A group of Haleiwa residents will drop a lawsuit against the city’s sale of about 3.4 acres of land around Haleiwa Beach Park to private developers because officials have agreed to back off selling the vacant land and instead build a long-desired canoe halau, the group’s lawyer confirmed Friday.
Attorney Jim Bickerton said his clients, the Save Haleiwa Beach Park Coalition and Haleiwa Beach Park users Cora Sanchez and Steve Baldonado, have signed the paperwork to dismiss their state Circuit Court lawsuit, and said the case should formally be dismissed next week.
“It’s not really a settlement,” Bickerton said. “We agreed to end up dismissing it because they’re (the city) now headed in the right direction.”
City spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke confirmed that the city has dropped any plans to sell the land near Jameson’s by the Sea restaurant and across Kamehameha Highway from Haleiwa Beach Park.
“There aren’t any plans to move in any direction before we talk to the community first,” Broder Van Dyke said Friday.
Deputy Managing Director Georgette Deemer said “the mayor is open to working with the community to see what the best use of that land is.”
City Council Chairman Ernie Martin, who represents Haleiwa and whom Bickerton lauded as being a supporter of constructing a canoe halau, or storage building, in the area, is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.
Bickerton said Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration helped change the course of the conversation but that the Council’s action to set aside $500,000 in the city budget approved June 5 for a public canoe halau on the land in question was what really motivated his clients to dismiss the case.
Haleiwa resident Blake McElheny said there is no canoe halau along the coastline from Kahaluu all the way to Makaha.
“If they just put everything on hold, we wouldn’t have stopped the lawsuit,” Bickerton said. “It was the actual change in direction — and that has to come from the County (City) Council because it involved a change in funds.”
Bickerton said dismissing the lawsuit without prejudice allows his clients to sue in the future if the city were to again consider selling the land to a private developer — something Broder Van Dyke said is not currently up for consideration.
Residents filed the suit about a year ago after Sanchez and others got word that the eight vacant, city-owned preservation land parcels near Haleiwa Beach Park could potentially be sold to developer D.G. “Andy” Anderson, who wanted to build an 80-room “boutique” hotel on the land, or Kamehameha Schools, which wanted to use the site as a cultural park.
“It look a lot of effort to get where we are today,” McElheny said.
The city acquired the parcels in the early 1970s via condemnation and intended to use them as part of a 1968 master plan for Haleiwa Regional Park that never came to fruition.
Bickerton said state and county laws require that the city obtain a special management area permit whenever it plans action that will reduce the public’s ability to use the shoreline, but the city failed to do so prior to pursuing bids for the Haleiwa property.
The 2012 complaint included an email sent to Sanchez from then-Mayor Peter Carlisle’s office stating that “the city believes that neither a special management use permit nor an environmental assessment is required for the proposed disposition of city property located in the vicinity of Haleiwa Beach Park.”
Sanchez, who coordinates the adopt-a-park program for the Haleiwa Mauka portion of the beach park, said she and her husband, Tony, were outraged when they first found out the land was for sale.
“We were very disturbed that they would take a park across from the street that was supposed to be a park and sell it to a private developer for any reason,” she said.
Sanchez said about two acres of the 3.4-acre plot were severly overgrown and inhabited by homeless people, so people thought it was private land. Her husband worked hard to clean up the area, she said.
Residents are now pleased with the city’s turnaround.
“We’re ecstatic,” Sanchez said. “It was really great news because … the canoe clubs have been down there for decades and don’t have a proper place to store (their canoes).”
McElheny said the resolution is an good example of elected officials listening and responding to community concerns.
