LIHUE — A Kauai lawmaker says his investigation of the county’s agricultural dedication law resulted in discovering “numerous serious violations of county law” by island landowners and agrochemical companies. In a letter to Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr., Councilman Tim
LIHUE — A Kauai lawmaker says his investigation of the county’s agricultural dedication law resulted in discovering “numerous serious violations of county law” by island landowners and agrochemical companies.
In a letter to Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr., Councilman Tim Bynum outlined the alleged violations, which include landowners and their lessees failing to properly adjust real property taxes and obtain conservation plans for new operations.
“If a thorough examination of these apparent abuses truly paints the picture as it seems, the implications are staggering,” Bynum wrote May 28. “There may be millions in unpaid tax liabilities.”
In his research, Bynum focused on three Tax Map Key properties. On one of them, along Ahukini Road between the Lihue Airport and Walmart, urban-zoned land was reclassified as ag dedicated in 2010 “without any evidence that required dedication petitions were received and processed in a timely manner,” he wrote.
“On just one parcel alone the loss of county tax revenue starting in 2010 is over $250,000 per year or over $1.096 million dollars from 2010 to 2014.”
The landowners are listed as Visionary LLC and Haili Moe Inc, both affiliated with Grove Farm Company. The lessee on the parcel in question is genetically modified organism producer Pioneer Hi-Bred International.
The other two properties are in Puhi, south of the Kauai Humane Society, owned by Cumberland and Western Resources LLC and operated by Dow AgroSciences, and another in Lihue, near German Hill, owned by Grove Farm and operated by Pioneer.
Bynum says the law requires a change of use petition when use or lessees change, and calls for the repayment of back taxes.
The councilman, who recently introduced a bill aimed at taxing crop-research land separately, began inquiring about the ag dedications more than a year ago. He says the county administration “astonishingly” told him it was not able to provide a complete set of information about dedicated lands, and that he still has not received assurance that all related documents to the three parcels were provided.
“When I finally received the petitions requested on the three parcels, ‘new’ ag dedications were processed, dated and approved just days before the documents were provided,” he wrote in his letter. “Yet the contracts submitted with ‘new’ lessees and new uses were dated years earlier.”
He says the documents include “conclusive evidence of the breach of existing dedications,” and that the new petitions should not have been processed.
Questions to Carvalho were referred to Finance Director Steve Hunt, who said the county is, and always has been, applying agricultural dedication laws correctly. However, he recognized that the county does experience challenges with enforcement if the property use changes and the county isn’t notified in a timely matter.
“We make every effort to reconcile use and valuation when we are alerted that a discrepancy exists,” he wrote in an email.
As for the potential losses of tax revenues, Hunt said the county is concerned, but “not convinced” those losses have been significant based on the information presented by Bynum.
In his letter to Carvalho, Bynum also addresses an alleged failure of landowners and lessees to obtain conservation plans for their new operations. The plans for Pioneer and Dow, which were provided to The Garden Island, are dated February 2011, “years after changes in lessee and use actually occurred,” Bynum wrote.
“This indicates that vast operations prior to that time were occurring with none of the health and safety or environmental protections required by law in place,” he wrote to the mayor. “The flagrant disregard of these fundamental health and safety and farming laws means thousands of violations of county grading and grubbing ordinance occurred.”
Hunt said the deficiencies for the seed corn operations mentioned in Bynum’s letter were brought to the county’s attention in February 2011, and that the companies were brought into compliance within several months.
“We are unaware of any agricultural entities currently operating that have not submitted a conservation plan and been properly exempted from the grading and grubbing ordinance,” he wrote.
Bynum acknowledged that his conclusions are tentative, based on examining only three parcels, but said an investigation and audit would likely reveal that the potential violation “has been the ‘norm’ and is prevalent.”
“Environmental laws have been ignored,” he wrote the mayor.
When asked if the mayor and county were doing anything to address the situation, Hunt responded by saying the county has and will continue to apply the law in a proper manner whenever a petition to dedicate land is received.
“Spot inspections as well as complaint-based investigations are performed by the county’s real property agricultural specialist to ensure that the activities are compliant with the terms of the dedication,” he wrote.
The county said there are between 1,700 and 1,800 ag dedications on Kauai, with one staff person responsible for enforcement.
Attempts to reach representatives of Pioneer and Dow for comment were unsuccessful.
The Kauai County Council’s Finance and Economic Development Committee is scheduled to take up Bynum’s bill, Bill 2456, during its meeting today beginning at 8:30 a.m.
Large ag companies and landowners have begun voicing opposition to the bill, which would establish “agronomics” as a new and separate real property tax class and exclude lands used primarily for crop research or parent seed production from the county’s definition of “agricultural use.”
• Chris D’Angelo, environment writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cdangelo@thegardenisland.com.
