Attorney Jack Naiditch and Richard Hoehn obtained a special management area permit exemption to do “minor improvements to an existing road”.
"Minor"
work, major trouble
reprinted courtesy Maui News 9/30/07
Disclaimer: we have no information if the content of this article is correct or not, we are reprinting it only for procedural administrative context re doing business in Maui. Whether the alleged infraction occurred or not is unknown.
HAIKU – A Maui attorney and his business partner face fines of thousands of dollars from the county for illegally grading a road and filling in a gulch on property they intend to sell in Haiku.
Attorney Jack Naiditch and Richard Hoehn obtained a special management area permit exemption to do “minor improvements to an existing road” on their 68-acre lot on North Holokai Road, according to Maui Planning Commission documents.
Instead, they went beyond what the permit allowed and cut a new road deep into the hillside and filled in a dry riverbed, which county experts and neighbors say is much needed for storm runoff, said county planner Paul Fasi.
“They scarred that property and made a cliff where there was once a green rolling hill,” Fasi said.
Hoehn said he thinks the county has overreacted to the situation and points to how many other similar violations go unpunished. The developers don’t believe they did anything wrong.
“We’re making a road out of an existing farm road to access a pineapple field that’s on our property,” said Hoehn. “The first engineer we went to said he had six of these violations that he was working on and didn’t have time to do ours.”
Hoehn said he and Naiditch believed they were acting within the purview of their special management area permit. He said he doubts they will need to pay all the fines and expects to settle with the county for a lesser amount, once the county’s criteria have all been met.
“They probably want a paved highway with retaining walls and lanes like Hana Highway,” Hoehn said.
Fasi said Naiditch and Hoehn have not complied with his demands to terrace the graded road and put in commercial-grade retaining walls to prevent erosion or collapse of the man-made cliffs, which are up to roughly 15 feet high.
Fasi said Naiditch and Hoehn had cleaned the fill out of the gulch since he last inspected the property three months ago.
The county Public Works Development Services Administration inspected the property in June and found multiple violations for grading the road without terraces or retaining walls. The property owners were given until July 10 to correct the problems or receive daily fines.
“We are fining them; we are still pursuing the violation,” said Public Works Civil Engineer Ty Fukuroku.
The county Department of Public Works has fined the partners’ company JNR Associates LLC $7,300 as of today. And those fines will continue to grow by $200 a day until the situation is remedied, Fukuroku said.
In addition, every 30 days, the daily fines double up to $1,000 per day. The county started fining them Aug. 11, after giving the developers two months to address the problems.
The area in question is less than an acre, Fukuroku said.
The state Department of Land and Natural Resources apparently first investigated the allegations after a neighbor complained, Fasi said. The DLNR turned the case over to the Planning Department.
The likelihood of the developers restoring the landscape is remote, so county officials demanded that they get a grading permit, Fasi said.
But before they can get the permit, the county is requiring them to get engineer-approved plans as well as soil, erosion and drainage reports, Fukuroku said.
“Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon, at least not as much as I would like,” Fukuroku said. “We see one of these (grading code violations) once a month. But maybe not to this extent.”
Naiditch was actually hit last year with a $200 county fine for doing grading work that exceeded the scope of another permit he received for property he owns in Makena. He later got an after-the-fact permit for that project.
Naiditch was in California this week and did not return a call seeking comment.
Naiditch is a Paia-based attorney who served as a per diem judge in 2nd Circuit Court from 2000 to 2006. He has represented Smith Development and the Pacific Whale Foundation.
Back in early June, Planning Director Jeff Hunt issued a written warning to Naiditch and Hoehn, telling them that “in the event of severe flooding, the cumulative impact of filling in the culvert with soil could potentially be an environmental disaster for downstream shoreline waters and aquatic life.”
When someone cuts into a hillside, county regulations state that they must have a slant, or terrace, of 2 feet inward for every 1 foot up, Fukuroku said.
He said he met with the developers once this summer and was assured that the problems would be corrected. The men also applied for a permit to build a subdivision on the property, but those haven’t been approved yet.
Hoehn said the developers ultimately plan to subdivide the 68-acre area into three buildable lots and put them up for sale, he said.
They are almost done with the engineering reports and expect to have the problems rectified soon, Hoehn said.
But Fasi said he is still waiting to hear anything new from the developers.
Staff Writer Ilima Loomis contributed to this story.
Chris Hamilton can be reached at chamilton@mauinews.com
reprinted courtesy Maui News 9/30/07
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