OCEAN VIEW — Abandoned vehicles littering Hawaii Island roadways is not a new phenomenon. Neither are individuals residing in said vehicles, as the homeless numbers in the county continue to rise annually, jumping nearly 12.5 percent from 2015 to 2016, according to statewide Point in Time Count statistics.
But one such situation in Ocean View has parents worried. A white van, clearly being used as a residence, with curtains draping the windows and picture frames set up across the dashboard, has been parked just off the roadside near the intersection of Lotus Blossom Lane and Princess Kaiulani Boulevard for months, according to parents in the neighborhood.
It’s situated only 20 yards or so from a heavily trafficked bus stop that serves a range of students between preschool and middle school from both the Naalehu and Pahala school systems.
“My concerns are obviously the sanitation issue,” said Everett Delao, whose children use the bus stop every weekday. “It’s clear (the occupants) are using the bushes as a bathroom because you can smell it. We’ll find beer bottles down there and various trash collecting around the vehicle.”
“The other concern is what type of people is this vehicle residence attracting?”
Delao said from conversations he’s had with other parents and what he’s observed himself, it’s an older couple living in the van. He said they’ve both come over to parents, some of whom now wait with the children in the morning until the buses arrive, asking for cigarettes or money, requesting to borrow a cellphone or trying to sell homemade jewelry.
Attempts by the WHT on Thursday and Friday to locate the individuals frequenting the vehicle were unsuccessful.
More than that, Delao said he’s seen other cars pull up and drop people off, who then hop into the van with its residents.
As to what they might be doing behind draped windows, Delao can only speculate. But as children are often dropped off between 6-6:30 a.m. when it’s still dark, he no longer feels safe leaving his kids there alone.
“I was dropping my kids off in the morning and going to work, but I don’t do that now because I’m concerned about who is coming and going,” he said.
These concerns neither begin nor end with Delao.
One woman picking up her children Thursday afternoon, who asked to remain anonymous, said she remembers the van being there since the first day of school. The increasingly aggressive behavior of the vehicle’s occupants — approaching parents and children and asking for favors or trying to sell homemade goods — has left her unsettled.
Jeanette Ellison has three children who use the stop. She said she’s fed up that it’s been months since the initial complaints, yet still nothing has been done by police or the schools to alleviate the problem.
She implied that the lack of action may be emboldening others living in abandoned vehicles to escape the increased police presence in crowded areas like Kona and Hilo, relocating to Ocean View and other areas of the island where they’ll meet less official resistance.
“There’s the car here and there’s another about two streets up at Orchid,” she said. “The worry is real. We drop (our kids) off when it’s still dark. It’s pretty frustrating that nothing has been done.”
Abandoning a vehicle is punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, and offenders may also be subject to a littering charge with a maximum fine of the same amount, as well as court-mandated community service. An ordinance also exists making habitation of a vehicle illegal between the hours of 6 p.m.-6 a.m. unless the vehicle is parked on private property with the property owner’s permission.
During the first six months of 2016, more than 280 vehicles were abandoned in the Kona District alone, an increase of 250 percent from the same time period in 2015, according to previous WHT reports on the issue.
Delao said he’s reached out to the administration at Naalehu Elementary School, who told him they’d received other calls, are aware of the problem and have contacted police.
What else individual schools or the Hawaii Department of Education might be able to do beyond reporting the situation is unclear. It’s also unclear if abandoned vehicles next to bus stops or in school zones pose a common problem across the county and the state, or whether the situation in Ocean View is isolated.
Neither the Naalehu administration nor the DOE responded to requests for comment on Friday.
Delao said both he and other parents he’s spoken to have also called the Ka’u police station, but thus far to no avail.
Sgt. Robert Pauole of the Hawaii Police Department’s Traffic Services Section said the common process to deal with an abandoned vehicle is as follows: A call comes in, an officer marks the vehicle as abandoned, a report is filed and passed on to a supervisor who then signs off on the report. Traffic services then sends the report to the Department of Environmental Management, which states it will typically remove a vehicle within 72 hours.
All told, Pauole, who spoke about the issue generally and not the Ocean View situation specifically, said the process should take around a week to complete, but can be held up for several reasons.
However, the van next to the Ocean View bus stop has been there at least two months, if not longer, according to parents.
Pauole, who doesn’t work in the district, said one possibility is that the intersection in question is comprised of private and not public roads.
Trevor Jackson, land surveyor with the Department of Public Works, confirmed that as part of the Hawaiian Ocean View Estates subdivision, both Lotus Blossom Lane and Princess Kaiulani Boulevard are private roads.
“The roads were never dedicated to county, so they’re privately owned. The county doesn’t have jurisdiction over the roadways themselves,” Jackson said. “I can’t speak to what the police powers are, but the roads are private in the sense that they’re not owned by a government agency, but they are open to public use.”
Police are still able to issue traffic violations and mark vehicles as abandoned on private roadways, but removal is clearly trickier, otherwise, based on what Pauole said, the abandoned vehicle next to the Ocean View bus stop would have been removed weeks ago.
Removal may require requests from community associations or the like that are associated with the private roadways before anything can be done, Jackson said.
The Ka’u Community Policing Section was not available for comment Friday as to why they have yet to resolve the issue despite multiple calls voicing concern. The department didn’t answer the phone on Saturday.
Delao said he spoke with an officer in Ka’u a couple weeks back who told him that patrol had driven by the vehicle, but had not yet encountered the its occupants.
“The officer said his dilemma was that if they go by and nobody is there, they can’t do anything,” Delao said.