Turtle Bay’s environmental plan leads North Shore hui to sue city

The community group Keep the North Shore Country says the plan to deal with environmental impacts caused by the expansion of Turtle Bay Resort is deficient and that the city Department of Planning and Permitting should not have accepted it from the resort owners.

"DPP should have stood up and said, ‘No, go back and do it again,’" said Gil Riviere, KNSC president.

The group is suing the city to require it to send the planned expansion’s supplemental environmental impact statement back to the resort owners to address what the group has identified as deficiencies.

KNSC filed its lawsuit against the city and Turtle Bay Resort LLC in state Circuit Court on Monday.

The resort owners said the expansion will include 625 hotel or time-share units, 750 homes, beach access and a new public park.

Riviere said the SEIS does not specify how many rooms will be hotel units and how many will be time-share units. He also says the impact statement doesn’t say whether all, some or any of the homes will be single-family, stand-alone structures.

The lawsuit also claims that the SEIS compares the expansion and its impacts with what the owners could have built under a Supreme Court-rejected 1985 EIS of a much larger expansion rather than on existing conditions, fails to evaluate the "no action" alternative as required by law, and does not evaluate the cumulative traffic impacts and the expansion’s effects on wetlands, environmental water quality and threatened and endangered species.

Turtle Bay said in a written statement that it has complied with all requirements and has appropriately addressed issues raised by hundreds of parties who commented on the SEIS before the city accepted it.

The city notified the public that it accepted the SEIS on Oct. 23. Affected agencies and those who submitted written comment have 60 days from that date to challenge the city’s action in court.

City spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke said the city has received the lawsuit and is reviewing it.

Another group, the Defend Oahu Coalition, is challenging the Land Use Commission’s reclassification in 1986 of 236 acres for a previously planned, much larger expansion.