LIHUE — Karen Ono is at her wits’ end.
For nearly two years, the Puhi resident said she has felt like a prisoner in her own home and has had to close and lock her windows and doors to muffle the sounds of dogs barking at all hours of the day and night.
The root cause, she said, are dogs from a nearby home that regularly jumps over her neighbor’s 4-foot fence and traipses through her yard.
“I have nothing against my neighbors,” Ono wrote in an email. “It’s just that their dogs are hunters and require the minimum exercise to keep them happy.”
Without getting that exercise, she said the dogs run through her neighborhood to blow of some steam.
Cases like Ono’s aren’t necessarily unique.
That’s why the Kauai County Council is considering adopting a bill that would aim to curb excessive barking complaints by educating dog owners and step up noise enforcement efforts.
The proposed ordinance, Bill 2516, will go before the council today. It defines excessive barking as dog noises made during any time of the day or evening, regardless of whether it is made on private property, “continuously or incessantly for a period of 10 minutes” or “intermittently for a period of 20 minutes within a 30-minute period of time.”
But with a lot of dogs living on the island, how do officials propose to put bite behind their own bark?
Kauai Humane Society Executive Director Penny Cistaro said the organization will ask complainants to speak with the dog owner after the first complaint and encourage the complainants to maintain a log documenting future excessive barking.
The log sheets, she explained, act as a legal document that allows KHS to determine the severity of the problem and what can be done to correct the problem.
If a formal complaint is filed, the nonprofit will then send a nuisance letter, along with educational material, to the dog owner, notifying him or her about the problem and giving them 15 days to improve the barking.
If the dog owner or owners fail to correct it, the proposed law calls for a $50 fine for the first offense thereafter. A $100 fine shall be assessed for the second offense and a $200 to $500 for a third offense, if the offense occurs within 90 days of the second one.
“A lot of dog owners don’t even know their dogs are barking, and when they do, they want to solve the problem and use some of the advise from the humane society to do it, which is good for everyone,” said Councilwoman JoAnn Yukimura, who is scheduled to introduce the bill during today’s meeting.
KHS will be the first responders to complaints made during the day, while the Kauai Police Department will respond to after-hour calls.
“We’ve tried to make enforcement as simple but as thorough as possible,” Yukimura said. “We’re really targeting only real problems.”
The County of Kauai, she explained, is the only county in the state that does not have a law in place to explicitly address noise complaints from barking dogs.
Yukimura said she decided to craft the bill after she and former Councilwoman Nadine Nakamura received a surge of complaints from residents.
“We’ve been working on this for over two years to try and make it a very clear bill that addresses real problems — not for other extraneous or trivial purposes — but real problems where people are not able to enjoy the peace and quiet of their homes,” Yukimura said.
A dog, however, will not be deemed a nuisance under the proposed law, if a person is trespassing or threatening to trespass on the dog’s property or for any other “legitimate cause which teased or provoked the dog.”
When she first introduced the bill more than two decades ago, Yukimura can still remember a local couple telling her that they were sleeping in their living room, rather than their bedroom, to cope with a barking dog next door.
“There really needs to be a remedy for those kinds of situations,” Yukimura said.
In all, a total of 158 excessive barking complaints were received by the Kauai Humane Society during the 2012 fiscal year — a slight jump from 140 from the year before.
It is a trend that has, Cistaro said, put a strain on the humane society’s time and resources and forced the nonprofit to scale back response efforts in recent months.
“They’re so hard, because you can’t sit there and listen for 20 to 30 minutes, because that is what would be considered a nuisance,” Cistaro said. “When someone calls and says, ‘This dog is barking,’ and we have to go out there and say to the owner, ‘Your dog is barking,’ we have no record of how often it is barking or how long the barking was.”
A similar bill that Yukimura introduced in the 1980s, along with two others made since then, have been voted down by the council.
But this time, she said, may be different.
“I think our community is better able to deal with conflicted issues and I think there’s a chance for some real discussion about what the problem is,” Yukimura said. “It’s a very serious problem to people who have to deal with it.”
• Darin Moriki, county government reporter, can be reached at 245-0428 or dmoriki@thegardenisland.com. Follow him on Twitter at @darinmoriki.
