honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Thursday, December 4, 2003

EDITORIAL
Landfill panel's work is valuable guidance

Before it dissolved into political acrimony, the mayor's landfill committee performed a valuable service upon which the City Council must build.

The task assigned to the committee was to provide the council with a list of the five best potential landfill sites from which to choose. This the committee did, in a manner that appears to have been remarkably objective.

The committee adopted a prioritized evaluation system, assigning various values for a long list of attributes. This system was applied to each site in a blind fashion — that is, the committee members knew each site only as a number.

In this manner, the committee eliminated dozens of prospective sites, and produced a list of the five best.

It was only after the locations of the sites became known to the committee members that the trouble began. Even though a majority of its members represented the Leeward Coast, the committee had chosen four Leeward sites and one in Kailua.

These were referred to as Ma'ili Coral Quarry, Nanakuli B, Makaiwa Gulch, the Ameron Kapa'a Quarry in Kailua and the existing landfill, Waimanalo Gulch near Ko Olina.

Committee members were surprised to learn that, on the basis of their own criteria, Waimanalo Gulch was the leading site in terms of desirable technical attributes.

It was not the committee's job either to pick a favorite from its list of five, or to try to narrow the list. But a majority of the committee voted (with nine in favor and the other four resigning in protest) to eliminate Waimanalo Gulch from the list.

In this vote, the majority was rendering a political judgment that exceeded its charter. It's the job of the City Council to stand up to the considerable controversy involved in this site selection. It should be able to choose from the full list of five sites.

The council will need further — and thoroughly objective — technical expertise to keep the process as objective as possible, but in the end, social, economic and political factors inevitably will intrude in their judgment.

Paramount among those factors is a commitment from Mayor Jeremy Harris to close the Waimanalo Gulch landfill in five years. It's a commitment he forced on himself by waiting until after his last election campaign to seek an extension to the site's state Health Department permit.

That commitment is likely to appear increasingly unwise if additional objective criteria add support for the Waimanalo Gulch site: Kapa'a Quarry may be unavailable and too small, the Nanakuli and Ma'ili sites too close to residences, and the Makaiwa site even more obtrusive than the present site.

And as committee member and former state health department director Bruce Anderson put it, what sense does it make to despoil a second site when Waimanalo Gulch, already despoiled, has at least 20 years capacity remaining?

This is not to argue that Waimanalo Gulch must be the City Council's final choice, but only that it must remain on the list of sites to be considered.

As we have argued before, the city must provide substantial incentives to the community that ends up hosting the landfill in future years. The incentives should have value equal to the "costs" of being host to a landfill.

After all, it will be accommodating the whole island's 'opala.