Due to concerns over sea level rise, a Honolulu City Council resolution seeks greater regulation over the inspection and maintenance of Waikiki’s shoreline hotels.
But Resolution 207, which would amend the city’s Land Use Ordinance, has drawn resistance from hoteliers operating within the state’s prime tourist zone. Ultimately, pending further Council review, a vote on the resolution has been postponed, however.
If adopted in bill form, the resolution introduced by Council Chair Tommy Waters will require hotels built on a shoreline lot in the Waikiki Special District to have a structural inspection performed within three years of the bill’s adoption and then every four years thereafter.
“Although there are ocean-front hotels in areas outside of Waikiki, those hotels are much newer than the bulk of Waikiki hotels and generally subject to more rigorous building standards,” the resolution reads.
To that end, owners of Waikiki’s shoreline hotels “must arrange for the structural inspection to be performed and are responsible for ensuring compliance with the requirements of this section,” the resolution reads. “The owners of the hotel are responsible for all costs associated with the inspection.”
The resolution also requires a licensed architect or engineer “to perform a visual examination of habitable and non-habitable areas of (the) hotel, including the major structural components of the hotel, and provide a qualitative assessment of the structural conditions of the hotel,” the legislation reads.
If structural problems are discovered, Resolution 207 would allow the city planning and permitting director to potentially “prescribe timelines and penalties with respect to compliance.”
Waters’ resolution — recognizing Waikiki’s 30,000 rooms for visitors — also notes the price paid for not inspecting and maintaining large buildings near shorelines. In particular, it cites the June 24, 2021, collapse of Champlain Towers South, in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Fla.
“In response to the Surfside tragedy in which 98 people died when a 12-floor oceanfront condominium project partially collapsed, the Florida legislature enacted a new law requiring certain buildings to undergo structural inspections in order to ensure that another Surfside tragedy never occurs,” the resolution states.
According to Waters, his resolution urges public safety first with regard to a changing global climate.
“We need these hotel owners to come to the table and have a conversation regarding the threat of sea level rise to Waikiki,” said Waters during the Council’s Executive Management Committee meeting Wednesday. “Sea level rise isn’t a distant threat; it’s happening now, and we must take tangible steps to ensure that potentially impacted areas like Waikiki remain safe and thriving.”
At the meeting, members of the hotel industry objected to more city-mandated inspections and maintenance — what many operators in Waikiki see as costly, duplicated efforts.
“Having worked with Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott, there are annual management operational reviews that are extremely extensive as to building character, spalling, electrical, plumbing, roof, elevator, structure, sewerage and more,” said Jerry Gibson, president of the Hawaii Hotel Association.
Gibson noted that extensive audits are performed by professional outside companies. “On top of that, all major hotels have professional staff on a year-round basis that inspect and perform purposeful, preventative maintenance on the buildings and landscape,” he said.
HHA, he added, believes the resolution “is unnecessary in so far as hotels are already fully incentivized to keep these buildings safe.”
“Moreover, the resolution would cause all hotels to incur substantial, additional costs to pay for professional engineers or architects to evaluate hotel buildings, and additional red tape to complete required filings with the Department of Planning and Permitting,” he said.
Sean Dee, Outrigger Hospitality Group’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer, said Resolution 207 “duplicates existing practices for hotel owners and narrowly targets hotels in Waikiki.”
And as far as ongoing maintenance, Dee said “major renovations” to Outrigger properties occur “every seven to 10 years.”
“It’s frequent,” he said, noting such work typically costs $50 million to $100 million. “And they start with assessment of the structural integrity: the foundations, the pilings, the basements. And that’s just something that’s a normal part of the process.”
He added that the “No. 1 focus” is infrastructure.
“So yes, these discussions are about what’s going to happen in 30 or 40 years, but our intent is to ensure that these buildings last much longer than that,” Dee said, adding, “The folks you’re targeting are already spearheading and leading this on behalf of the whole state. We have to. … We’re protecting one of the most valuable assets that we have.”
But Dee said that he and his company were more concerned at the degradation of beaches around Outrigger properties.
“The thing that we seem to be overlooking is Waikiki Beach,” he said. “That is one of the most valuable, if not most valuable, assets in the state, and it is deteriorating.”
Dee told the Council the city “can do things that we can’t” toward a full beach restoration effort.
“We have to make Waikiki Beach the world-class beach that it once was and it’s not today, and you can help fix that,” he said.
Saltwater intrusion
According to one expert on sea level rise, what lies beneath Waikiki — and much of urban Honolulu as well — is rising salt water, which, on a daily basis, has an overwhelmingly corrosive effect on man-made structures and buried utilities around the island.
Testifying in support of Resolution 207, Chip Fletcher, a geologist and climate scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told the panel Oahu’s groundwater is also affected, as it becomes more salty with rising sea levels.
“In fact, the water table under Waikiki actually goes up and down with tides because it is directly connected to the ocean,” he said. “And that salt water in the ground is flooding into the basements of buildings all across Waikiki, even as we speak, with every high tide; it’s a very common problem, and it threatens the integrity of the foundations of these buildings.”
Fletcher said this rise in salt water causes “groundwater inundation” — when the water table rises to the land surface, creating wetlands.
“And the water table under Waikiki, and underneath most of the primary urban core of Honolulu, is only a few feet below that land surface,” he said. “It rises at high tide and it goes down at low tide, and with every increment of sea level rise, it gets closer and closer to becoming a wetland in our urban area.”
Groundwater inundation was one reason “why we have major problems maintaining our roads,” he added.
“The bottoms of the roads are getting sapped by that water table. It’s a major reason why our buried infrastructure flexes with the tides,” he said. “Our buried wastewater pipes and our freshwater pipes are all flexing as the tides rise and fall in the water table under the ground surface, breaking joints, changing the stress dynamics of our buried infrastructure.”
He added that these actions also “threaten the integrity of the rebar and concrete that hold up those buildings” in Waikiki and elsewhere — “meaning that it’s below where we can see very easily, and that’s why increased maintenance and taking and establishing extraordinary measures for increased maintenance is critically important,” Fletcher said.
“This is a subtle problem that is beyond our vision in many cases, and so we have to look for clues and proxies that represent the danger inherent in this corrosion and flooding from the groundwater table.”
