North Shore homeowner gets hearing over $92,000 fine

The state Board of Land and Natural Resources on Tuesday approved a contested case hearing for a North Shore property owner who faces $92,000 in fines for modifying the beach in front of his two oceanfront homes and refusing to remove sandbags and other debris littering the public beach.

The hearing process, approved by the five members present at Tuesday’s meeting, is likely to delay the case for months.

The Department of Land and Natural Resources will now choose a hearing officer and schedule a time when Ke Nui Road oceanfront homeowner Todd Dunphy can formally dispute the fines being levied against him.

Board member Vernon Char urged DLNR to expedite the matter due to the notoriety of the case.

Dunphy, who owns two neighboring properties on the beach at Rocky Point, is accused of using an excavator to illegally push massive amounts of sand on the beach to construct a berm fronting his houses and building an erosion control structure made of sandbags and strong synthetic fabric.

Dunphy says he took action when a neighbor’s home collapsed onto the beach when 30- to 40-foot waves battered the North Shore in February.

First, he placed sandbags in front of both his parcels to prevent damage from the waves. A few week later, with the blessing of his neighbors, he used a construction excavator to move sand to support his property and his neighbor’s, he said.

In a formal request for a contested case hearing, Dunphy’s attorney, Myles Breiner, wrote that DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands failed to give his client guidance to protect his property after he urgently asked for help. He said Dunphy was told only to devise another option.

“This response was entirely unacceptable, negligent, and emblematic of the institutional and bureaucratic paralysis rampant throughout the DLNR and OCCL,” Breiner wrote.

Dunphy ended up doing the kind of emergency “sand push” that was previously authorized by DLNR in January 2014, March 2015, March 2018 and February 2021, he said.

According to Breiner, Dunphy was notified that any form of self-help remediation was not acceptable only after he started moving the sand with the excavator.

DLNR is also accusing Dunphy of failing to remove debris from past erosion control structures after being ordered to do so. This comprises the bulk of the fine — about $77,000, calculated at $1,000 a day going back to February when he received a letter on the matter from DLNR.

But Breiner said Dunphy is being falsely accused. His client was in prison when the sandbags were originally installed in January 2014 and wasn’t released from federal custody until almost a year later.

Dunphy, a former martial arts champion, was sentenced to nearly three years in prison in 2012 for conspiracy to distribute large amounts of cannabis, according to court documents.

Breiner said photos used as evidence for DLNR’s fine are linked to Dunphy merely because the depicted beach debris is fronting his property.

The proposed fine is not the only penalty Dunphy has faced in recent years for alleged violations at the two properties. He’s also been accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines from the city for failing to correct shoreline violations that date back to 2006.

For example, Dunphy built unauthorized decks, a hot tub and cabana within the shoreline area that he still hasn’t removed, according to the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting.

The fine that was imposed in 2013 now totals $168,900, and the department placed liens on the property in 2018.

Dunphy’s properties are among many on the North Shore threatened by seasonal coastline erosion exacerbated by sea level rise and linked to climate change.

At Rocky Point the beach at times has become marred by illegal sandbags, heavy black tarps and boulders as homeowners fight the changes that are threatening their properties.

Meanwhile, politicians and land managers have come under increasing pressure in recent years to protect Hawaii’s beaches from further erosion and beach loss caused by hardening of the shoreline with structures such as seawalls and revetments.

A 2018 study by University of Hawaii scientists pointed to a trend of beaches dwindling in size and, in some cases, disappearing altogether as shoreline development and man-made structures, such as seawalls, have proliferated in recent decades.