EvilCorporations.com • Docket No. UIC-09-2024-0016 • 22 min read

Decades of Sewage: Bank of Hawaii Let Illegal Cesspools Drain Into Kauai’s Drinking Water For Nearly 20 Years After the Federal Deadline

A federal consent order exposes how Bank of Hawaii, trustee of a 501(c)(3) public park, kept raw sanitary waste seeping into underground drinking water sources on Kauai for two decades past the legal closure deadline, paid $58,000 to settle, and waived its right to challenge any of it.

What Is a Large-Capacity Cesspool and Why Is It a Federal Crime to Run One?

Most people picture cesspools as an old-fashioned plumbing problem. The federal government classified them as something far more serious: underground injection wells that pump contaminants directly into the earth.

• Under 40 C.F.R. § 144.3, a cesspool qualifies as a “drywell,” which is legally a “well.” A large-capacity cesspool (LCC) is defined as a device with an open bottom and sometimes perforated sides that receives sanitary waste, including human excreta, from multiple dwellings, communities, or regional sources serving 20 or more people per day.
• These structures do not contain waste. That is the point. The open bottom allows liquids, pathogens, nitrates, bacteria, and other contaminants to leach directly into the soil and migrate downward toward underground sources of drinking water (USDWs), which communities depend on for clean tap water.
• The EPA classified LCCs as Class V injection wells under its Underground Injection Control (UIC) program, the same regulatory framework that governs industrial wastewater disposal and hazardous fluid injection. Operating one without authorization is a direct violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
• Congress gave the EPA authority to ban these wells under Sections 1421 and 1422 of the Safe Drinking Water Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 300h and 300h-1. The EPA used that authority to issue a hard deadline: all existing LCCs must close by April 5, 2005. New ones were prohibited starting April 5, 2000.
• Hawaii is one of the states where the EPA directly administers the UIC program because Hawaii never obtained “primacy” (state-level authority) over the program. That means the federal government, not the state, is the direct enforcement authority for cesspool violations in Hawaii.

The Timeline: From Federal Deadline to Two Decades of Non-Compliance

The federal deadline was unambiguous. The violations were not a gray area. What followed was nearly 20 years of inaction while the clock ticked and the cesspools kept draining.

• Bank of Hawaii has operated the Kukuiolono Golf Course property at 854 Puu Road, Kalaheo, Kauai (TMK 4-2-3-005-002) since at least August 20, 1918, making it one of the longest-running institutional landholdings on the island. The bank operates this property as trustee of the Kukuiolono Park Trust Estate.
• A second parcel at 4255 Papalina Road (TMK (4) 2-3-005: 024), containing the Kukuiolono Camp residential dwellings, has been under the trust’s operation since approximately 1943. Both properties contained cesspools for the entire duration of their operation.
• The three cesspools identified in the enforcement action served: the Kukuiolono Golf Course Comfort Station, the Kukuiolono Park Pavilion (both on the 854 Puu Road parcel), and the Kukuiolono Camp residential dwellings (on the Papalina Road parcel). All three qualify as LCCs under federal regulations.
• April 5, 2005 was the federally mandated closure deadline for all existing LCCs nationwide. Bank of Hawaii did not close the cesspools on that date. Nor in 2006. Nor in 2010. Nor in 2015. Nor in 2020. The EPA alleges each day after April 5, 2005 constitutes a separate violation.
• The consent agreement was signed by Bank of Hawaii Vice Presidents Robin L. Nonaka and Flora Arney on October 24, 2023, and by EPA Enforcement Director Amy C. Miller-Bowen on November 1, 2023. Docket No. UIC-09-2024-0016.
• The consent order gives Bank of Hawaii until December 31, 2024 to finally close all three cesspools, meaning the total span from the federal closure deadline to actual required closure will be approximately 19 years and 270 days.

“Each day that Respondent failed to close the alleged LCCs at the Kukuiolono Golf Course Comfort Station, Kukuiolono Park Pavilion, and the Kukuiolono Camp residential dwellings after April 5, 2005, constitutes a violation.”
— EPA Consent Agreement, Docket No. UIC-09-2024-0016, Paragraph 32

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Law Cannot Put a Price On

There is no line item in a consent agreement for trust. For the particular weight that settles in your chest when you learn that the water beneath your community has been at risk for nearly two decades because someone with a legal duty decided that closing three holes in the ground was not urgent enough to bother with.

Kukuiolono Park is a public park. The golf course is open to residents and visitors on the island of Kauai. The pavilion hosts community gatherings. The camp houses people in residential dwellings. These are not abstract environmental coordinates on a map. They are places where families picnic, where kids play, where neighbors live. And underneath those places, three open-bottomed pits have been slowly injecting human waste into the earth, year after year, for almost two decades past the date the federal government said: this must stop.

The people who live in Kalaheo did not get a letter saying their community’s groundwater was at elevated risk. They did not get a town hall meeting. They got nothing, because the regulatory process is not designed to tell communities when an institution has decided to ignore a federal deadline. The EPA finds out when it gets around to it. The community finds out when a journalist publishes a consent order.

