The Honolulu Planning Commission is expected today to receive the city’s latest update regarding its ongoing search to find an alternate site for Oahu’s next municipal landfill before the end of this year.
The city’s status report for the replacement to the 35-year-old Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill in Kapolei is part of a state-imposed mandate issued in August by the state Land Use Commission as well as a prior Planning Commission decision in early summer.
However, city officials say the pursuit for a new property will no longer include federal lands — namely, military-owned parcels on Oahu — that in past months the city has had trouble securing outright.
Instead, the city says it could locate its next dump on privately owned lands, which means employing government condemnation to legally obtain a future site.
“The city Department of Environmental Services will share a list of the potential sites under consideration, and the restrictions/obstacles for each one,” Ryan Wilson, a city spokesperson, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Tuesday afternoon. “The potential sites are located all over the island. A final selection has not been made.”
But he asserted that “the city is no longer considering federal lands for a landfill.”
“The city is considering sites that would require amendment to Act 73 restrictions and sites that might require eminent domain,” Wilson said.
Starting in August 2023, a contested case hearing held before the Planning Commission — which finished earlier this summer and provided findings for the state’s review for approval of a time extension — focused on the request by the city to amend a special-use permit the LUC granted to the city in 2019.
By October, city ENV Director Roger Babcock testified before the Planning Commission on the city’s need and difficulty to find an alternate landfill.
In part, Babcock’s testimony related to amending or rescinding an existing state law, Act 73, that placed restrictions on locating waste disposal facilities, particularly those close to conservation lands or half-mile “buffer zones,” near residential areas, schools or hospitals, as well as near airports or tsunami inundation zones.
He said it might be too difficult to amend this state law, at least for the time being. Rather, the director said, a new landfill site might be acquired through eminent domain of private property or on land owned by the military or federal government.
But Babcock later claimed the city was only looking at federal lands for its future dump.
In 2023, the city says, Mayor Rick Blangiardi and city Managing Director Michael Formby engaged in discussions with the U.S. military to gain assistance in siting a new landfill on Oahu.
Four possible alternate sites — all on federally owned land in West Oahu and the Windward side — were under consideration, city officials said.
Those locations included Lualualei in Waianae, Iroquois Point and Waipio Peninsula near Pearl Harbor, and a property near Bellows Air Force Station in Waimanalo.
The city said it eliminated federal lands for potential landfills along the Waianae Coast. And for its part, the military has “excluded” Bellows-area lands, too, city officials said.
In April the Navy also announced it would not allow the city to locate a new landfill on Waipio Peninsula near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, based on concerns regarding the site’s proximity to near-shore waters, the city stated in a news release.
The city’s landfill search continues, however.
On Aug. 22 the LUC’s vote, which adopted formal documents related to the city’s December 2022 petition to modify the state special-use permit and extend a deadline by two years, gave the city time to find an alternate landfill.
The prior deadline of Dec. 31, 2022, to locate the island’s next dump was extended to Dec. 31 — just over three months away.
Closure of the existing 200-acre landfill near Ko Olina is scheduled for 2028, though the city says its dump won’t reach full capacity until 2036.
In part, the LUC’s approval requires the city to provide quarterly in-person reports to the Planning Commission over its landfill search as well as submit quarterly written updates to the LUC on that same search effort.
That information is supposed to include timelines and milestones, schedules of tasks for the specific plan to have a site selected by Dec. 31, a list of potential sites under consideration and any obstacles to the city’s ability to choose a site as well as “reporting on the investigation of alternative technologies” to reduce the amount of solid waste that requires landfilling, the city said.
Meanwhile, Scott Humber, the mayor’s communications director, previously told the Star-Advertiser that “the administration is confident it will be able to identify a new landfill site by Dec. 31, 2024.”
The Planning Commission meeting begins at 1:30 p.m. inside the Fasi Municipal Building’s sixth-floor conference room, 650 S. King St.
