From Koko Crater to Wahiawā: The long fight over Oʻahu’s trash

by Stan Fichtman, Politics Hawaii, August 15, 2025 

Sometimes, all it takes to recollect a memory from the past is an email. That is what occurred on August 8th when Hawaiʻi State Senator Donovan Dela Cruz issued his periodic e-newsletter, this time addressing the current issues with locating a new Oʻahu landfill.

But first, let’s catch up the reader on the current discussion of the siting.

Honolulu City and County Mayor Rick Blangiardi, December 10, 2024, based on a list of choices to site a new landfill, chose a location in Wahiawā, central Oʻahu, that is currently on prime agricultural land and is owned by Dole Food Company. It’s a 150-acre site that sits on top of a water aquifer.

In the face of increasingly loud opposition, Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz pushed Act 255, passed in 2025, which will now bar landfills over aquifers on Class A ag lands. These rules killed the City’s Wahiawā proposal. With Waimānalo Gulch set to close by 2028 (or 2032 if expanded), the City wants more time, while legislators (as said by Senator Dela Cruz) weigh revising buffer-zone rules to make other non-aquifer sites possible.

The one challenge was the fact that the selection was made to try and address the limits that the State put on the City in selecting a site, even before Act 255. That limited the number of sites that the City could choose from, of which the Dole land, at least to the City, seemed to be the least bad choice for a landfill.

With Act 255 signed into law, the City and the Mayor’s office simply said that their plan B was to go back to Waimānalo Gulch on the Waiʻanae Coast and file for permits to continue expanding it into the gulch that has been filled with garbage since the late 80s.

If one thinks, though, that this is the first time a controversial location and off-the-reservation thoughts of what to do with Oʻahu trash had been thrown out by the City, it isn’t by a long shot.

Back in this blogger’s first months working at the Honolulu City Council as a Legislative Aide in 2004, the city at that time was in the last throes of choosing a landfill that was proposed by a “Blue Ribbon Panel”, with it facing then what it faces now – the impending end of the permit to dump trash at Waimānalo Gulch, and a call by those on the Waiʻanae Coast to stop using it as Oʻahu’s dumping ground.

The Blue-Ribbon panel at the time selected four sites on the Waiʻanae Coast, and one in Kapa‘a Quarry in Kailua. At the time, the calls for removing it from Waiʻanae were strong. So, in trying to address the selection of a site, the politicians at the time, most notably Councilmember Rod Tam, as Public Works Committee Chairman, decided to take issues in their own hands and choose a site not on the list.

In early December 2004, at the City Council Chairman’s office – then occupied by now-Senator Donovan Dela Cruz – held a news conference in which Councilmember Tam announced that he would propose legislation to create the new dump in Koko Head Crater.

“Whaaaaat??!?” could be heard by everyone in that room, including by this rookie Legislative Aide, who knew that his boss – who represented the area of the proposed dump – would oppose it immediately.

In reporting at the time, it was suggested that the off-the-list choice by Councilmember Tam was to pressure other Councilmembers to agree to an even more daring choice – a 23-acre site next door to the Honolulu garbage-to-energy facility called “H-POWER”, to both initially dump trash there to be shipped out by a contractor to the mainland.

(Skipping to the end of the story, the plan to ship trash off-island fell apart, and the bales ended up landfilled at Waimānalo Gulch by 2011).

At the end of all the drama that occurred with the last time Oʻahu looked for a new landfill, it was decided to just file an extension of the permit at Waimānalo Gulch. This was made a shade more palatable by then-Mayor Mufi Hannemann providing a couple of million dollars to the impacted communities on the Waiʻanae Coast for community improvement programs.

At the end, the permit was extended…and if no new idea is brought up for a new site, the City will do the same thing again, and Waimānalo Gulch will continue to be Oʻahu’s dumpsite. The last extension asked to go to 2028, with possible capacity until 2032.

With that plan, which by many accounts seems to be the most feasible to solve the issue now, the decision of a new site will be kicked down the road once again, for as many years as the Land Use Commission gives the city permission to dump at Waimānalo.

But that does not mean that the City, in getting yet another extension, is showing any clairvoyance as to how to address this issue, once again, in years to come. While there have been many in the City that declared (mostly Mayors) that they would be the ones to solve this issue on their watch, the result has been more keeping to the status quo than becoming the maverick leader that solves the big problems.

And that might be the lesson in all this – big problems don’t lend themselves to quick-to-decide solutions. Mayor Blangiardi is only the latest leader in this state who has discovered the rock wall of opposition in Hawaiʻi, on any issue of controversy, is both well-built and able to withstand withering attack, both through policy and rhetoric.

If history is any guide, the rock wall will hold—and the City will end up right back where it started: extending Waimānalo Gulch.

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