As 2020 drew to a close, developers of an oceanfront estate in Waimanalo tied to former President Barack Obama were awaiting a critical decision from the City and County of Honolulu. They needed planning officials to grant them an exemption from environmental laws that would allow them to embark on a $3.2 million overhaul and expansion of a century-old seawall that was protecting the property from the ocean.

Obama’s close friend Marty Nesbitt had been redeveloping the land into a sprawling estate that state officials and community members have said is to be shared by the Obamas and Nesbitts.

The application attracted backlash. The local Surfrider Foundation told the city’s Planning and Permitting Department that approving the permit would “set a dangerous precedent that would allow for redevelopment of all of these old seawalls across the island.”

Owners of neighboring lots also objected, telling county officials they were worried that the revamped seawall would worsen erosion in front of their homes.

“This impact will be especially detrimental as sea levels rise and our unarmored shorelines are impacted by the effects of this permanent seawall,” they wrote in a letter to the planning department that was signed by the owners of 17 neighboring properties.

The neighbors proposed a side deal: If the owners were willing to assist with an ambitious project to restore the beach in front of their homes, they would support the seawall exemption. “Without it, we as a community would oppose it,” they wrote.

In November 2020, DPP granted Nesbitt’s variance request but with a condition: Within two years he had to show proof he was coordinating with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources and his new neighbors to the east on a beach nourishment project, which involves bringing in sand from elsewhere to expand the beach.

Nesbitt told city officials last month that he’s fulfilled the spirit of that requirement. He said he’s met with his neighbors and continues to express interest in the project even though the plans are incomplete and costs unclear. City officials say that’s sufficient enough to fulfill his permit requirement.

But as Nesbitt stands by ready to help, his neighbors have become entangled in their own shoreline permitting problems, and the beach nourishment project, which could involve mining massive amounts of sand from just offshore over several months, is attracting its own community concerns.

Expiring ‘burritos’

Areas of the shoreline stretching from Kaiona Beach Park, where local families flock during the weekends for barbecues and birthday parties, past the Obama and Nesbitt property and on toward the Makai Research Pier, a launching pad for oceanic research, have suffered from worsening erosion in recent years. A narrow ribbon of white sand stretches along the coastline, portions of which become impassable during certain times of the year when waves lap farther inland.

Amid the disappearing sand, oceanfront property owners along a stretch known as Pahonu Beach that lies east of the Obama and Nesbitt property have scrambled to erect barriers — not all of which have been authorized — along the public shoreline to protect their homes.

Some of the property owners, including those who insisted Nesbitt help with the beach nourishment project, have spent tens of thousands of dollars installing stacks of heavy sand-filled tubes and tarps, colloquially known as burritos, that now blanket parts of the shoreline.

John Dean, the former CEO of Central Pacific Bank, and his wife, Susan, installed 100 small sandbags along the shoreline to protect their increasingly imperiled property from erosion. The barrier, approved by DLNR in 2016 for a two-year period, has since morphed into a much larger one constructed by the Honolulu engineering firm Oceanit.

In 2017 DLNR gave the Deans permission to build a sloping wall out of 1,000 burlap sacks filled with 42 cubic yards of imported sand, nearly 10,000 square feet of fabric, 610 zip ties and 4,100 yards of rope, comprising 540 square feet of the shoreline, according to DLNR documents. Two years later the Deans were allowed to place 80 cubic yards of sand along the shoreline to build a sandbag groin, a perpendicular barrier extending 8 feet into the ocean.

Oceanit installed a similar structure for the Deans’ neighbor, Martin Rabbett. The barrier, taking up 800 to 900 square feet of the shoreline, cost Rabbett about $200,000 for construction and repairs, according to DLNR documents.

The hardened barriers are among dozens of emergency protections DLNR has approved over the past decade, most conspicuously along Oahu’s North Shore, that have elicited the furor of environmental groups and the public. Coastal scientists say the barriers can be just as damaging to the beach as seawalls, which are now largely forbidden, and in past decades have contributed to the loss of about one-quarter of Oahu’s beaches. As waves hit a hardened coastline they claw away at the sand and prevent sand from being renourished.

DLNR issued the approvals under the premise they would remain in place temporarily to stave off an immediate emergency. But property owners have obtained repeated extensions or refused to remove the sandbag barriers after they expire.

The Deans and Rabbett are hoping their beach nourishment project will buy them some time with state regulators and allow them to maintain their burrito systems. The Deans are currently facing a March deadline to remove their barrier.

John Dean, in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, said he plans to request another extension. Rabbett told the newspaper that even though DLNR rejected his request for an extension for his burrito system, which expired in 2020, he hopes DLNR won’t force the issue while it is evaluating their beach restoration project.

A new beach

The Deans, Rabbett and other property owners along the coast have formed the Pahonu Beach Community Restoration Foundation to execute the beach nourishment plan. The goal is to restore the beach, now largely nonexistent, to what it looked like in 1975.

“I think this is a good plan that doesn’t fight the ocean but tries to work with the ocean,” said Dean, who is president of the foundation. “My focus is to come up with a plan that is not only acceptable to DLNR but to the overall neighborhood and the community and all these other regulatory bodies.”

Oceanit, which is designing the project, has been tight-lipped about the proposal. Asked for details about the project last month, Michael Foley, a coastal engineer who is leading the project for Oceanit, would only say that work has been done to identify offshore sites for sand and that Oceanit had evaluated the dynamics influencing sediment flows within the coastal ecosystem.

