People can tell the city how they feel about the appeals process for the city’s new sidewalk nuisance ordinance at a hearing today in Kapolei. A hearing officer will receive spoken testimony from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the first-floor conference room of Kapolei Hale, 1000 Ulu Ohia St.
The city Department of Facility Maintenance will also accept written testimony through June 12, city spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke said. The city is expected to begin enforcing the law soon after.
The sidewalk nuisance ordinance, signed into law by Mayor Kirk Caldwell on April 19, two days after it was approved unanimously by the Honolulu City Council, allows city workers to remove, without notice, tents and other objects deemed "sidewalk nuisances."
The ordinance defines a sidewalk nuisance as any object or collection of objects "constructed, erected, installed, maintained, kept, or operated on or over any sidewalk, including but not limited to structures, stalls, stands, tents, furniture and containers, and any of their contents or attachments."
The city is required to hold the items for at least 30 days and to provide written notification of the removal through a posting on the property where the items were removed. The posting would have to be up for three days. Owners would have up to 30 days to reclaim their item or items but would need to show proof of identity and pay the city a $200 "removal, storage and handling" fee.
A person could contest the removal via the rules being developed.
Members of (de)Occupy Honolulu say they will challenge the new law, just as they are taking the city to court over the stored-property ordinance, which allows the city to remove items left on city property if they have been "tagged" 24 hours in advance.
(De)Occupy Honolulu, which has camped along the sidewalks at or near Thomas Square since fall 2011 in protest of government policies on homelessness and other issues, has been a constant target of the stored-property ordinance.
Broder Van Dyke emphasized that the rule-making is to establish procedures for any contested-case hearings, typically appeals of decisions made by the department, to be heard by Facility Maintenance.
The proposed rules are similar to contested-case procedures typically used by other state and city agencies, Broder Van Dyke said.
Today’s public hearing was originally scheduled for 1 to 3 p.m. But the legal notice for the meeting, which was published in the Star-Advertiser, did not state the meeting times, so the agency decided to keep the hearing date but assign a worker to accept public testimony through the entire business day.