The Kukuiolono Park Trust Estate is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. That means it is a charitable organization, theoretically operated for public benefit, with tax-exempt status granted by the federal government. The same federal government that had to sue it to stop it from running illegal sewage injection wells. The same federal government that ultimately accepted $58,000 as resolution for roughly 7,200 days of documented violations.

On Kauai, underground aquifers are not a technicality. They are how people drink. The Hawaiian islands have limited surface water infrastructure relative to their population. Groundwater, specifically the underground sources of drinking water that the Safe Drinking Water Act was written to protect, is a fundamental resource. When an open-bottomed pit full of human waste sits above that resource for 19 years, the harm is real, even when it is invisible, even when nobody has yet handed you a test result proving the aquifer was compromised.

The harm of non-compliance is probabilistic, not always provable in a test tube. But the people in the path of that probability did not choose to be there. They did not choose a trustee who needed a federal enforcement action to close a cesspool. They did not get a say in whether their community’s groundwater would be the thing put at risk so that a golf course comfort station could avoid a renovation project for another year, and then another, and then another, for nineteen years running.

Bank of Hawaii manages billions of dollars in trust assets. The Trust Services Group, represented by two vice presidents in this consent agreement, is a sophisticated fiduciary operation. The argument that the bank did not know about the April 2005 federal deadline is not credible. The argument that it could not afford the closure is equally implausible. What the record shows is that nothing happened until the federal government came knocking, and when it did, the bank’s response was to write a check for $58,000 and agree to finally do what the law required in 2005.

That is the non-financial ledger. Not a number. A pattern of institutional indifference, quietly accumulating in the soil beneath a public park on an island where clean water is not something people take for granted.

Legal Receipts: What the Document Actually Says

These are direct verbatim quotes from the consent agreement and final order. No paraphrasing. The document speaks for itself.

“40 C.F.R. §§ 144.84(b)(2) and 144.88 required owners or operators of existing LCCs to have closed them by April 5, 2005. New LCCs were prohibited as of April 5, 2000.”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 24

“EPA alleges that each day that Respondent failed to close the alleged LCCs at the Kukuiolono Golf Course Comfort Station, Kukuiolono Park Pavilion, and the Kukuiolono Camp residential dwellings after April 5, 2005, constitutes a violation of 40 C.F.R. §§ 144.84(b)(2) and 144.88.”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 32

“Respondent: admits the jurisdictional allegations of the CA/FO; neither admits nor denies specific factual allegations contained in the CA/FO; consents to the assessment of any stated civil penalty, and to any conditions specified in the Consent Agreement; and waives any right to contest the allegations and its right to appeal the proposed Final Order.”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 7

“Under Section 1423(c)(1) of the SDWA, 42 U.S.C. § 300h-2(c)(1), and 40 C.F.R. Part 19, EPA may assess a civil penalty of not more than $27,018 for each day of violation, up to a maximum administrative penalty of $337,725, for violations occurring after November 2, 2015 where penalties are assessed on or after January 6, 2023.”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 27

“This civil penalty represents an administrative civil penalty and shall not be deductible for purposes of federal taxes. 26 U.S.C. § 162(f).”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 36

“The provisions of this CA/FO shall apply to and be binding upon Respondent and its officers, directors, employees, and successors or assigns.”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 61 — meaning this obligation does not disappear if the bank transfers the trust

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays the Price When the Bank Does Nothing

Public Health

Large-capacity cesspools are classified as a public health threat specifically because of what they inject into the ground and where that material ends up.

• The defining hazard of an LCC is its open bottom. Liquids, including raw human excreta, bacteria, viruses, and nitrates, leach directly into the unsaturated soil zone and migrate toward underground drinking water aquifers. The EPA banned LCCs precisely because this contamination pathway is not theoretical; it is the designed function of the device.
• Nitrate contamination from human waste in drinking water is a documented public health hazard, particularly for infants, who can develop methemoglobinemia (low blood oxygen) from elevated nitrate levels in formula water. Communities dependent on groundwater wells near cesspool sites face elevated exposure risk.
• Pathogens including fecal coliform bacteria, E. coli, and enteric viruses can travel significant distances through porous soil and fractured basalt, which is common in Hawaiian geology. Volcanic island aquifer systems are particularly vulnerable because the basalt rock provides fast-moving conduits for contaminants rather than natural filtration.
• The EPA’s UIC program exists specifically because underground water contamination, once established, is extremely difficult to remediate. Cleanup of a contaminated aquifer can cost millions of dollars and take decades. Prevention, the entire point of the 2005 deadline, is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective.
• The Kukuiolono properties serve a public park, a golf course with a comfort station, a pavilion used for community events, and residential dwellings. The people using those facilities, and the people living in those dwellings, were in proximity to active illegal injection wells for approximately 19 years after federal law required them to be closed.

Economic Inequality

The enforcement gap in this case follows a pattern that shows up again and again in environmental compliance: the penalty is too small to deter, and the burden falls on those with the least power to avoid it.

