To anyone believing that Peter Martin, Bob Horcajo, West Maui Land, and their related Olowalu development and water companies are trustworthy and care about the community’s well-being, or thinking that their recent criticisms of DLNR Deputy Water Director M. Kaleo Manuel are not in response to Mr. Manuel’s efforts to hold them accountable for decades of broken rules – please take a look at the attached documents from whistleblower Chris Salem.
While working for the County in 2019, Mr. Salem submitted reports to various County authorities about firebreaks that were supposed to be created in Olowalu but never were. Mr. Salem’s reports were ignored.
Firebreaks that were supposed to be built as environmental conditions of Martin and Horcajo’s SMA Major permit still have not been built and represent an enormous risk to the community today.
This is despite a warning notice sent to the Olowalu Developers in 2010, personally signed by Kathleen Aoki, now the Director of Planning on Maui under Mayor Bissen, which Ms. Aoki and the State Office of Planning currently refuse to enforce in violation of Federal environmental laws.
Maui Zoning and Code Enforcement Inspector Sonny Huh also had his career destroyed in retaliation for filing his inspection report of the Olowalu site in 2010 which documented the missing firebreaks and protective infrastructure.
Two other major whistleblowing efforts by Mr. Salem involve the thousands of 3-Lot-or-Less infrastructure deferral agreements that Corporation Counsel wrote for over 40 years to benefit private developers that have never once been collected on that are worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to the County, and the bogus “mistake” that Corporation Counsel made in languaging the 2015 Upcountry Water Bill that allowed private developers island-wide to receive two-lot subdivision infrastructure exemptions that the Council and public only ever intended specifically for residents on the Upcountry Water Meter Wait-list.
To get a sense of how the Good Ol’ Boy network works here on Maui, County Council Member Alice Lee delayed the “fixing” of that “mistake” for years until just after Bob Horcajo unduly received an infrastructure exemption believed to be worth millions for his subdivision up in Iao Valley.
In Napili, Former Planning Director Michele McLean never actually filed the required, public Notice of Violation to Greg Brown, instead sending him only private letters which denied the community of our right to contest her determinations with the Planning Commission.
With such game-playing and abuses of authority rampant across all agencies on Maui, is it not proper for State or Federal authorities to appoint an independent CPA or Comptroller as a Procurement Tzar to protect the billions of relief dollars headed to Maui from being wrongfully siphoned off onto the well-connected pockets of the local Good Ol’ Boy network?
Sam Small
Director, Maui Causes
www.MauiCauses.org