After more than 150 people spoke out last week against building a landfill in Wahiawā over an aquifer, a Honolulu official said the administration doesn’t want it there, either. But a state law gives them no other choice, he said.
Now some state lawmakers, including House majority leader Sean Quinlan, are planning to give the city some choices. Quinlan drafted a bill to reduce the minimum distance between a landfill and homes, schools and hospitals from a half-mile to a quarter-mile, though he said the proposed new limit could change. The bill also would bar landfills over a “significant aquifer.”
The half-mile buffer was created in 2020 through Act 73. “To be fair to the city,” Quinlan said, “because we passed Act 73, we’ve put them in quite a bind.”
The Honolulu Board of Water Supply, meanwhile, recommends against placing a landfill where porous, volcanic rock would allow contaminants to seep into the island’s drinking water supply. That “no pass zone” covers the interior 77% of the island. Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi also has promised not to place the new landfill on the Waiʻanae Coast, a lower-income community with the highest concentration of Native Hawaiians on Oʻahu.
The rest of the island is off-limits due to an array of state and federal restrictions. State law, for instance, bars landfills in conservation zones, which cover much of the island outside the Act 73 buffer.
Honolulu currently sends about 250,000 tons of waste to the landfill annually, according to the city, which in October floated the idea of shipping garbage off the island for a decade as an interim solution.
At a pair of town hall meetings last week, city officials said the state’s buffer zone forced them to choose a pineapple field in Wahiawā for the landfill, even though it sits about 800 feet above an aquifer that leads to the North Shore’s drinking water supply.
“All our options — our legal options for city and county — are over aquifers,” Honolulu Deputy Managing Director Krishna Jarayam said at a community meeting last week. “This is not our choice. This is not what we wanted to do.”
Even so, city officials say they’re confident they can build the landfill in a way that protects the water supply. The landfill would have a double liner, unlike the current facility’s single liner, which Blangiardi said hasn’t leaked since it opened in 1989. The city would pump out and treat the watery ooze, called leachate, created when rainwater seeps through the trash.
Quinlan said his bill could open up other sites that sit above a thick, protective layer called caprock, which the Board of Water Supply says would help prevent water contamination. City officials have identified two sites that could be options if lawmakers reduced the buffer zone to a quarter-mile and allowed landfills in the least restrictive conservation areas.
The half-mile buffer zone was created in response to complaints by people living near the PVT Landfill in Nānākuli, Quinlan said, which handles construction and demolition waste. The buffer prevents PVT from expanding beyond its current boundaries.
Although county officials testified that Act 73 would hamstring their ability to expand and place new landfills, Quinlan said he didn’t fully appreciate their objections.
“I don’t think any of us understood at the time what that would mean in the future,” he said. “It was an emotional issue for us, hearing the testimony of folks on the Westside.”
Although the landfill in Nānākuli has capacity to handle waste until the early 2030s, the city is under pressure to find a new site. Its permit says it can’t dump anything past 2028 — and getting a new landfill approved takes several years.
The city was supposed to find a site by the end of 2022 but got a two-year extension after failing to do so.
In the meantime, Blangiardi tried to secure a location on military land, but the Navy denied the city’s request to use land on the Waipiʻo Peninsula. That move also would have required the city to remove its massive public soccer complex. At a public meeting last week, Blangiardi said the deal failed because the Navy concluded that having a dump on land it controlled could threaten national security.
At the two community meetings last week, a handful of residents urged Blangiardi to try again with the military, arguing the city is in a better negotiating position now.
In November, the Navy acknowledged that mismanagement allowed jet fuel to leak from its Red Hill fuel depot in 2021, contaminating Pearl Harbor’s water supply. And the military’s $1 land leases with the state of Hawaiʻi will expire in 2029, prompting many residents to begin to demand more favorable terms for the state.
“I’m begging you to do the hard work and go back to that first option with the military,” Wahiawā resident Betty Ickes told the city’s waste management director, Roger Babcock, at a packed community meeting Wednesday night. “We’ve got some leverage. Let’s use it.”
Most of the speakers said they remain concerned that the landfill would contaminate a portion of Oʻahu’s drinking water supply and questioned the city’s claims that modern engineering techniques will prevent contamination.
“What gives you such confidence it’s not going to happen?” former council member Heidi Tsuneyoshi asked at the Wednesday meeting. “We cannot see what’s happening underground. It could be years before we find out that there’s contamination.”
The next night, as residents hammered Blangiardi with similar concerns and questioned how much thought he had put into the landfill’s proposed location, the mayor became exasperated.
“Let me be very clear, OK? This was not a capricious decision,” he said. “Just tell me where else we can put it.”
___
This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.