 It's Monday morning. Oh, Monday morning. Big day, though. Big day for vaccines. Big day for counting electoral votes. Ooh, big day. And it's a big day also because Sophie Cock is here with us from the Star Advertiser. And she wrote a story. We want to talk to her about it here on Community Matters. Good morning, Sophie. Good morning, Jay. Nice to see you. So it's about beaches. It's all about beaches. And, you know, an essential part of Hawaii's, you know, appeal, if you will. It's essential connection with the land. It's really connection with the beaches and the water. And people feel that. It's almost a religion with a lot of people. And so it's built into the DNA of the state, isn't it? Can you talk about the background of the connection between the people way back when and the beaches and the water? Well, I mean, I think you're right. I think that, you know, the beaches and the ocean have always been central to life in Hawaii. Obviously, it's a center for recreation. It's where people take their kids and, you know, their friends and families. It's where people have fished for generations. So I don't think you can underestimate the importance of the beaches to Hawaii. And obviously, they're a huge draw for our tourist economy as well. And so when, you know, as we're facing a future with far future, far fewer beaches, it's a real emotional thing for people to grapple with. Now, when you say that, you're talking about sea level rise. You're talking about the disappearance of beach sand, which we already see in so many places. You're talking, you know, and you're talking about really people who thought they really made a brilliant move by buying property on the water. The future may not hold all the same promise they were expecting. So you wrote an article about beaches, and I think it's really important that we discuss, you know, what that's about, because although you and I respect the whole notion of allowing access to beaches, not everybody does. Can you talk about that? Yeah, well, I mean, I think, first of all, just to put the series of stories that I've been working on into context, as you had mentioned, we've already lost a lot of our beaches. And scientists estimate that on Oahu, Maui and Kauai, about one quarter of the beaches have been lost. And that's largely due to shoreline armoring. Obviously, you know, over the past decades, we developed way too close to the coast. And as private property owners sought to protect their properties from the ocean, they put up rows of seawalls, which on a naturally eroding beach, if you put up a seawall, it's just going to suck the sand off the beach and the beach essentially drowns, you know, and then as we are facing a future sea level rise, the situation is obviously so much more ominous in terms of what we're facing. And, you know, so that's, you know, in part why I felt like it was really important to do this series now is that we're just sort of at this crossroads right now, if we don't make dramatic changes in the way that we're managing our shorelines scientists predict the loss of our beaches is going to be really dramatic in the coming decades. To revisit the notion of seawalls for a moment, I know some property owners on the North Shore, we're talking decades ago, who saw this happening and who decided as a matter of faulty engineering that they should build seawalls to protect their own beaches, their own, their own sand behind their house. Because, you know, you buy a house and you want to have a certain margin of sand there between you and the water. And now it's disappearing. So your first reaction is, oh, I think I think about build a seawall and an engineer come around and stamp the plans and presto you have a seawall. And just as you said, the seawall does not help. It's reverse effect. All of a sudden you have no beach and the whole thing is inundated. Right. Well, it helps the private property owner, but it's obviously a huge loss to the public. I mean, we've seen it in Launaykai, Mughalaya, where rows of seawalls have gone up. It's like it's a domino effect. And it happens pretty quickly in terms of the erosion of the beaches. And it's tragic for the public, I think. What's quickly, Sophie? Well, scientists say you can't make a generalization about how it depends on the coastal area. So you can't over generalize about, well, if we put seawalls up on Sunset Beach, how quickly that beach is going to go. But I think what we've seen with Launaykai, that happened over 10, 20 years in terms of how quickly we lost that stretch of coastline. Half of that beach is gone now. Scientists are predicting that it'll continue to erode. So these decisions are, it's not something that's happening over 100 years. It's something that's happening 10, 20 years or losing them. Well, Chip Fletcher at SOEST, at the university, tells us what areas are likely to be inundated. And there's an awful lot of them. And he gives us maps. I'm sure you've seen the maps of the water creeping up into the community. But a lot of people, they don't take it seriously. They have these rationalizations. I don't shop there. I don't go there. I don't need to go there. I don't care. I don't care if we lose the beaches. In fact, those tourists, I don't care about them either. So what? What's your answer to that? Yeah, it's that's one of the things that was really interesting in reporting this last story and interviewing so many of the homeowners on the North Shore of Oahu. These are some of their most treasured beaches. And it was interesting talking to them because a lot of them were aware of the damages that seaballs cause. But they still wanted to put up a seawall on Sunset Beach, Pupukea, because their rationalization, what I kept hearing was like, well, yeah, we know that it's