• Wandering TMKs add more clouds to Kealia Road situation Wandering TMKs add more clouds to Kealia Road situation After months of labor on trying to amend the County’s grading ordinance in order to protect the ‘aina from unscrupulous individuals,
• Wandering TMKs add more clouds to Kealia Road situation
Wandering TMKs add more clouds to Kealia Road situation
After months of labor on trying to amend the County’s grading ordinance in order to protect the ‘aina from unscrupulous individuals, often with the cooperation of the Public Works Dept., the Parks and Public Works Committee of the County Council shot itself in the foot by refusing to accept the one amendment that would put a stop to the kind of shenanigans accompanying the recent debacle at Kealia Road.
What happened at Kealia Road, wherein the PW Dept. had first proclaimed the grading work illegal and ordered it stopped in early August, only to have the official issuance of the Violation Notice delayed long enough for all the cover-up to be arranged so that eventually the grading was declared legal after all, on the basis that the designation of the piece of land in question – usually referred to as the Tax Map Key, or TMK – had been mis-identified. This assertion was given official blessing by the head of the DLNR Land Division office in Kaua‘i with the statement that “TMKs wander around!” Such a delay action would have been stopped if the Council had adopted the amendment introduced by freshman Council Member Mel Rapozo, which would have required that a violation, once established, must be turned over to the Prosecuting Attorney’s office, within a few days, for further action. Up to the present, and probably into the indefinite future, the delay in handing over the violation to the Prosecutor’s office has enabled the PW Dept. to work some accommodations either to remove the violation notice (as happened with the Kealia Road case, with the cooperation of the East Kaua‘i Water and Soil Conservation Board) or minimize the nature of the violation. The Rapozo Amendment would have prevented the kind of conspiracy that occurred.
One must question the motivation behind the Council Parks and Public Works Committee’s rationale in refusing to add the Rapozo Amendment to the long list of amendments the whole Council had been working on since the Bill 2060 was introduced by Ron Kouchi, Kaipo Asing and Gary Hooser in the last council many months ago. The current Parks and Public Works Committee consists of Council members Jay Furfaro, Jimmy Tokioka, Daryl Kaneshiro, Joe Munechika and Mel Rapozo. It is highly unusual for a committee not even to extend the courtesy of a second to the motion of a fellow committee member even if in the end the committee chose not to support the motion.
Perhaps the Old Guard decided to exercise its unwritten privilege of not countenancing uppity behavior of a junior colleague, which would be very unfortunate at a time when the public had hoped to see some progress in the County government’s efforts to rescue itself from the embarrassing position of being the last entity to enter into some kind of action against developer Pflueger — last in line to enter the federal lawsuit first filed by a private community organization — after the malfeasance of its staff had allowed Pflueger to wreak havoc on the ‘aina in the first place. The assertion that one of the Committee members is known to have met with some of the participants of the various agencies that cooperated in promulgating the Wandering TMKs Theory adds further cloud to the troubling issues raised here.
Raymond L. Chuan is president of the Limu Coalition.
