A dispute between Honolulu and the state over a decade-old zoning decision has made it all the way to the state Supreme Court.
The City and County of Honolulu and the Hawai‘i Land Use Commission have been at odds for years over a project by the County’s Department of Planning and Permitting to identify “important agricultural lands” (IAL) on Oʻahu. Such lands are preserved for agricultural use, and landowners who dedicate their lands to agriculture are eligible for a variety of incentives.
While that project began in 2014, it is still being disputed, as the Land Use Commission has argued that the City failed to undergo proper procedure when designating those lands.
The problem began in Nov. 2017, when DPP had identified some 1,800 potentially important agricultural parcels — about 45,500 acres in total — and mailed letters to the owners of those parcels about a community meeting where they could learn more about their land’s potential designation.
According to court records, more than 150 people attended the community meeting, and in 2018 DPP submitted the matter to the Honolulu City Council for its approval. The Council then in 2019 approved the designation of the vast majority of the parcels as important ag lands, and recommended that the LUC rezone the parcels as such.
But when the LUC held its own hearings on the matter in 2021, several property owners were alarmed. Many told the commission that they didn’t remember receiving any notice from DPP about their land, and others were concerned about the high cost of dedicating their lands to agriculture, evidently believing that they might lose their homes if they did not use their property for agriculture, according to court records.
This ultimately led the LUC to unanimously reject the IAL proposal in 2022, having concluded that DPP did not meet minimum statutory requirements for providing public notice for the IAL project, that DPP had used inaccurate data, and that DPP had not maintained proper records of the project as a whole.
The City appealed LUC’s rejection to the First Circuit Court — which eventually punted the case to the Supreme Court. In its appeal, the City claimed that the LUC itself had failed to follow proper procedure when rejecting its submission.
Attorneys for both the City and the LUC presented oral arguments about the case Tuesday, which involved a series of arcane questions about what specific administrative processes the LUC should have been following when it rejected DPP’s submission.
Honolulu’s attorney, Brad Saito, argued that the LUC should have used its administrative rulemaking procedures to reject the IAL submission; Deputy Attorney General Miranda Steed, the LUC’s attorney, countered that the contested case procedure it used to make the rejection was proper according to state statutes.
And both sides maintained their stance about whether DPP had properly met public notice requirements for the IAL project; attorneys for the City said DPP had, and LUC attorneys said DPP had not.
In any case, the Supreme Court will make a decision on the matter at an unspecified future date.
In the meantime, the more-than-40,000 acres that could potentially be designated as important ag lands remain in limbo. However, Saito noted that zoning decisions are “not like open heart surgery … When you make a mistake, you can fix that mistake with the click of your keyboard.”
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