caused damage on other beaches. But we just don't think it's going to happen on the North Shore. We think it's fine if we put up seawalls. Or others are just really adamant about what they see as their right to protect their private property, even if it is at the expense of public trust lands, the beach. And of course, our laws and policies and Supreme Court rulings say the exact opposite. They say that it is government officials responsibility to preserve and protect natural coast lines. That area is a public trust and it belongs to the public. It doesn't belong to private property owners. But it's, you know, it's a thorny situation because when you have people living on the coast and they're, you know, on the brink of losing their home to the ocean, it's probably human nature to scramble and try to save it. And it's hard to tell someone that they're going to lose their home. And some of the property owners are really wealthy. They live in multi-million dollar homes, but we also have other areas around the islands where you have people who live there for generations and don't have a lot of money. And so it's a really difficult thing when you're faced with, you know, telling that property owner that their investment is now public land. Yeah. Well, you know, one question occurs to me. I do want to move on to the legal, but one question occurs to me is that if you build a seawall and then you recognize that that's not going to work, it dawns on you, that's not going to work. Or rather, put it this way, it dawns on the authorities, the governor for example. If people seriously take climate change as an emergency, which they should, and say, gee, we can't afford to have that, so we are going to, you know, take an aggressive step. And we're going to tell all these people they got to remove the seawalls or we'll do it for them. And so we're going to take them down one way or the other. Does that correct the problem or is it simply too late? Well, I think it depends on the coastline and what the projections are for sea level rise. I mean, as you had noted, so I said UH Manoa has really good maps right now that show the inundation with sea level rise. And so they don't see it, you know, when I talk to scientists, they don't see it as too late. But they do see it as, you know, we're at a point where we have, we can't keep bandating the situation. We have to take action now if we want to preserve beaches like the North Shore, which, you know, are so important to so many people. I mean, they're heavily used. And so, you know, I don't think we're going to save all the beaches that are left. And scientists don't say that, but, you know, we got to start prioritizing what we do want to save and then figuring out an exit strategy for all those private property owners. And it's not just homeowners. The state has done a terrible job in terms of relocating highways away from the coastline. And that's been one of the, you know, a really big culprit in terms of beach loss. So we're dealing with not just the loss of our beaches, but infrastructure and homes falling into the ocean if we, if we don't try to, you know, remedy the situation. And it's, and then we have all of these cesspools all along the coastline. And so scientists are, you know, growing increasingly alarmed about what impact that's going to have on the quality of near shore waters. If we have all of this wastewater flowing into the ocean, you know, it's being inundated. Yeah. And vice versa. It's the ocean flowing into the aquifers as well. Right. So you have an exchange of, I don't want to say, well, of contaminants as it were from one side to the other. Let me digress for a moment though, because what strikes me to hear you talk is that there's another issue too, and it's the North Shore as well. You know, we all came up at the time where every X yards, there was an access to the beach. And that you could, you could park on the road on Kamehameha Highway there, and you could take stuff out of your car to go to the beach, and you could walk down a little, a little access way, and it was usually fenced, because the property owners on either side didn't want you to get into their backyards, so they fenced it. And then all of a sudden property owners started to shut those down. And it was a, you know, a big rumble about that, maybe what, 10 years ago, maybe, where some of the local people said, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're shutting down what we thought was our right to access the beach. And oh, people were fighting about it as if that wasn't the law, but it was the law. Where does that fit in all of this, Sophie? Yeah, that's not, I haven't focused that much on, it's a huge issue, and I totally agree. I mean, the public absolutely has a right to access the shoreline, and there are stretches of coastline that have, that private property owners, hotels, condos have worked very hard to close off to the public. We just saw recently the whole skirmish with Koalina blocking off shoreline access to the public. There was no, I think the issue was with parking, and they've been suffocating that for years, trying little by little by little, to stifle any access. Yeah, and so Oahu's Surfrider Foundation did a really good job in, you know, trying to raise awareness about that issue and opening a parking along there, but it's a huge problem. I think through, not just Oahu, I know on Maui, it's something that they've been fighting on the west side, particularly, you know, with the hotels. The beach is not, it's not private part of, you know, hotels private property, or homeowners private property, it's it's a public beach, and so I think a lot of that comes down to the county in terms of enforcing shoreline access, you know, making sure that they stay