Houseless residents evicted from Kanaha sue county
Plaintiffs say the sweep was unconstitutional and gave them no chance to contest
Houseless residents caught up in the sweep of an extensive encampment near Kanaha Beach Park in Kahului are suing Mayor Michael Victorino and Maui County, calling the move unconstitutional and a violation of residents’ rights.
“Our lives are more chaotic because of the Kanaha sweep,” Adam Walton, one of four plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Oct. 20 in 2nd Circuit Court, said in a statement. “We’ve lost all peace of mind. We were doing everything we could to get back on top of everything and the carpet got pulled out from underneath us and we’re back to zero.”
Saying that the encampment was creating hazards for the nearby wastewater treatment facility and Kanaha Pond, Maui County and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources in late September began clearing out residents, towing abandoned vehicles and picking up trash. In less than a week, 58 tons of solid waste and 54 derelict vehicles were removed from Amala Place, Victorino said in his Oct. 2 “Our County” column in The Maui News.
A county spokesperson said Tuesday afternoon that “the County of Maui does not comment on pending litigation.”
However, Victorino defended the county’s actions in his Oct. 2 column, saying that “Amala Place has now been reclaimed as a clean, safe roadway for public access to Kanaha Beach Park.”
“The intervention was necessary to resolve the growing health and safety hazards for both encampment occupants and the community at large,” the mayor wrote. “Illegal occupation of public property had gone on for awhile, but not without offers of social services to camp occupants. For years, Family Life Center outreach workers had been meeting regularly with homeless campers there.”
Outreach meetings were held almost daily in August, and the county knew how many family groups, couples and singles would need shelter, Victorino said. “No trespassing” signs were put up on Amala Place on roadsides on Sept. 1, and Maui police officers served “notices to vacate” letters to camp occupants shortly after, he added.
But the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii, which is representing the four plaintiffs, said that the residents’ written request for a contested case hearing was filed before the sweeps began but was not answered, nor was a letter from the ACLU of Hawaii calling for the sweep to cease immediately.
The four plaintiffs and about 60 others living in the area known as Pu‘uhonua o Kanaha were forced to vacate or face arrest, the ACLU said. Many lost their belongings, including vehicles, shelters, cooking and water supplies, clothing and baby supplies.
“The county appears to believe that our clients are not entitled to constitutional protections because they are houseless and reside in public spaces,” ACLU of Hawaii Legal Director Wookie Kim said in a news release Tuesday. “We filed this lawsuit to challenge that notion. We would like the Hawaii courts to clarify — as the federal courts already have — that people do not lose their constitutional rights simply because they do not live in a house.”
Cleanup efforts began early on the morning of Sept. 20, according to the plaintiffs. Jessica Lau, a 52-year-old Hawaiian, Filipino and Chinese woman from Maui, said police first came through with lights and sirens at around 5:45 a.m. and had started making loudspeaker beeps and announcements by 7 a.m., telling residents that they needed to vacate the premises or be arrested. Lau scrambled to get her stuff out of the area, first taking her car with most of her belongings and then jumping on a bike and cycling up and down the road to help others, “but we just didn’t have enough time to take our stuff out.”
“If county workers saw a vehicle with people’s stuff inside it, they pried the doors open with crowbars, cleaned and threw out all of that property onto the ground so that the bulldozer could then pick it up,” Lau said in her statement. “I tried to stop the county from throwing out stuff from cars that I knew were not abandoned. I tried to explain, for example, that the person who owned the car and the property inside wasn’t here at the moment. But the county ignored me.”
Walton and Lauralee B. Riedell, his partner and fellow plaintiff, said that a large group of police arrived at around 9 a.m., with one officer telling them, “You know you got to go, right?” Riedell and Walton told police that they were contesting the sweep and planned to stay in place. Walton said that the notice of the sweep “provided no opportunity to contest what was about to happen” and offered no contact information “to ask questions or learn more about the process.”
“Had we known that there were options, we most definitely would have gone through that process and asked for accommodations,” Walton said.
Riedell, 48, and Walton, 40, eventually moved into the emergency pallet shelters at Waiale Park but said the structures were poorly constructed and dirty.
“It feels like jail,” Riedell said in her statement. “This place has so much potential, they could have made it more welcoming, but instead it’s dirty and it’s infested with ants. Things are not very well put together. There’s leaks, and we get cuts from sharp edges of the pallet materials. I even lost a nail after getting my fingers trapped in a door. In Kanaha, we were settled and functioning and doing what we needed to do to try to find permanent housing.”
Walton and Riedell, both house cleaners, had been unable to find a place to live within their budget on Maui and had been living in their car at Kanaha, according to the ACLU’s news release.
Lau also said she’d been juggling two jobs for most of the pandemic. She previously worked as a driver and tour guide but began experiencing health issues from long days of driving, the news release said. Around the same time, she had to give up her income to help pay rent for her disabled 30year-old son. As a result, she ended up getting evicted in early 2020 for nonpayment, making her houseless for the first time in her life.
“People keep saying that houseless people don’t want shelter,” Lau said. “That’s not true. I want to find some kind of housing. In fact, I had been calling the shelters every day for weeks and they weren’t able to find shelter or alternative housing for me.”
Plaintiff Sonia Davis, a 64year-old Native Hawaiian woman born and raised on Maui, has been recovering from surgery to treat cancer. Since her rental assistance funding ran out, she had been unable to afford housing and had been residing in Kanaha. Davis has worked hard to fight a methamphetamine addiction and has been sober since completing a rehabilitation program after being arrested in 2019 for possession of drugs, the news release said. She was arrested again for a technical violation of her probation and did not receive notice of the sweep until a few days before because she was in jail.
“Since the sweep, I have been sleeping in a parking lot by night and staying by the Kanaha Beach Park during the day,” Davis said in her statement. “I have anxiety and depression from needing to move around so much and for fear that at any moment I could be forced to move or be arrested. The sweep on the week of September 20 has exacerbated these problems.”
The lawsuit is asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment that each plaintiff’s procedural due process rights were violated, that their right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures was violated by the sweep and that the county was required to conduct a contested case for the plaintiffs. It also asks the court to require the county to hold a contested case hearing for the plaintiffs and to require that people in the future who could be affected by a sweep receive “adequate, sufficient notice and an opportunity for a contested case hearing if they request one.”