Kaua‘i County Council look at infrastructure, housing as policy goals for next year

This was updated at 8:38 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 3, 2022, to clarify a statement from Councilmember Felicia Cowden. Permit violation fines can be $10,000 per day for day violation, not just on illegal vacation rentals. She expressed concern for residential housing, not illegal vacation rentals.

LIHU‘E — The next Kaua‘i County Council meeting isn’t until Jan. 12, but councilmembers are continuing to work toward county issues behind the scenes.

The council currently consists of Chair Arryl Kaneshiro, Vice Chair Mason Chock and five councilmembers: Bernard Carvalho, Felicia Cowden, Billy DeCosta, Luke Evslin and KipuKai Kuali‘i.

At the end of this year, both Kaneshiro and Chock will both term-out, having served four consecutive two-year terms, a total of eight continuous years on the council. But all seats are up for election.

This past week, members shared some of their goals and policy plans heading into the next 12 months of work. And for each one, enabling solutions for an affordable-housing market is a shared goal.

“My primary long-term goal is always to reduce the cost of housing,” Evslin said. “No — that goal definitely has not been met. The cost of housing is higher than it has ever been. And we can all see the devastating impacts everywhere.”

The council has passed several measures to reduce the barriers to home construction, Evslin said, including allowing kitchens in guest houses, eliminating permitting fees for qualifying affordable-rental units, loosening some of the building-code barriers to tiny-home construction; eliminating minimum-lot-size requirements for multi-family homes; creating a mixed-use property-tax exemption to incentivize residential units above commercial space; and changing the affordable-housing ordinance which incentivizes the construction of more housing in town cores.

“Coming off of our focus on zoning, building and housing codes in the previous two years, my personal goal for 2021 was to help people convert off of cesspools,” Evslin continued. “If we are successful at implementation, we could install up to 400 septic systems over the next decade, and each system gives a homeowner the ability to add an ‘ohana unit for their aging parents or their adult children or simply to use as a rental unit.”

In 2020, Kaneshiro and Kuali‘i introduced amendments to encourage affordable housing. In the future, they’re planning to submit more updates.

“Chair Kaneshiro and I will again work with our housing director to create a second bill proposing another round of housing policy amendments to align Chapter 7A with Chapter 2-1.16, to clearly establish procedures for ‘certifying’ private affordable-housing projects, and to address some of the concerns shared by stakeholders in their testimony during our last housing-ordinance-update deliberations,” Kuali‘i said.

But the county has “taken great strides to create affordable housing,” Kaneshiro said, which has resulted in either the completion or groundbreaking for about 365 housing units, from Kealaula at Pua Loke that has 28 units, to bigger projects like Lima Ola Phase 1 that’ll have 150.

But county-owned projects aren’t the only ones that can help grow the market.

“(This year) I will look to introduce a resolution supporting beneficiary-requested reform at the state’s Department of Hawaiian Home Lands in order to accelerate residential and other land awards to Native Hawaiian beneficiaries to have housing, rental housing and other businesses, as well as for all residents to have access to more-affordable rental housing and commercial space,” Kuali‘i said.

Over the next year, Cowden hopes to introduce legislation that shifts away from the “intense permit-violation penalties” can be which can be $10,000 a day.

“In the hot real-estate market of the COVID migrations, this existing ordinance will lay older neighborhoods and informal housing arrangements vulnerable to predatory speculative action,” Cowden said. “This fine structure can drive a home into a forced sale for a family of modest means, whereas those of strong income stability can hire a lawyer.”

As chair of the council’s Public Safety and Humane Service Committee, Cowden works with the police and fire departments as well as nonprofits to “diminish houselessness, suicidality, substance abuse and youth encouragement.”

“Surprisingly, it is uplifting to directly work with these population groups, as I find so many of the individuals are remarkable at their level of creativity, activated empathy for others and resilience in the harshest of circumstances,” she said.

“The experience is instructive for policy development, as this group demonstrates where our policies fail. So many of the people who once had happy lives become pushed to the margins with no place to sit at a table, go to the bathroom or be allowed to sleep. The misfortunes that destabilized them could happen to most of us. A society succeeds or fails based on how we treat those in crisis. Progress was made and continues, but not yet to my satisfaction.”

Agriculture

DeCosta has been working on several zoning amendments, including one that ensures landowners are presently using their land and not banking in on low taxes on large parcels of land while only using small portions for ranching.

“We need to make sure agriculture-dedication landowners are farming and ranching their lands and not letting these lands sit uncultivated and still receive a tax break,” DeCosta said.

“Supporting active agriculture is important,” Kaneshiro said. “I anticipate legislation to revamp our real-property-tax agricultural-dedication process and procedures. The current process is burdensome, and in some cases impractical on both the agricultural producer and the county’s real-property-tax department. Changes will make it easier for the agricultural producer to apply and the real property tax department to implement. This will free up staff time and allow them to shift resources towards tax-break abusers.”

Along with Kuali‘i, Cowden seeks to see movement on a community-first agricultural village that would allow creation of “villages to create stable, empowering, transitional housing to assist our populations that live best as extended ‘ohana and are without housing at present,” she said.

Infrastructure

“In addition to dealing with the impacts of COVID-19, we still needed to be cognizant of the county’s core functions,” Kaneshiro said. “Road conditions have been a longstanding issue, and I am proud to say the county has been responsibly utilizing general-excise-tax revenue to repair and reconstruct county roads.”

Roadwork at Maluhia and Koloa roads has been completed, and safety improvements on Kawaihau Road near Kapa‘a High School have begun, Kaneshiro said.

“Another of our biggest challenges is re-siting the location for our new landfill and greatly increasing our solid-waste-diversion efforts,” Kuali‘i said.

Carvalho, who was mayor during preliminary studies and siting of a landfill along Ma‘alo Road, said that the project needs to be pushed forward in the next year.

“It can be done,” Carvalho said.

Generally speaking, Evslin said one of his personal policy goals for the upcoming year is to fund a plan to analyze curbside recycling.

And infrastructure includes the impacts of water.

“Neighborhood-flood-mitigation policies need enhancements, such as required French drains to protect downhill houses from newer constructions, concrete driveways and other water diversions that have unintended storm impacts on their neighborhoods,” Cowden said.

River and stream management and maintenance remain priorities for Carvalho.

“You have three rivers we need to revisit: Hanalei, Wailua and Waimea,” he said. “We need to revisit the whole river- and stream-maintenance program. What kind of support and funding would be needed, and where can we go to seek funding? We don’t wait until the bridge goes away.”

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Sabrina Bodon, editor, can be reached at 245-0441 or sbodon@thegardenisland.com.