A large residential complex now standing in a prime Honolulu corner lot in Kapahulu went up with no city building permit and despite a stop-work order.

The nearly done structure has been sitting idle at 2930 Date St. since January, according to neighbors. Technically, it’s three stories, although the ground floor is in a flood plain and therefore uninhabitable.

The city Department of Planning and Permitting slapped the property owner, contractor and an architectural design firm with fines for first building a concrete wall without a permit and ignoring a stop-work order on the illegal barrier. Then they were fined for building the complex itself without a permit and for being in violation of yet another stop-work order.

“If you are building a wall without a permit and ordered to stop work, that should be your warning,” said Christine Otto Zaa of the group HI Good Neighbors. “But to begin building the entire house without a permit, you are now willfully choosing to break the law, and there should be no leniency. In this case, more time to ‘correct’ the bad practices and threats of minimal fines did not deter the builders from continuing.”

An assistant to Benny Lee, owner of building contractor Brilliant Construction, said Lee was in China and would not return until the middle of the month. Efforts to contact property owners Gary Chan Trust and Jenny Yeh Trust through Brilliant Construction also were unsuccessful.

Otto Zaa pointed out that the city first hit the project at Date Street and Makaleka Avenue with a notice of violation for building the wall in March 2017 — 13 months ago.

The parties were issued a stop-work order for the illegal concrete wall on Aug. 23. As of Wednesday there was $11,500 in fines over it.

$1,000 A DAY

For the complex itself, DPP has issued a $1,000 fine for building without a permit and for violating a June 27 stop-work order. Since March 28 the parties have been incurring a daily fine of $1,000 for failing to take corrective action. The total amount was $16,000 as of Thursday.

The permit application was submitted by building design firm ProWork Pacific Inc., although President Jimmy Wu said he was not the architect for the complex and served only as a third-party reviewer for building code compliance.

Wu said he was asked to review the project by Brilliant Construction and that he has met Gary Chan only once. Wu said he had no knowledge the building was being constructed and that he warns his clients not to begin construction until they obtain building permits.

DPP officials say they are working with the parties to resolve the situation.

A building permit application for “a new, two-story, two family detached dwelling was submitted Nov. 15, 2016, by ProWork Pacific Inc. on behalf of owner the Gary Chan Trust. That application is “still being reviewed and processed” due to outstanding items asked of the applicant, DPP Acting Director Kathy Sokugawa said.

“We need to see some progress,” she said. “Hopefully, they’ll get a building permit soon.” If not, the matter will be forwarded to city attorneys, she said.

Finding ways to make a violator come into compliance with zoning and building laws has historically been DPP’s focus, which Sokugawa reiterated in a Honolulu Star-Advertiser interview.

“We’re trying to be patient and work with them in getting a permit because all we want to do is see that at the end of the day, they’re building safe buildings that meet the code,” Sokugawa said.

But frustrated critics of the department say the situation underscores their belief that the agency does not have the enforcement authority, staffing or mindset to combat questionable activity by unscrupulous property owners and builders.

Tyler Dos Santos-Tam of the Hawaii Construction Alliance said the building represents the clearest case of a builder flouting city laws and reinforces the argument that fines need to be steeper.

“The penalties for violating the law should be a deterrent, and in this case they’re clearly not,” Dos Santos-Tam said.

Both HI Good Neighbors and the Hawaii Construction Alliance have supported legislation against large-scale houses that have been the subject of a growing number of complaints in older Oahu residential neighbohoods.

The Date Street property, however, is in an area zoned for apartments. A bill signed into law last month by Mayor Kirk Caldwell imposing a temporary moratorium on so-called monster houses does not apply.

‘WE’RE WAITING’

The building permit application for the Date Street project calls for a two-story, two-family dwelling on the 6,000-square-foot property, but exactly what’s being put up inside is unclear. DPP does not require disclosure of the number of kitchens, bedrooms or bathrooms on a building permit application.

Xiang Yee of IMH Engineering confirmed he is the architect for the complex. When asked by the Star-Advertiser how many kitchens, bedrooms or bathrooms there are, Yee said he would need to check and respond later.

Sokugawa said the city has not granted a building permit because there are at least two outstanding issues.

A restrictive covenant calls for the structure to have only two dwelling units if the owner is to avoid park dedication fees required for apartment-zoned property. “We’re waiting for that draft covenant to be submitted,” she said.

Additionally, the city is requiring that the street on one side of the property be widened and frontage area upgraded but has yet to receive a plan for the work, Sokugawa said.

Both requests have gone unanswered “for quite a while now, several months,” she said.

The building permit was also held up because the submitted plan did not account for the property being in a flood zone, although that issue was recently fixed, Sokugawa said.

Meanwhile, since submitting the application for a permit in November 2016, there’s been legal and illegal activity on the property. (See the accompanying timeline at right.)

DPP approved a request to demolish three small houses that had been on the property since 1931, but, it has also issued four notice-of-violation citations.

Area resident Cody Kobayashi, 24, said he saw foundation work being done in September. The building itself started going up about a month later, and workers disappeared about 1-1/2 months ago, he said.

Like other neighbors who spoke to the Star-Advertiser last week, Kobayashi said he was most concerned about how construction had affected street parking. Construction workers would show up before he left for work around 6 a.m. and take up all the spaces.

Although not the project architect, Wu has been in the thick of the monster house debate and has testified before the Council urging members to use caution in prohibiting what is now legal.

For various reasons, “there’s a lot of work being done in this city without getting a permit,” Wu said.

With Date Street, the parties involved might not have anticipated how long the permit process for apartment-zoned structures would take, he said.

Wu said he fully expects the pending zoning issues to be resolved and that the project will receive a building permit at some point, assuming the contractor follows the plan he checked. “It’s not something like … they have violated (building) code or violated zoning; they are not,” he said. “The only violation is they built without a permit, probably.”

‘WE WANT THEM CAUGHT’

Brent Hamasaki, a project manager for a construction company with more than 20 years of experience in the industry, said he does not know either the general contractor or owner of the Date Street property.

Generally, Hamasaki said, there are inspections done during the course of a project, including for structural, electrical, plumbing and mechanical, drywall and fire safety, when applicable.

Those inspections can’t be done without an approved building permit, and construction is typically stopped until each inspection is completed, Hamasaki said.

From experience, he said, “when inspections have been missed, I have had to remove items installed to allow the respective inspector access for review and inspection.” If an entire house is constructed without any of those inspections along the way, “there is no physical way to effectively, retroactively conduct the inspections, (and) the project should be condemned and not occupied,” he said.

With after-the-fact inspections, Sokugawa said, DPP inspectors can and will ask for portions of structures to be torn out so they can check for compliance the various areas.

But in some cases, such as a concrete pour or steel reinforcement that could take hours or an entire day, DPP inspectors cannot be on-site for the necessary time. “What happens when there is a pour without an inspector … at that point the contractor is liable for self-certifying it, that it was done to correct specifications.”

Jay Manzano, president of the General Contractors Association of Hawaii, said building without a permit “is not something our organization promotes or condones, as it would be a violation of the law.”

To help deter these types of violations, “enforcement is key, and in order to enforce the laws in place, the city needs resources, whether it is through inspectors or key investigators who would be able to process complaints in a timely manner,” Manzano said.

“The small minority of contractors who choose not to follow the rules reflect poorly on the vast majority of us who do, so at the GCA we want them caught and corrected as much as the agencies do,” he said.