• Bank of Hawaii is one of the largest financial institutions headquartered in Hawaii, with billions of dollars in assets under management. Its Trust Services Group manages complex estate and institutional trust portfolios. The $58,000 penalty represents a negligible compliance cost relative to the institution’s financial capacity.
• The economic benefit of non-compliance, over nearly 20 years, was the avoided cost of cesspool closure and replacement with a compliant wastewater system. Cesspool-to-sewer or cesspool-to-individual wastewater system conversions in Hawaii typically cost tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand dollars per property. By delaying, the trust saved money it was legally required to spend in 2005.
• The maximum per-proceeding administrative penalty of $337,725 was not collected. The settlement of $58,000 means Bank of Hawaii paid approximately 17 cents on the dollar of the legal ceiling. A community resident who operated an illegal cesspool at a single-family property would face the same per-day penalty structure with far less capacity to negotiate a favorable settlement.
• Working-class residents in Kalaheo and surrounding areas on Kauai’s south shore depend on groundwater quality they cannot individually monitor or protect. They have no enforcement authority. They have no standing in this consent agreement. They found out about this through a public notice process that most people never see.
• Hawaii has a statewide cesspool problem, with an estimated 88,000 cesspools statewide, disproportionately affecting rural and lower-income communities that lack access to municipal sewer systems. Federal enforcement actions like this one are rare; the vast majority of non-compliant cesspools face no federal action at all, meaning the contamination risk is systemic, not isolated.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric: Breaking Down the Math of Impunity

What the Public Understood vs. What Was Actually Happening

What Now? Accountability Doesn’t End With a Consent Order

A consent order is a floor, not a ceiling. Here is who holds ongoing power in this situation and what people can do about it.

The People Who Signed This

• Robin L. Nonaka, Vice President and Manager, Bank of Hawaii Trust Services Group — signed the consent agreement on behalf of Respondent, October 24, 2023.
• Flora Arney, Vice President, Bank of Hawaii Trust Services Group — co-signed the consent agreement on behalf of Respondent, October 24, 2023.
• Amy C. Miller-Bowen, Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 9 — signed on behalf of the EPA, November 1, 2023, and authorized the settlement terms.
• Beatrice Wong, Regional Judicial Officer, EPA Region 9 — issued the Final Order as Regional Judicial Officer.

Regulatory Watchlist: Bodies With Ongoing Jurisdiction

• EPA Region 9 (San Francisco): Direct UIC enforcement authority in Hawaii. This consent order requires quarterly progress reports and a Final LCC Closure Report with photographic evidence. Public can submit comments and inquiries to the Regional Hearing Clerk at 75 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Enforcement Officer: Jelani Shareem (shareem.jelani@epa.gov).
• Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH): The consent order requires Bank of Hawaii to comply with all HDOH closure, conversion, and replacement requirements. HDOH’s Wastewater Branch has state-level oversight of cesspool conversions and individual wastewater system installations. File inquiries and public records requests directly with HDOH.
• EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG): Independent oversight body for EPA enforcement decisions. If you believe the $58,000 settlement was inadequate or that the administrative process failed the public interest, the OIG accepts public complaints at oig.epa.gov.
• U.S. Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division: Has authority to bring judicial enforcement actions for SDWA violations, including cases where administrative penalties are insufficient. Cases can be referred by EPA under Section 1423(c)(7) of the SDWA.
• Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Exempt Organizations Division: The Kukuiolono Park Trust Estate holds 501(c)(3) status. Operating facilities in violation of federal environmental law for nearly 20 years raises questions about whether the trust is being operated consistently with its charitable mission and tax-exempt status. IRS Form 13909 allows the public to report concerns about tax-exempt organizations.

Grassroots and Community Action

• Track the closure deadline. The consent order requires cesspool closure by December 31, 2024. File a public records request with EPA Region 9 after that date to obtain the Final LCC Closure Report and the photographic evidence of closure. If the bank missed the deadline, it owes $300 per day in stipulated penalties.
• Connect with local water advocates. Organizations like the Surfrider Foundation Hawaii Chapter, Life of the Land Hawaii, and the Hawaii Wildlife Fund have longstanding campaigns around cesspool pollution. They have the technical expertise and community networks to contextualize this enforcement action within the broader statewide problem.
• Know your groundwater rights. If you live in Kalaheo or Kauai’s south shore and draw water from a private well or a community water system fed by groundwater, you have the right to request water quality testing data from your water system operator under the Safe Drinking Water Act’s public notification and consumer confidence report requirements.
• Push for stronger state-level enforcement. Hawaii has approximately 88,000 cesspools statewide. The state passed Act 125 in 2017 requiring cesspool upgrades over time, but enforcement and funding have been inconsistent. Contact your state legislators and the Hawaii Department of Health to demand robust implementation, priority enforcement for properties near drinking water sources, and adequate funding for low-income property owners who cannot afford conversion costs.
• Demand transparent public notice. The 40-day public comment period required before this consent order became final is legally mandated but practically obscure. Push EPA Region 9 and your county government to proactively notify affected communities, not just post a legal notice that most residents will never see, when enforcement actions involving drinking water threats are settled near their homes.