Editorial for Friday — December 19, 2003

• Beach access

&#8226 Shocking developments

Beach access

The withdrawal of a request to purchase a section of a county road at Papa’a is a sign that voices of local people opposed to the sale are being heard and taken seriously.

There is to be a party being organized by an ad hoc group on Sunday, December 28, to celebrate the county’s decision.

Peter Guber, the owner of the estate that has the turquoise “Tara” sign at its entrance on Kuhio Highway north of Anahola, withdrew his offer.

The Papa’a Bay lands now owned by Guber were up for sale for a number of years, and like a number of other sections of Kaua’i changing hands, public access to the area became more difficult.

Getting to Papa’a Bay now takes a walk around a rocky shoreline, and the county road once used by fishermen and other residents for easier access was closed off, and if opened may lead through private lands where beach-goers could be cited for trespassing.

This issue and a growing list of other access sites is becoming one of the major land-use issues on Kaua’i. The local branch of the Sierra Club is publicizing the lack of a list of beach accesses, open or otherwise, on Kaua’i. There may be dozens of beach-access paths and roads on the books that are supposed to be open to the public but are closed or abandoned.

County of Kaua’i officials have taken some action on this issue. However, the voice of the Sierra Club, other organizations and individuals, is what’s now driving this issue in the public forum.

Unlike other states, the constitution of the state of Hawai’i guarantees general access to the beaches and mountains of Hawai’i. On the Mainland, private beaches can be found on the West Coast and East Coast. Some are completely off-limits, while on others beach-goers must pay a fee to enter. This type of beach-access system is thankfully pretty much unheard of in Hawai’i.

Landowners have rights to protect their property and their privacy, whether they own a 5,000-square-foot lot or a 5-million-square-foot parcel. However, if public access exists, such access needs to be opened up. Government needs to be proactive in protecting these rights. Funding is in place through the charter amendment passed in the last election in support of public-access lands to move ahead with this work, so financing isn’t an excuse.

If the beach-access issue is worked out in the right manner, both owners of large parcels of land, and our fishermen and beach-goers, can all be happy, with private rights protected, and constitutional rights of access enforced.

Shocking developments

Cincinnati has become the poster city for police-community conflict. Its reputation was tarnished three years ago when police fatally shot an unarmed man and triggered three days of rioting. Last month, police subdued a 350-pound man, who was high on drugs, by repeatedly clubbing and jabbing him with their metal nightsticks. His subsequent death, officially due to excited delirium resulting in respiratory and heart failure, focused the national spotlight on the way that city’s police — and police elsewhere — are trained to handle unruly suspects.

But this time Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken made a welcome decision to help police find non-lethal means of dealing with threatening suspects. He wants to buy Tasers, weapons that fire two tiny metal darts that deliver 50,000 volts of electricity. The shock is usually powerful enough to incapacitate a person within one second without shorting out his central nervous system.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch