Honolulu mayoral committee’s recommended choice of Kailua as the site of a new landfill stunned residents of the area, but the admission that it was a mistake — that a site in Kahuku was the top spot — casts doubt on the whole process, especially since the rankings were not accompanied by full explanations of the choices.

Those won’t be revealed until next month at the earliest. In the meantime, those who live in the communities on the list are free to imagine the worst.

It will be the responsibility of the mayor’s office, which must recommend a site, to ensure that the public has full confidence in the administration’s selection process. The upcoming public debate must be thorough, transparent and open to all. And whoever’s sitting in the mayor’s chair when the site is chosen will need to exercise strong leadership in resolving what has been for years a problem of Gordian complexity.

Nobody wants a landfill in their neighborhood. When Kailua was misidentified as the chosen spot, Ikaika Anderson, the area’s city councilman, vowed to do "everything in my power to stop it." When Kahuku was identified as the frontrunner, that area’s representative, City Council Chairman Ernie Martin, said he would "ensure that a thorough analysis is done before we would even consider having … a landfill in any community in my district."

Indeed, the choice of an 898-acre area of Kahuku has been met with skepticism up and down the North Shore, centering on the two-lane Kamehameha Highway with no sidewalks that would have to handle movement of hundreds of trash trucks daily. Kent Fonoimoana, a member of the Koolauloa Neighborhood board, said the recommendation is "asking the community to pay too high a price."

No information has been publicized other than a draft summary by the committee that its first step in arriving at the selection "was to apply the community criteria and weighing factors to come out with a numerical scoring of sites based on the data available to the committee to arrive at the list of ranked sites."

The next step, it added, "was to discuss the various positive and negative attributes of each site."

The summary of pros and cons has yet to be made public. The criteria, cited by the committee last year, includes the potential capacity, the effect of wind and rain on landfill operations, nearness to schools, hospitals, parks, neighborhoods, tourist areas and businesses, and — of special interest in the Kahuku area — wear and tear on highways and roadways.

A blue-ribbon panel made recommendations for the next landfill in 2003 after being chosen by then-Mayor Jeremy Harris. Waimanalo Gulch, a landfill since 1989, was taken off that list. The City Council ignored the committee’s trimmed list of four sites and chose what is now Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill, Oahu’s only municipal solid-waste landfill. The next landfill will eventually replace Waima-nalo, which was not considered due to a strong argument by the Leeward community that it has carried the burden long enough.

The recent handling of the committee’s assessment was clumsy to say the least. On April 20, the committee announced that the Ameron Quarry in Kailua was ranked as the top site among the 11 finalists. Last Monday, committee consultant James Dannemiller, president of SMS Research, said that misinformation was the result of an "inadvertent data error," and the Kailua site was actually fifth on the list, behind four North Shore sites, including the leading Kahuku Military Reservation, a U.S. Army training area.

Now that the error has been discovered, Carlisle says the city "can proceed with a more thorough site analysis before making a proposal to the City Council," which has the final say on the issue.

There’s nothing like choosing a new landfill to pit communities against one other. It will take strong, inspired leadership to keep the debate focused on what’s best for all Oahu.