Fine on city an empty gesture

By itself, the state fining the City and County of Honolulu for violations of any sort can result in shrugged shoulders for Oahu taxpayers who both pay and collect the fine.

However, if no one is held responsible for the violations, the city’s promises to ensure that such violations won’t occur again ring hollow.

The state Department of Health initiated the fine of more than $1.7 million against the city in July 2010 for dumping hundreds of truckloads of concrete slabs into a Waianae Coast stream used by endangered Hawaiian birds.

A spokesman for then-Mayor Mufi Hannemann did not acknowledge any blunder or wrongdoing, claiming that the slabs were used to stabilize the stream’s banks so heavy equipment could safely operate and remove overgrowth of vegetation.

But now, the city finally has agreed to pay the state $1.2 million — essentially a fine of city taxpayers to supplement what those same residents pay to the state — for water quality improvements on the Waianae Coast, while the city on its own spends $200,000 on stormwater control projects in the Mailiili area.

The city taxes that will go to the state will pay for a plan that will direct funding of future projects to protect Leeward Oahu water quality and finance community-based water quality improvement projects. Perhaps more important, it will pay for a city computerized environmental information sharing project so the public can track permitted facilities in their communities.

Citizens can, and will need to, use such tools to be as vigilant as Carroll Cox, founder of Mililani-based EnviroWatch, to investigate environmental degradation in Hawaii. In 2009, it was Cox who said he had received a complaint from city workers who had noticed dumping on weekends over a two-year period. Also, Lucy Gay, a Leeward Community College teacher, took her students to the stream after an environmental activist alerted her to the concrete. Cox and Gay reported the case to the Army Corps of Engineers, which alerted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

When the state announced the fine in 2010, Cox said he was ecstatic. He said at the time that one high-ranking officer in the city Department of Facility Management had been aware of the dumping for some time.

"It was about time that this fine was levied," he said. "This was probably one of the most glaring examples of disrespect for the environment that we’ve come to expect of the city." We share his dismay "that no one in the process will be held personally responsible. In that sense, it’s business as usual."

This week, Cox pointed out correctly that the city still fails to say who’s to blame, if and how anyone’s been punished and how this was allowed to occur: "It’s a do-nothing response."

For more than a year, the city dumped 255 truckloads of concrete estimated at 1,600 cubic yards and weighing 3,200 tons at Mailiili Stream about two miles mauka of Farrington Highway near Maili. Westley Chun, head of the Department of Facility Management under Mayor Peter Carlisle, issued a statement that procedures have been improved to prevent this from happening again.

The city has yet to come forward to explain how such an environmental disgrace could happen and continue for years. At the very least, taxpayers deserve to know why they are required to pay $1.4 million in fines and projects because of official wrongdoing that remains sketchy.