open, and that there's enough of them, that they're, you know, interspersed. We have certain parts of the island where the access is really good, like Waimanalo Beach Slots, or that whole coastline, and then other, like, where it's terrible. Well, let's talk about, you know, the governmental, the governmental imprimatur here. So if I, I'm returning to the main theme, if you will. So if I build a seawall, or I do other engineering that is actually hurtful to the ecology, and enhances the sea change, sea change, sea level effect. So I need, I need permission to do these things, like seawalls, from DLNR. And that was an essential part of your story the other day. Can you talk about that? What, what, what kind of permits do I need to get? How hard or easy is it to get them? And what about this thing about renewing them indefinitely? Can you talk about that? Yeah, so, you know, there's the seawalls, which permanently fixes, which fixes the shoreline. And I think it's pretty hard to get a approval from DLNR for a new seawall, particularly if it's on a sandy beach. It's very hard, but we've seen property owners just go to the county sitting in County of Honolulu and get the approval. But in terms of the story that I was working on, on these emergency approvals, that's really a whole different thing. DLNR has for years, sort of viewed them as or soft erosion control. And they see it as, you know, when you have a, when the erosion is within 20 feet of a home or hotel, they've been allowing the property owners to essentially put up these sandbag revetments. And there's all sorts of iterations of it. I mean, we have just stacks of sandbags. We have these burritos that have been going up on the North Shore, where you have like a long tube, and then they put geotextile fabric over it. It's all different concoctions. But scientists say that shoreline hardening is shoreline hardening. And it doesn't matter if it's a sloping boulder revetment or a seawall or a sandbag revetment. If the shoreline is naturally eroding, it's going to have the same effect. It's going to pull sand off the beach. So they become increasingly alarmed by all of these emergency protections that are going up. The burritos on the North Shore, you know, there's 30 of them. And those are just the ones that are, you know, have been authorized, most of them after the, a lot of them after the fact. I've also heard that there's others that are up that are illegal that just aren't on DLNR's radar. And those approvals really, I think, have gone on below the radar. When I talk to lawmakers, they had no idea that, you know, that this was taking place. I had no idea until I started investigating the store, the series at the beginning of the year that that's how, I mean, we see these big sandbag revetments go up. But I had no idea what, you know, what the authority was that was authorizing them or how they came to be. And so what happens is that basically the head of DLNR, you know, if they see it as an emergency, they can sign off on it and allow them to install this structure. And it's supposed to be, per DLNR's own administrative roles, temporary. But what temporary means has been, I think, one we construed. And what I found in my investigation was that these sandbag revetments go on for years and years and years that DLNR continues to basically extend them. Usually they're given three years, you know, but they continually extend them. And I found, you know, sandbag revetments that have been up for more than two decades. And so those approvals completely bypass our whole approval process for new seawalls. If you want a new seawall from DLNR, you have to obtain a conservation district use permit. So you have to do this environmental assessment. It's a really rigorous process. You have to, it goes before the land board, you know, if it's in the conservation district and on public land, they then have to pay the state to lease the land, which can be incredibly expensive. But these emergency approvals bypass that entire process. So, but then, you know, on the other hand, it's a situation where I think DLNR feels like they're in this bind, you know, they're trying to protect public safety and not have all these homes fall onto the, you know, the beach. But at the same time, it's these, you know, seabag sandbag revetments are becoming long term fixtures on our shoreline. And we just haven't come up with any sort of exit strategy or anything. Well, soon enough, these homes will fall into the water. There's another element too, and I just recalled, is that if the ocean comes higher on you, if there's a rise and it takes the sand away and all that, the, I think it's the high water mark is the end of your property. And you may have bought, you may have thought you were buying, your property description may have indicated that you were buying more, but you wind up buying less as time goes on, because the high water mark is, is climbing to you. There's one reason why a homeowner would want to avoid this process, because he's losing land, his property's becoming less valuable and all that. Is this relevant to, is this becoming relevant to the choices made by the homeowners, by DLNR, you know, to get, to approve, to renew these emergency permits? I mean, if I come to, if I come to you and say, look Suzanne, Suzanne case, look Suzanne, I'm losing land. I got to preserve my land. It's not only that it's, my house is going to fall into water, but it's, I'm losing land. We can't have this. And I know of no other arrangement where I could protect what I bought. So how about it? Or perhaps more to the point, I go to a legislator or I go to the governor and I apply political pressure on the basis of my problem. Is this, is this playing into it? In terms of, yeah, I do think that the