73 acres, 160 units of affordable housing representing almost triple what is required, two additional resort entrances, a relocated equestrian center and reduction of one of Turtle Bay’s two 18-hole golf courses to nine holes.
The estimated cost of the plan is $1.2 billion.
Stotesbury said the resort owner settled on the plan after holding roughly 140 meetings with community members or groups over the last year or so.
The new plan is sketched out in a draft supplemental environmental impact statement preparation notice being filed with the city today.
A supplemental EIS, or SEIS, was required under an April 2010 Hawaii Supreme Court decision ruling that a 1985 EIS was outdated. Environmental groups Keep the North Shore Country and the Sierra Club Hawaii Chapter sued Oaktree and the city in 2006 over the issue, and prevailed after losing in two lower courts.
A consortium of lenders repossessed the property from Oaktree two months before the high court ruling and has since been formulating a plan to renew the development effort.
The SEIS preparation notice provides the public a 30-day period to comment on broad aspects of the proposal. The notice includes general descriptions of plan components.
After the 30-day comment period, the owner will submit a draft SEIS to the city with more details, including traffic studies and proposed mitigation measures. That is followed by another period for public comment.
Once the draft SEIS comment period is over, the company submits a final SEIS to the city.
The final SEIS addresses public concerns raised during the comment periods and proposes mitigation measures for negative impacts. If the city determines that the company has followed the SEIS process correctly, the company can move forward with the project. That’s because the landowner already has land-use, zoning and other discretionary approvals.
The owners have sketched out two less intensive development plans as options should some negative impacts — such as traffic congestion or the discovery of Native Hawaiian burials — be deemed unavoidable, according to the SEIS preparation notice.
Traffic and burials are two main areas of contention for community groups that opposed Oaktree’s more intensive development plan.
Pahinui calls previous Turtle Bay traffic studies a “joke” and questions whether mitigation measures will address regional congestion that can be terrible in the Haleiwa area.
“It doesn’t just affect either side of the property,” she said. “It affects all the way down the coastline.”
Kahuku resident Kevin Kelly said he already avoids driving to Haleiwa on the weekends and does not think the owners of Turtle Bay Resort can avoid making the problem significantly worse.
Kelly, a member of the Defend Oahu Coalition, which supported the lawsuit challenging the old EIS, said the new development plan also ignores community desires for preserving the coastline.
One of the landowner’s less intensive development alternatives includes a 20-acre strip along Kawela Bay as a preservation site keeping development off the banks of the bay. The proposed plan, however, calls for a resort condo with 75 units on the parcel.
The landowner proposes designating Kawela Bay a marine life conservation area and proposes reducing sediment into the bay by rerouting Kawela Stream to its original outfall in Turtle Bay, where currents are stronger.
“We know Kawela Bay is very important to the community,” Stotesbury said.
Burials are another factor that could determine what gets developed around Turtle Bay.
The landowner says the area has been heavily disturbed by activity including military use and hundreds of pilings driven into the ground for a hotel in front of Kawela Bay that ultimately was not built by a previous resort owner.
The landowner has committed to producing a supplemental archeological inventory survey that will help determine whether Hawaiian remains, or iwi, are present, and following state procedures for determining whether development would have to be altered if iwi are discovered.
Stotesbury, who works for Replay Resorts Inc., a Vancouver, British Columbia-based resort development firm retained by Turtle Bay’s owners, said he hopes the revised plan will be acceptable to a critical mass of community members.
He said Replay and the resort owners are open to discussing prohibitions on further development, which could be possible with another SEIS given that land-use and zoning approvals still allow a maximum 4,000 hotel and condo units.
