Some Ocean View residents aren’t waiting around for a new county garbage disposal facility.
Some Ocean View residents aren’t waiting around for a new county garbage disposal facility.
Instead, large quantities of trash are being dumped along the access road to the future site of the transfer station. The accumulation of auto parts, appliances and household garbage is a setback for a community where one group of some 150 volunteers removed masses of junk vehicles and trash from 2009 to 2011.
Photos of the garbage were supplied to Stephens Media Hawaii by an Ocean View resident who did not want to be identified.
“There are just people who don’t want to drive all the way to Waiohinu,” said Fortune Otter, president of the Ocean View Community Association.
Residents are able to dispose of their trash for free on Saturdays when the county sets up temporary containers at Kahuku Park. But the lines can take a half-hour to navigate, and residents must use a dump 12 miles away at Waiohinu during other days, said Otter, who traveled the access road to the future transfer site recently and said the trash problem has gotten worse in the past year or two.
“The garbage down there has gotten incredibly bad,” Otter said. “It’s not just refrigerators and tires and generators. It’s also bags of diapers, which means that people are definitely just not waiting for Saturday.”
Hawaii County Environmental Management Director Bobby Jean Leithead Todd said illegal dumping has been a long-standing problem on the access road but that she wasn’t aware of any dumping on the 20-acre site.
“We will clean it up if there is an issue,” Leithead Todd said, but she added the county is pressed with other concerns as it deals with the aftermath of Tropical Storm Iselle and a lava flow threatening Pahoa, its transfer station and highway access to lower Puna.
The county is considering expanding the temporary services offered at the Kahuku collection site, Leithead Todd said. Mayor Billy Kenoi lauded the temporary center when it was put in place in 2010, saying the facility would help prevent litter and illegal dumping.
In June, the Windward Planning Commission approved a permit allowing Ka‘u Rubbish Disposal LLC to begin operating a curbside garbage pickup service in the subdivision.
The lack of a transfer station has been a sore point for years with Ocean View residents.
In an email, District 6 Councilwoman Brenda Ford said she was disgusted by the trash and displeased the transfer station hasn’t been built.
“I’m so frustrated about this project and many other public safety projects that have not been completed in Ka‘u and Kona,” she said.
Leithead Todd said the county has invested $5.5 million in transfer station improvements during the Kenoi administration. These included upgrades in Pahoa, Keaau, Waimea and Kealakehe. The Volcano and Glenwood transfer stations are under a $1.8 million contract for improvements.
Waiohinu is likely next on the list before a new transfer station for Ocean View because a wooden support structure to shore up a quake-damaged wall at the station was burned in an act of vandalism, Leithead Todd said.
“We can’t build everything on the wish list all at once,” she said.
Ford acknowledged that county departments are currently in crisis mode but said that doesn’t explain years of inactivity on a project that has been on the county’s capital improvement projects list since 2007.
Email Bret Yager at byager@westhawaiitoday.com.