What Foley didn’t mention was that Oceanit in October had submitted a 114-page application on behalf of the foundation to DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands outlining the proposed project and seeking a permit to begin work as soon as March. The Star-Advertiser obtained the application from DLNR this month.

Oceanit is proposing dredging up to 10,000 cubic yards of sand just offshore, enough to fill about 1,000 dump trucks, and depositing it in front of eight oceanfront lots, according to the application. Initially, 5,000 cubic yards of sand would be deposited on the beach. Over the next decade, another 5,000 cubic yards of sand could be dredged as part of two additional projects to combat sand loss.

The sand could be scooped up from the seafloor with a crane mounted on top of a barge that would transport it to shore, or it can be pumped through a pipeline, an option that could be more challenging because the coastline is surrounded by reef, according to the application.

Oceanit also is seeking permission to build five concrete “reef fingers” that extend 75 feet out into the ocean and act as groins, capturing sand that’s transported by currents.

The project is expected to take four to six months, according to the application.

Dean said there is no firm cost estimate for the project yet, noting it’s in part dependent on what materials might be approved.

“It’s going to be in excess of a million dollars. How much more? I really don’t know,” he said, noting that Oceanit, which didn’t provide an estimate, might even peg it at $2 million or $3 million.

By comparison, a proposed beach nourishment project at Poipu Beach Park on Kauai that would add 6,600 cubic yards of sand is projected to cost $2 million to $3 million, according to DLNR documents.

Whatever the price, Dean acknowledges it’s a high buy-in for property owners, who would split the project cost.

There’s also some expectation from neighbors that Nesbitt will contribute financially to the project, even though it’s not a condition of his seawall permit.

Foley said that while neither the Obamas nor the Nesbitts have been directly involved with the project “there is hope with a community-based solution that may change in the future.”

We “strongly feel that community-wide collaboration is necessary for coastal adaptation and the best way that we can preserve public access for all stakeholders,” Foley said.

However, Michael Cain, who leads DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, said his office rejected Oceanit’s application. He said Oceanit needs to provide more information about the reef fingers, plans to remove the expired and expiring burritos on the beach, and how it plans to dredge the sand rather than leaving it up to the contractor, according to a letter OCCL sent to Foley.

Foley said Oceanit is in the process of revising the application and still needs approvals from other regulatory agencies. It’s not clear how long that might take.

Community unease

Waimanalo Neighborhood Board Chair Kimeona Kane said he was unaware Oceanit had submitted an application to the state outlining the beach nourishment proposal until being informed by the Star-Advertiser earlier this month.

“As far as mining sand offshore, I’m certain that the community will have concerns about that,” he said. “If they have any intention of building any type of groin, which this is the first I’m hearing of it, that would be obviously a concern.”

While the beach nourishment project is to be funded by private property owners, Kane notes the shoreline is held in public trust and said the community needs to be given an opportunity to weigh in.

“The truth about Waimanalo, especially when we talk about the coastlines, is no one can tell us without a reasonable doubt what the true impacts of mining sand are going to be,” he said. “Not a single person can tell us that because no one is studying the movement of sand in the bay actively.”

The beach nourishment project falls under a streamlined permitting program overseen by DLNR that exempts the property owners from conducting an environmental assessment that looks at potential impacts of their specific proposal. Instead, the state conducted an environmental review of beach nourishment projects in general. Such projects can be noisy, increase the turbidity of the water and harm marine life, according to that review, but they can also widen habitat area for endangered species and restore public beaches.

Pahonu fishpond

As neighbors along Pahonu Beach seek ways to bring sand back onto the shoreline fronting their homes, a sandy beach has emerged in front of the Obama and Nesbitt estate without them having to pay anything.

In 2018 DLNR granted a local community group, Ke Kula Nui O Waimanalo, a permit to restore a historic fishpond called Pahonu that extends out from the property’s shoreline. Pahonu, which in Hawaiian means turtle enclosure, was used to hold turtles for a local chief, according to the group’s permit application. The pond had fallen into disrepair and Ke Kula Nui O Waimanalo has sought to restore it to its original grandeur.

The work, done by hand and using rocks from the area, has continued for several years. But as cultural practitioners and members of the community elevated the height of the walls and altered the design, Pahonu apparently began acting like a settling basin, according to OCCL, trapping sand within the walls and creating a little beach in front of the Obama and Nesbitt property.

Ikaika Rogerson, who has led work on Pahonu, said Ke Kula Nui O Waimanalo has tried to get rid of some of the sand that has been collecting in the pond.

“A fishpond full of sand is not a fishpond,” Rogerson said.

But it’s been a challenge. “We have made design changes quite a few times and we probably could have rebuilt the pond three times at the rate we have been doing design changes,” he said.

Rogerson said he was approached by DLNR and members of the Pahonu Beach Community Restoration Foundation about perhaps finding a way to use the sand in the pond to renourish the beach to the east. But he said he was more concerned about the erosion happening to the west, at Kaiona Beach Park, which is heavily used by local families.

He said the community would really like to see sand replenished there.

“In my opinion, for somebody that’s trying to do something for the community by rebuilding Pahonu, I would much rather take the sand and put it at Kaiona for the community rather than give it to a private homeowner,” he said. “So we have never really connected and then everything kind of faded away and we never heard from them again. So the fact that they are putting in a permit (application) alarms us a little bit. We weren’t aware of it.”