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Under the Sun
Cynthia Oi
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'Waimanalo Blues' heard all over Oahu
TO THE long string of land use conflicts in Hawaii, queue up the one coiling around the North Shore of Oahu.
There on the tip of the island, where the highway curves around the descending ridges of the Koolaus, the 500-room Turtle Bay resort could soon swell to a hotel-condo compound seven times its size.
The conflict contains the typical menu of adverse consequences, which project opponents emphasize in alarm, and purported "community benefits," which the developer and proponents tout to blunt resistance.
Mix in the 20 years that have passed since city officials signed off on the resort agreement, a rancorous employee union dispute at the hotel, a history of development clashes in the region and you've got the makings for a bitter stew of trouble not uncommon in the islands.
Battle stations have been fortified, talking points framed, data gathered, analyzed and spun, and sympathetic forces lobbied and lined up.
Opponents point to traffic jams, stresses on the power grid, natural resource depletion, reduced shoreline access, environmental degradation and, most important, a higher bar for development since 1986 when the City Council approved the open-ended agreement for the project.
THE RESORT and land owners, whose properties span more than 800 oceanside acres and 468 mauka of Kamehameha Highway, wave their unilateral agreement as a bill of rights to build. They characterize the opposition as a tiresome cabal of anti-development professionals who inhabit the North Shore and a bunch of "haves" who want to keep the country country just for themselves.
Underlying the discord, the question that remains unanswered -- despite multi-million-dollar studies, task forces and high-level convocations -- is how much growth is too much.
Like with greenhouse gases and global warming, there is a refusal to put limits or benchmarks on building up tourism and broadening the human footprint in Hawaii, even as there is evidence that we are on the edges of physical and societal boundaries.
A RECENT survey for the Hawaii Tourism Authority found that for the first time, a "definite majority" of residents think that their islands are "being run for tourists at the expense of local people."
Industry leaders -- perhaps whistling past the graveyard -- have tried to mute the significance of that statement. Some suggest people may be frustrated about lagging infrastructure, while others interpret the response as residents' concern about unmanaged growth in general, not exclusively tourism.
Parsing aside, the overriding message appears to be a desire to slow things down a bit.
A brawny economy has powered development vigorously and the heady vision of profit and prosperity is intoxicating. But not everyone is drinking the spiked Kool-Aid. Some can't afford to, not the ones who make the beds, trim the grass and iconic coconut trees and serve the surf-and-turf sunset dinners, not on an average hotel industry wage of under $34,000.
Yet, these jobs are held out as limp carrots to tempt acceptance of another hotel or resort that caters to the affluent. And if the conflict is really among the haves, the have-lots-mores and the want-plenty-mores, then the have-nots are the commodity in which they are trading.
I DON'T doubt that there are people who want the jobs a new hotel could bring to the area and are not in the economic position to decline opportunities. But the exchange rate is steep, not measured in dollars and cents, but in sensibilities, in the loss of another place unconfined.
The plaintive lyrics of Liko Martin and Thor Wold, whose song "Nanakuli Blues" has been adapted to other locales, most familiarly Waimanalo, come to mind:
"The beaches they sell to build their hotels my fathers and I once knew ..."
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at
coi@starbulletin.com.