Community rallies to protect trees threatened by Poipu Road safety project
(HawaiiNewsNow) - Kauai County this week broke ground on a $70 million project aimed at increasing safety along Poipu Road.
But when ribbons started appearing on trees lining the south Kauai roadway, residents raised the alarm.
The trees provide a leafy canopy, and in the spring, colorful blossoms.
“When they are in bloom, they are quite a sight, I gotta say, not just for the residents but for visitors as well,” said Kauai County Council chair Mel Rapozo.
The Poipu Road Safety and Mobility Project, which got started this week, threatened dozens of those trees.
Residents grew suspicious when they had ribbons tied around them that weren’t decorations.
“When I saw there was a pink ribbon tied around the trunks, I wondered what that was for,” a Poipu Road resident told the Kauai County Council at its Wednesday meeting. “Surely, they wouldn’t cut them down.”
But that’s exactly what the ribbons were for, putting the community in an uproar.
“If I did not notice those pink ribbons on the trees, today we wouldn’t be here talking about trees because they would have been gone,” Poipu resident Julie Souza told the council.
The county said the trees were not on the original plans when engineers designed the improvements. Rapozo asked them to visit the project site in person to see what they could change.
“It was an oversight and they apologized for it, and they’re trying to revise these plans to save as many trees as possible,” Rapozo said.
“We can have a deterrent for speeding cars. We can have paths for bikes and we can have sidewalks. But we don’t have to take the trees down,” Poipu resident Marianne Martin told Hawaii News Now.
The road project will include three new roundabouts, along with continuous bike lanes, new sidewalks and crosswalks, and bus stops with shelters from Koloa to Poipu.
Community members are also worried that this will lead to new development. Many have been trying to block a luxury condo project by Gary Pinkston and his company, Meridian Pacific.
“One of the things that has been accused in some of the testimony that we received as that this project is either directly funded, requested, or a part of the expansion of Pinkston developments,” County councilmember Fern Holland said.
“This project long predates, was planned and designed long before Pinkston bought that property and started developing it,” replied Michael Moule, the chief of engineering in the county Public Works Department.
It’s a familiar tension in yet another Hawaii community that depends on visitors while longing for fewer of them.
“Slowly by slowly, we’re losing our island. Slowly, by slowly, our character of this place is being lost. And we gotta be cognizant of that,” Rapozo said.
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