Honorable Robert Bunda

President of the Senate

Twenty-Second State Legislature

Regular Session of 2003

State of Hawaii

Sir:

Your Committees on Water, Land, and Agriculture and Energy and Environment, to which was referred H.B. No. 192, H.D. 1, entitled:

beg leave to report as follows:

The purpose of this measure is to include accreted lands in the definition of state public lands, although allowing a private property owner to file an accretion claim to regain title to the owner's eroded land that has been restored by accretion.

Testimony in support of this measure was submitted by an Hawaii County Councilmember, Life of the Land, Ka Lahui Hawai`i Political Action Committee, and three concerned citizens. The Board of Land and Natural Resources requested a deferral of the measure.

Your Committees find that this measure will stop the unlawful taking of public beach land under the guise of fulfilling a nonexistent littoral right supposedly belonging to shorefront property owners. The measure will help protect Hawaii's public lands and fragile beaches and effectuate the State's constitutional mandate in Article XI, section 1, that all public natural resources are held in trust by the State for the benefit of the people.

Your Committees have amended the measure to require that the person bringing an action to quiet title by accretion must provide public notice of the action and to require that the agency receiving the accretion application supply the Office of Environmental Quality Control with the public notice so that it may include it in its periodic bulletin.

As affirmed by the records of votes of the members of your Committees on Water, Land, and Agriculture and Energy and Environment that are attached to this report, your Committees are in accord with the intent and purpose of H.B. No. 192, H.D. 1, as amended herein, and recommend that it pass Second Reading in the form attached hereto as H.B. No. 192, H.D. 1, S.D. 1, and be referred to the Committee on Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs.