HONOLULU (AP) - The state Supreme Court has ruled the owners of Turtle Bay Resort must complete a new environmental study if they want to add thousands more hotel rooms to their property on Oahu's North Shore.
Chief Justice Ronald Moon wrote in an opinion joined by three other judges that circumstances have changed since the resort's previous owners prepared an environmental impact statement in 1985 to expand the development.
Judge Simeon Acoba concurred in a separate opinion.
Moon's opinion says traffic conditions have changed, while the endangered Hawaiian monk seal and the threatened green sea turtle now use the area unlike in the mid-1980s.
He says these factors make the project an "essentially different action" than the one considered 25 years ago.
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