For the past month, water from a disintegrating plantation-era irrigation ditch has been flooding parts of Charles Huang’s land on Oʻahu’s North Shore.

Huang rents the land to New Zealand property developer Arthur Morgenstern for his polo horses. Huang and others suspect the concrete-lined ditch breached during heavy rains earlier this month, flooding the 17-acre parcel’s entrance. Prior to that, it had been seeping out for about six months. Huang said they haven’t been able to drive through the part of the land where a small creek has appeared.

The horse operation trucks in water because it hasn’t been given access to the irrigation ditch, and that has made the flooding especially frustrating, Huang said. 

“They say there’s not enough water on the island, and they’re just wasting all this water,” he said.

The ditch running through Huang’s land is just a small part of the approximately 30-mile-long irrigation system that snakes throughout Central Oʻahu, where it provides between 6 million and 10 million gallons of water to about 3,000 acres of active farmland every day. 

After years of planning and negotiation, the state is edging closer to acquiring the system and its source – Lake Wilson – from its current owners, Dole Food Co., and the private property owner Sustainable Hawaiʻi. Landowners like Huang are feeling a sense of urgency as the ditches and pipelines disintegrate and Wahiawā Dam has failed to meet safety standards for years. 

The state has been working on a deal since at least 2023, and Gov. Josh Green signed off on negotiations and set aside money to make it happen. But almost three years later, it’s not clear why exactly it’s taking so long. The state has put $4.9 million in escrow for the purchase of the spillway, but it has yet to secure the remainder of the deal with Dole. 

Dole offered to donate its interest in the system to the state in 2023, in exchange for much needed but costly repairs. Now as state agencies assess the infrastructure, those costs are continuing to rise, but the state says a deal is imminent.

In the meantime, Huang said, Dole has only done minor upkeep of the ditches. 

“They said they’re just going to do a Band-Aid fix,” he said. “Then they’re going to leave it for the State of Hawaiʻi to do all the major work later. Before, they were always maintaining it but they just neglected it.” 

In The Pipeline

The Waialua Sugar Co. built Lake Wilson, the Wahiawā Dam and its spillway and the 30 miles of irrigation ponds and ditches in the early 1900s to feed 17,000 acres of sugarcane and pineapple.

The system provided up to 50 million gallons per day in its early years, though by the time the company shuttered in 1996, that number had dropped to about 30 million. The water network directly supported 411 agriculture jobs and produced $85 million in economic benefits by 2007, according to a Department of Agriculture report, while costing about $735,000 to maintain. 

Now, after years of neglect, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has classified Wahiawā Dam as a “high hazard dam,” with the risk of catastrophic failure putting 2,500 lives at risk. And the expenses associated with upgrades and increased maintenance costs prompted the system’s owners to put it up for sale to the state. 

Lawmakers and state officials see the historic infrastructure as an important part of the agricultural renaissance they envision for Hawaiʻi. As a network of state agencies, including the Department of Land and Natural Resources and state-run Agribusiness Development Corp., work to increase food production and resurrect the state’s agricultural economy, and hopes of restoring the irrigation system to its former glory are running high. Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz of Wahiawā, chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, has long been a key advocate for the cause.

“People want us to invest in being able to grow our own food,” said Rep. Amy Perruso, also of Central Oʻahu, adding that support from the money committee chair “kind of makes it a given.” 

Escalating Costs

The state is close to closing on its purchase of a 143-acre portion of Lake Wilson from Sustainable Hawaiʻi for $4.9 million. But the state agriculture department, which is overseeing the purchases and upgrades, will now need more than twice what lawmakers budgeted for the purchase in 2023. 

The state set aside $26 million in 2023, including $6 million for Sustainable Hawaiʻi’s portion, which includes the spillway. The remaining funds were to go to Dole for the rest of the system. Now the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity estimates it will need an additional $31.5 million. That money is needed to bring the dam and spillway into compliance with current safety standards, based on the agriculture department’s assessments. 

The initial $20 million estimate was probably not the result of an in-depth scoping process, says Brian Kau, chief engineer of the state Agricultural Resource Management Division. “It would have been based on a super-duper preliminary guess of what has to be done,” he told Civil Beat. 

The agriculture department, the Department of Land and Natural Resources and Agribusiness Development Corp. are all acquiring portions of the land, while the corporation will eventually take ownership of the whole system and manage it. 

The corporation will work alongside the agriculture department to upgrade the dam and spillway to compliance before restoring the disintegrating irrigation ditches, ADC Executive Director Wendy Gady said. 

The department aimed to acquire the remainder of the system from Dole by June 2026, the end of the fiscal year, though Gady said the ADC is “ahead of schedule” and that a deal could be signed within a few months. 

Dole’s general manager Dan Nellis confirmed the intended timeline. The business is just waiting for the state to finalize its process, he told Civil Beat in a recent email.

The system is just one of several hefty investments into Wahiawā in recent years, as the state-owned corporation increases its portfolio with the Central Oʻahu Agriculture and Food Hub, which includes a large centralized kitchen to produce school meals with a greater proportion of locally produced food. 

“There’s so many moving parts to this thing,” Hawaiʻi Farm Bureau Executive Director Brian Miyamoto said. “But like many, we want to see this complete and not drawn out so we can focus on other things that we need for agriculture.”

Making the irrigation system a state asset could provide some stability for farmers, Miyamoto said, which is what they need if they’re going to invest in growing more local food for the state. 

Once the spillway and dam are safety compliant, Gady said, the corporation hopes to canvas local farmers and landowners to help identify priority areas for the system’s renovation.

“It’s really key, especially in this day and age when we’ve got serious issues with drought,” Gady said. “Whenever we do get water, we have to capture the surges and be really smart about it.”

“Hawai‘i Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation. Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change and the environment is supported by The Healy Foundation, the Marisla Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.