Berg: West Oahu Should Secede From Honolulu
After years of hosting landfills and power plants and not receiving a fair share of infrastructure expenditures, it’s time for a drastic step in Leeward Oahu.
It’s time to leave.
That’s the plan, according to District 1 Honolulu City Council member Tom Berg. He said he’s been working for months on a resolution that would place a question on the ballot asking voters if Leeward Oahu should secede from the county and form its own government.
“I got a resolution in the making to have West Oahu secede from the county,” Berg said in a phone interview with Civil Beat Friday, pronouncing the word like “succeed” but clarifying that he was referring to “secession.”
“We in West Oahu should secede from the county because we’ve got to put a stop to the broken treaties and the dumping,” he said.
Berg said he wants West Oahu to become its own entity so it can levy taxes to pay for infrastructure improvements the City and County of Honolulu hasn’t undertaken. He said the money would be used to fix potholes, pay for air conditioning in area schools, and build a secondary access road so Waianae Coast residents have an escape route in the event of a natural disaster.
He complained about the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill — which was promised to be closed many times but remains open for business. Next door is Hawaiian Electric’s power plant and not too far is the PVT construction debris landfill. He said the host community benefits package provided by the city government has been insufficient to balance out the negative impacts in Leeward Oahu.
“We’re the ashtray for all Oahu,” he said.
Berg compared the situation to a dispute on the Big Island in which some residents wanted Hilo and Kona to have separate governments. He said there’s no resolution number yet as he has not yet introduced the measure.
It’s not clear exactly what Berg’s resolution will say. The power to create counties is left to the Hawaii Legislature under the terms of the .
But the Constitution also explicitly says county charters are superior to state laws when it comes to the structure and organization of local governments. As of today, the defines the City and County of Honolulu as the island of Oahu and all other islands in the state not already included in another county.
But that could change.
If Berg’s able to get enough support from his colleagues — of the nine-member Council on three separate readings — then it would be put on the ballot for all Oahu voters. And if they changed that language, then the City and County of Honolulu could be defined to exclude, for example, the Waianae Coast. In that scenario, the excluded portion would not yet have the powers and privileges of the state’s four existing political subdivisions, and couldn’t levy taxes, pass laws or otherwise govern its citizens — without say-so from the Legislature.