property owners have a lot of influence over lawmakers and to some degree, government officials. It's a little harder to get at that issue, but I think the real estate industry has had a lot of influence and developers, you know, at the level of the, you know, state legislature and city councils, county councils. But yeah, I mean, what we state, what we state publicly, you know, the state says publicly about owning a home along the coast is that it's a risky proposition, you know, it's a risky investment to buy a home along the shoreline. And our laws are very clear that if the shoreline migrates Malca, as you had mentioned, then that becomes public land. The boundary between public and private property is the high wash of the waves during the time of year that, you know, the ocean is furthest inland. And of course, our oceans are increasingly pushing inland with the level rise. So it's not a good place to be. You're a coastal homeowner. I think what I've found in terms of reviewing 20 years of approval is that the state and county level is that over and over again, government officials, when it comes down to it, they repeatedly favor the interests of private property owners and for the interests of the public. It really flips the priorities that are outlined in our laws and policies. So it's going to take some leadership to say, wait a minute, we have to look at the priorities here. We can't just, you know, exceed to the wishes of those people who are lucky enough to be wealthy enough to afford land on the water. I really wonder, by the way, just a footnote wonderment if those properties are as valuable as they used to be. I mean, it's a headache. If I sell you a property that needs a seawall to preserve what I think is my high watermark, that's a built-in expense. I have to go file for a permit. I have to go lobby. I have to spend money to get protection on this. And so it's a built-in problem. It's like an EPA problem. And it's going to follow that property wherever that property goes. And therefore, I would reduce my offer for that property because I would build that cost into the value of the property. That must be happening with at least some of these properties on the North Shore and elsewhere. Well, yeah. I mean, what I found, which was particularly alarming is that a lot of these property owners, particularly on the North Shore, obtained these emergency protections from the state. And right after they get them and they have their, you know, a lot of them, it's like they put up a burrito illegally and got after the fact approval from the state. And they immediately flip the property or put it up for sale. And buyers, I talked to, some of them told me, I mean, this is their side, their version of the story, but they said they didn't even know that the emergency burritos were going to expire. And they're freaking out because they don't know what they're going to do, you know. And it's amazing how much these properties are selling for. I mean, they are classified as eminently threatened. You have to, you know, just in order to get an emergency approval, it has to be classified as eminently threatened by the state. Yet they're able to sell it for millions of dollars. And it's just, it's a huge problem. And it raises a lot of ethical issues. And then, you know, one other issue just to touch on really quickly that you talked about is what I found is that there's really an equity issue involved in all of this. It's really only the wealthy property owners that can afford these protections. The emergency revetments often cost 30 property owners have told me $30,000 to $70,000. And these are supposed to be temporary, you know. And then sea walls can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get through the regulatory approval process can be incredibly expensive. So this is something that's really only in the reaches of the wealthy. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm reminded of an architect, rather an engineer who died a few years ago by the name of Alfred Yee and his partner was Hans Crock. They were both, you know, structural engineers. And they designed this concrete anchor system for the Natatorium. And the idea is to put these special molded concrete forms in the water around the Natatorium and you change the way the water flows. And these guys knew how to do that stuff. The city was not interested and it got in the newspaper, but nothing ever happened with their solution or any solution. You know, government just had no will on this issue. It was not a priority finish. So I'm thinking maybe there's another kind of engineering solution. And it isn't just a sea wall or a burrito. It is another kind of engineering solution that people or the government can and should do to preserve the shoreline. Has there been any discussion of that or are we limited to, you know, sea walls and burritos? You know, I think that there is some discussion about that. When I've talked to coastal specialists, they say that there could be sort of a middle ground where, for instance, on the North shore, property owners are able to put up some sort of protection during the time of the year when their home is really being hammered by the ocean and then they take them out. And so they do see some sort of middle ground there, but I haven't seen anything manifesting in that regard. No, that's the problem. It's not a priority. And indeed, these days, we have so many other priorities and we're in a pickle with the budget. So where's the money going to come from? I mean, this is not going to get resolved by individuals. It's going to have to be state action. And it is critical to the state. And I'm thinking of when Bloomberg was the mayor of New York, they came to him, the engineers, the architects that came