Despite a notice of violation from the city, the unapologetic and unrepentant organizer of a 70-foot fence blocking access from a private road to Laniakea Beach wants to replace the wooden fence with one made out of metal or rock.

"How would you feel to have 1,200 people standing in your driveway every day — and you can’t get out of your own driveway?" said Dr. Carl Hodel, who organized the collection of $4,000 from eight residents along Pohaku Loa Way to build the fence two weeks ago near a wildly popular beach along Oahu’s North Shore.

After vandals cut through three sections of the fence, giving hundreds of people access to the beach Wednesday, Hodel said, "We may have to go to a steel rail or rock wall fence."

He also plans to ask his fellow property owners to paint white stripes across Pohaku Loa Way to give visitors another signal that their presence is not wanted.

But 10 property owners who share ownership of the private Pohaku Loa Way began receiving violation notices from the city Department of Planning and Permitting on Wednesday telling them they have 30 days to remove the fence — or begin the process to obtain both a building permit and a special management area permit to avoid unspecified fines.

"They have no permit at all," said city planner Steve Cheung, who signed the violation notices. "If they don’t start to apply for a permit, they have to remove the fence by Oct. 16."

Five of the 10 property owners who were sent Notices of Violation live as far away as California, Utah and Australia.

The city considers the fence a permit issue. But to the property owners, it represents a safety issue because dozens of cars, tour buses and people park or stand along Pohaku Loa Way every day trying to get a glimpse of green sea turtles swimming in the waves off Laniakea Beach.

The homeowners insist the fence they built on their private road does not run counter to state law that ensures beach access to everyone because they are not required to provide public access — and built the fence on their own property.

And, Hodel said, there are more than a dozen ways to walk to Laniakea Beach just steps away from the public Kamehameha Highway.

Instead, Hodel and other residents said, tour buses and visitors prefer to stop or stand right in the middle of a blind corner off Kamehameha Highway and Pohaku Loa Way, where Bob Justice said his 23-year-old daughter drove into a 12-year-old girl as the girl tried to cross the private road 10 months ago.

Justice named his daughter Laniakea after his favorite surf spot.

"My daughter was hysterical, saying, ‘I just hit a little girl,’" Justice said.

Hodel, Justice and others said concrete anti-parking barricades on the mauka side of Kamehameha Highway essentially force people to park on the Sunset Beach side of Kamehameha. They then use Pohaku Loa Way as the closest and most convenient path to get to Laniakea Beach — despite 70 feet of fence that the owners erected.

Swedish visitors Martin and Anna Setterderem admitted they were so focused on seeing the turtles they read about in their Waikiki hotel to notice that they had just walked through a hole that had been cut into the property owners’ fence, which is decorated with "No Parking" and "Do Not Enter" signs.

"We came to look at the turtles," Martin Setterderem said. "We didn’t read the signs, obviously. … I don’t see the harm."

But Diane Peck worries that more tourists will get hit along the private road she has lived on since the 1960s.

"It’s just too dangerous," Peck said. "Tourists come leaping out all of the time. They don’t even look. People have already been hit. It’s just too dangerous, even through there are ‘No Parking’ signs everywhere. The tour buses ignore them. Everybody ignores them."

Hodel has lived on Pohaku Loa Way since 1983, but said homeowners’ frustrations with foot and vehicle traffic peaked in the past several months as tourists flock to a widely advertised turtle-spotting site.

"Now it’s known as Turtle Beach, not Laniakea," Hodel said. "All of the traffic is because of the turtles. But that doesn’t give anyone the right to go through someone’s private property."

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