Respecting Thomas Square, City Council Bill 23 protects all of Oahu’s pubic parks by helping to ensure that they remain under the care and management of the Parks Department.
Moreover, both Thomas Square, dedicated by King Kamehameha III and demarcated by his Privy Council in 1850, and Kapiolani Park, dedicated by King Kalakaua in 1877, are protected by the Organic Act of 1890 as the free and open public parks they are today and in perpetuity.
The historic banyan trees of Thomas Square were planted in the 1880s, and the mock-orange hedge that is now being destroyed under the city’s new plan was designed in the 1930s by Honolulu landscape architects Thompson and Thompson, whose noteworthy work also includes Washington Place, Irwin Park, the Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Academy of Art) and Ala Moana Park.
The City Council passed Bill 23 by unanimous vote of 9-0. The mayor’s veto of this important bill leads the city down a slippery slope and sets a dangerous precedent. The first example would be the mayor’s intended takeover of Thomas Square by the city’s Department of Enterprise Services, whose operations center on monetization and commercialization of city properties.
This misguided pursuit would be wholly inappropriate for Thomas Square as well as any of Honolulu’s treasured parks. Further telling is the former role of the present Enterprise Department’s administrative director as a board director of the quickly repealed and now defunct Public Lands Development Corporation (PLDC).
Honolulu’s worthy Parks Department manages and cares for our public parks, including permitting park-related activities such as those in Kapiolani Park. There is no rational need for the city’s Enterprise Department to interlope and intrude on the Parks Department’s kuleana.
Tossing our parks into the jaws of the Enterprise Department is not the answer, especially in view of the chaos and clutter of commercial enterprises presently taking over its Blaisdell Center grounds. Clearly it would not be in the public interest for such commercialism to creep across the street to Thomas Square.
First and foremost, the Parks Department should have the necessary resources to care for and maintain our public parks, with the needed and deserved support from the City Council and the mayor as it strives to do so. Honolulu can do better than to tie with two other cities for a No. 32 urban-parks ranking in the United States.
Clearly, the City Council could collaborate with the city administration and specifically work with the Parks Department to ensure optimum upkeep of our parks with best management strategies under continued important protections. Conversely, allowing the present veto to stand and trying to work with the city’s Enterprise Department would undoubtedly lead to further controversies and additional legislative and administrative challenges.
For the protection and preservation of our free and open public parks to benefit the people of Honolulu in the greater public interest, it is now the City Council’s public duty to demonstrate credibility by honoring its unanimous vote on the passage of Bill 23 and overriding the mayor’s veto of this important and protective legislation.
Michelle Spalding Matson is president of the O‘ahu Island Parks Conservancy.