to him and they said, you got to do something because Sea Level Rise is going to ruin downtown. It's going to creep into all of Lower Manhattan. And he did take steps. I don't know what they were. They were engineering solutions to avoid inundation. And in a funny way, New York, which is very threatened by this, right on the Hudson River and the East River, actually did stuff. And here, we're surrounded by water. Those charts that they make at the university are very, very, very threatening. Not only the property owners, but the whole economy of the state. What do you do with Waikiki? The island of Waikiki is inundated. Oh boy, what are we going to do then? It's a terrible result. So the question is, if I gave you, Sophie, a check for anything you wanted in terms of American money, billions, what could we do? What's your mailing address? Never mind. What could we do? I mean, maybe those roads have to be built up. Maybe they have to be moved inland. Maybe the governments that come around and do condemnation and all those buildings that are losing value on the shoreline. We have to reorganize our entire community physically in order to deal with the climate chain, which is happening. And certainly nobody can say that it's slowing down. It's speeding up. There's no question whatsoever that this is going to happen at increasing, accelerating, and more threatening all the time. So, querie, what will ultimately have to be done if I gave you this billion, billion dollar check? Oh, jeez. I'm just a reporter. I agree with you. I think step one is getting the state and kind of start moving the roads back. I think that would help immensely. And it would show the state is showing us some leadership on zone infrastructure. I mean, the whole issue of, you know, are we going to condemn land and pay fair market value or just let nature take its course is so, so thorny because, you know, I've gotten a lot of emails actually from people in other states like California, North Carolina saying, you know, the state's policy has just been to let nature take its course if you lose your house by the ocean takes it, the ocean takes it, right? So when you get into this whole issue of condemning land or buyouts, it's tricky because critics are saying, you know, why should we, as a public, be bailing out private property owners for making a bad investment decision? And it becomes even more, you know, people get even more upset if it is hotels and, you know, really wealthy homeowners. Why are we having to spend all this money to bail them out so we can protect, you know, what is public land? And so it's just really, it's hard, you know. And then, of course, again, there's the equity issue. Can you even distinguish by, you know, wealth? Can you say, well, you know, this homeowner is low income and lived there for generations. So we want to bail them out, but we don't want to bail out the, you know, multimillionaire that lives, you know, in California is only here, you know, one week, you know, out of the year and is, you know, running it out as a legal vacation rental, you know. And I don't know that you can start doing some sort of a litmus test, you know, and, you know, if you're going to have an overall policy, I don't know if you can get into that litmus test about who you help out and who you don't. Maybe you can. It's a challenge. It's a challenge and it's not, it's not comforting in the sense that right now it's visible. You can see it right down the road what's going to happen. And you can see that it's a threat right now in certain ways, but it's going to become more of a threat in other ways. And after a while, it's going to become existential, you know, to the economy of the state. And our systems are, what do you want to call it? May I say democracy, our transparency, our whole system of dealing with existential problems is it really needs work. Yeah, we're totally reactive, you know, I mean, that's how we've dealt with this whole issue for years. It's just been a reactive type of, you know, and not proactive. And so those issues are just really coming to a head. And but yeah, it is, you know, just two, three months ago, government officials and scientists really thought we were going to see a whole, you know, bunch of homes on the North Shore just collapse. I mean, that's how serious the issue is. It's not really a question of if it's a question of when. And, you know, the burritos are upsetting a lot of people because they're worried that it's going to erode the beach on the North Shore. But, you know, whether there will, you know, ultimately be able to hold back the ocean, I think most people say, no, I don't think so. What are you going to do with that mess when, you know, it's dangerous? Because, you know, especially all the surfers out there, it's dangerous if you have all this debris getting sucked into the ocean and, you know, boards with nails sticking out of them, you know, how powerful the ocean is up there. It's really scary. Just the thought of it. Yeah. Think of the lawsuits. Yeah. You know, and the lawsuits will shoot in every direction, and including the state, including the neighbors, including the engineers, whoever. Well, thank you very much, Sophie. It's been a great discussion. And I feel that we are not yet done. I feel that you are not yet done. This is, this is going to be a subject you can plan to cover for many happy years to come or unhappy years as the case may be. You know, you're onto something here because this is going to be with us and be increasing the relevant, increasingly threatening as we go by. Well, thank you very much for coming around. I hope we can do it again. Yeah. Thanks for talking to me, Jay. Appreciate it. Aloha. Sophie Koch, Star Advertiser. Star Reporter on Star Advertiser.