Judge forces changes to private Moiliili road

A state judge kind of played the role of traffic cop Tuesday, allowing a private landowner to finish widening a road that is largely owned by a neighboring property owner but open to public use.

Circuit Court Judge Bert Ayabe ruled that the road, Kahuna Lane, which is in Moiliili between a natural foods store and a recently built collegiate housing tower, will be repainted. As part of the judge’s order, two-lane traffic will be clearly marked and that two utility poles are removed from the middle of what will become one of the lanes.

Ayabe’s ruling should extinguish two flash points in a feud between adjacent landowners. Their battle hinged on disagreements as to how the road should be improved in conjunction with construction of the 590-bed Hale Mahana tower that opened in August to house university students, teachers and staff.

Those disagreements led to a lawsuit being filed last year, and since then each property owner has accused the other of doing things that posed a public safety hazard on the road.

The Malulani Group, a kamaaina company that was previously known as Magoon Brothers Ltd. and has major Honolulu landholdings, owns a block-long segment of Kahuna Lane next to land it leases to the operators of Kokua Market. With Hale Mahana planned next door, Malulani wanted the tower developer to make certain improvements to the road that included adding sidewalks and storm drains on both sides.

The tower developer, a partnership between mainland firms Laconia Development LLC and EdR Collegiate Housing, is using Kahuna Lane as the sole entry and exit for parking and ended up adding five feet and a sidewalk to the road where it fronts the tower. As part of that work, two utility poles that were on the edge of the lane before it was widened were to be removed.

Hale Mahana’s owner claimed that Malulani interfered with the pole removal by insisting an easement, a form of written permission, was needed to do the work because the poles are on Malulani land. So the poles are now within the widened roadway amid orange warning stanchions.

“There is a very real danger that a distracted driver turning into Kahuna Lane could think that the full width of the street is usable and collide with the poles,” the tower developer said in a filing.

Ayabe agreed. “It looks like a safety hazard,” he said.

The judge also said Malulani or the tower developer shall remove yellow diagonal striping that Malulani painted on its portion of the road so that the tower developer can paint a single white dividing line on the whole section of the widened road as the city would like.

Malulani added the yellow striping in August right before the tower opened, and also painted the words “private access” and a 5 mile-per-hour speed limit that it said was an effort to improve safety on the lane because the tower developer made the road less safe by using the lane as the only vehicle access for so many new residents.

Malulani, which filed the lawsuit, still contends that the tower owner needs permission to use the lane as the only access to its property, which it said is different from the general public using Kahuna Lane as a connector to other streets or its land tenant Kokua Market. That claim remains pending.

The tower developer anticipates being able to carry out the work on Kahuna Lane in about 10 days.