Source: Maui Time, Maui News, Best of Maui, Maui Activities

Maui%20County
The Battle of Honolua Ridge
Why one group of rich people is fighting the even richer Maui Land & Pineapple Co.

by By Anthony Pignataro

May 03, 2007

We don’t usually associate mud-clogged drainage inlets, potentially

unsafe drainage basins and poorly graded roads with new Kapalua Resort

developments, but a new owners’ association report concerning Honolua

Ridge is saying exactly that.

Official Kapalua Resort publicity brochures and web pages paint the

50 new Honolua Ridge estates in extremely vivid, luxurious colors.

“Honolua Ridge offers agricultural home sites perched above Honolua Bay

and adjacent to the award-winning Plantation Golf Course,” boasts the

Kapalua website. “This exclusive community is part of the gated

Plantation Estates at Kapalua and contains the largest home sites ever

offered at the Kapalua Resort. Home sites range in size from three to

thirty acres.”

Three to 30 acres overlooking Honolua Bay. Maui Land &

Pine—which owns the whole Kapalua Resort—certainly doesn’t need to hire

Eric Estrada to do a 30-minute infomercial to move property like that.

By comparison, the nearby “exclusive private gated community” known as

Plantation Estates at Kapalua is a Hooverville—52 estates dating back

to 1990, no ridge, and they range in size from just two to seven acres.



The construction atop Honolua Ridge (HR)—broken into two phases,

each holding 25 homesites—is nearly complete. And when it is, that

neighborhood holding 50 massive, palatial mansions will become part of

Plantation Estates. And that has the Plantation Estates Lot Owners’

Association (PELOA)—the group that represents the current Plantation

Estates owners and the eventual Honolua Ridge owners—really pissed off.



On Dec. 20, 2006, then PELOA President Robert C. Miller and

structural engineer Florian Barth—representing the Plantation Estates

Design Review Committee—completed a 21-page report titled “Plantation

Estates: Preliminary Review of Proposed Honolua Ridge 1 (HR1) and

Honolua Ridge 2 (HR2) Infrastructure.” According to Miller, the report

had taken four months to research.

The copy of the report obtained by Maui Time

highlighted four main areas: drainage, grading, roads and landscaping.

Miller and Barth were uncompromising in their conclusions.

“[T]he bottom line is that much of the infrastructure is not [in] a

condition that the Board of Directors of the Association believes it

could accept,” Miller wrote in a Feb. 23, 2007 letter to all the

Plantation Estates and Honolua Ridge owners. “Aside from functionality

issues, much of the HR infrastructure is significantly below the

standards of the infrastructure of the original Plantation Estates

phases… [T]he installation of this wholly inadequate infrastructure in

HR by the developer raises serious concerns that will likely face the

Association for some period of time.”

“Lack of concern for safety was my main issue,” Miller told me later. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”



PELOA attorney Joyce Y. Neeley expanded on that view in a letter, also dated Feb. 23, to ML&P attorney Richard J. Kiefer.



“As is detailed in the report, the infrastructure in HR suffers from

serious construction and/or design defects which in some instances

would make maintenance by Plantation Estates Lot Owners’ Association

(‘Association’) impossible or extremely expensive,” Neeley wrote.

“Moreover, certain of the infrastructure pose and/or create safety or

health hazards.”

Such problems posed considerable “liabilities” to the PELOA, Neeley added.



“The Board of Directors is understandably concerned that the

developer apparently plans to suggest that PELOA should accept

responsibility to maintain this complex and ill designed drainage

system,” Neeley wrote. “PELOA is not willing to accept this drainage

system or the attendant liabilities.”

According to the report by Barth and Miller, maintenance of Honolua

Ridge’s drainage system has been “less than adequate” during

construction. Barth and Miller report spillways littered with debris,

basins that aren’t allowing water to percolate properly into the soil

and possibly high long-term maintenance costs.

“The developer does not appear to have considered safety issues

including unprotected open water features and steep slopes accessible

to children and others,” Barth and Miller wrote. “There is another

non-potable reservoir in the same park area that creates the same

conditions.”

The rest of the report’s concerns highlight a variety of

issues—grading that doesn’t match design plans, “inadequate” slopes,

insufficient road shoulders and a paucity of trees—but aren’t nearly as

dramatic as the potential drainage dangers.

What’s happening now isn’t clear. Miller declined to comment on the

current situation, saying his term as PELOApresident ended in March.

And current PELOA President Lee Reiswig wouldn’t say much when Icalled.



“We’re in the process of working on a response right now,” Reiswig

said of current negotiations with ML&P, but then declined to

comment further.

Structural engineer Barth similarly declined to coment, and Maui

Land &Pineapple Co. attorney Kiefer didn’t respond to two phone

calls and a fax seeking comment for this story.





Kira Sabini contributed to this story. MTW