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WAINIHA — Past the idyllic surf haven of Hanalei town, Kauai’s two-lane highway winds and dips before it stops abruptly at Kee Beach, the “end of the road.”

Shiny new Mustangs, Sebrings and Jeeps — and other typical rental cars — are packed into the small parking lot at the base of the Kalalau trail into the Na Pali coast. They overflow into the nearby dirt parking area and Haena Beach Park a little further down the road and back up on both sides of one-lane bridges. And with increasing regularity, they are parked in front of beachfront homes.

Kauai is the smallest and least populated of the main Hawaiian Islands, but draws more than its fair share of tourists who come to see its natural beauty. According to preliminary , some 60,000 Kauai residents hosted an average of nearly 19,000 visitors every day. The island has a higher ratio of tourists to locals (about 0.31) than Maui (0.29), the Big Island (0.13) and Oahu (0.09).

It wasn’t always this way. The Garden Isle prides itself on being the , the oldest of the main Hawaiian Islands, the first to be settled by the Marquesans and the last to be conquered by Kamehameha the Great. The defiant attitude lingers in the form of bumper stickers that demand Kauaians “Keep The Country Country” and the common refrain that Kauai does not want to follow in the footsteps of Oahu and Maui, considered by locals here to be commercialized and crawling with too many tourists.

“We used to have a community here with families and kids,” said 30-year Wainiha resident Caren Diamond as she walked along the beach fronting the Wainiha II Subdivision Sunday morning. She pointed out one massive multi-story vacation rental after another. They’ve become so numerous that the single-story faded plantation-style houses stand out. “Now our neighborhood is lost. It’s all transients.”

Diamond — whose name graces a 2006 Hawaii Supreme Court pertaining to certified shorelines — has teamed with former Kauai Planning Commission Chair Barbara Robeson to create Protect Our Neighborhood Ohana. The two have hounded the commission, Planning Department and Kauai County Council, demanding restrictions on the proliferation of transient vacation rentals.

Kauai began to address the largely unregulated with the passage of its 2000 General Plan a decade ago. In an effort to contain visitors to certain regions and allow local families to enjoy the rest, the Kauai county government eventually limited rentals¹ to the so-called “Visitor Destination Areas” in March 2008 with [pdf] and [pdf].

Those ordinances laid the ground rules. Bed-and-breakfasts and other vacation rentals were to be restricted to the bluffs of Princeville on the North Shore — and to Kapaa, Lihue and Poipu on the East and South sides — unless owners obtained a non-conforming use certificate from the Kauai Planning Commission.

The laws closed the door on vacation rentals on agricultural land and required those in residential areas who wished to be grandfathered in to show that they had been operating their rentals in good faith. But some thought the restrictions were unfair and hired attorneys to make not-so-thinly-veiled threats of lawsuits.

The proposed new ordinance, largely designed in response to those threats, would loosen restrictions. It would open the application process for a whole new set of homeowners — those on agricultural land — and could make it easier for others who were previously denied permits to gain approval.

Much of the argument on Kauai has centered on the agricultural lands portion of the bill. State law has been referenced by those on both sides of the debate — Hawaii Revised Statutes by those opposed to the bill, and by those in favor.

But locals say another major problem with the bill is that it guts the existing law. On the chopping block is a stipulation requiring the county planning department to inspect vacation homes themselves before issuing a permit. If passed as currently written, gone will be the requirement that any building seeking a permit or a renewal be in compliance with state and county laws.

Diamond and Robeson say the bill amounts to a new interpretation of law where applicants can simply obtain a general excise tax license and sign an affidavit promising they were in operation before the March 7, 2008 implementation date of the original law. In other words, the bill will grandfather in vacation rentals that were operating illegally.

County Council Vice Chair Jay Furfaro disagrees. Furfaro serves as chair of the Planning Committee that held a public hearing Wednesday and will take up the bill starting July 7. He says the new bill doesn’t stop the county from enforcing the law.

“The county cannot deny the use of property, but can prosecute the violation,” Furfaro told Civil Beat.

“Getting this bill, the door closed, stops any further proliferation of vacation rentals. It stops it,” he said. “It draws a line in the sand and you get your day in court, or your day in front of the Planning Commission.”

Vacation rentals on Kauai have become a flash point for a host of related land use decisions. It’s become a proxy fight for shoreline access and beach privatization, adherence to the community development plans, conditions of Land Use Commission approvals, federal flood plain rules, disingenuous construction estimates, increased property values and a process that leaves community members feeling like their input isn’t heard or considered.

Robeson and Diamond, the longtime North Shore residents, worry that local families are being priced out of their own neighborhoods and that tourists are unknowingly signing up for unsafe accommodations. Kauai has plenty of hotels and condos. Most of all, they’re frustrated by what they see as the loss of their community.

“It all comes down to the Planning Department not doing its job,” Diamond said. The bill gives planning officials too much discretion in handing out permits.

Asked if the Planning Department and the Planning Commission should be trusted to enforce county and state law, County Councilman Furfaro alluded to the fact that the bill currently on the table was written for the council by planning commissioners: “The Planning Commission is trusting the Planning Commission.”

He said amendments to strengthen the commission’s recommendations could be considered. He also hopes the county will beef up the inspection team and fund it with the introduction of a new class of property taxpayers — non-conforming commercial users in both agricultural and residential zones — through a separate bill that could be introduced sometime soon.

Asked if Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho is concerned about the proliferation of transient vacation rentals in areas outside of designated visitor destination areas, county spokeswoman Mary Daubert said both the current and proposed legislation do not allow any new TVRs outside of the VDA.

“The proliferation of them was the concern that prompted the study and legislation. The policy decision was made both with the study and subsequent legislation to allow existing TVRs outside of the VDA to continue,” she wrote in an e-mail to Civil Beat.

“The issue with the current ordinances is not about the effectiveness of regulation but rather about the lack of due process within the regulations. This is what the proposed legislation is intended to correct,” Daubert wrote. “The current draft does address the due process issues and most likely would be signed if passed in this form.”