Major portions of Ala Wai Community Park and next-door Ala Wai Neighborhood Park will be closed for maintenance through Dec. 26.

The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation announced the closures Tuesday and said they are not the direct result of a growing homeless population there.

The community park sits along Kalakaua Avenue and Kapiolani Boulevard and is the launch site for canoes that paddle the Ala Wai Canal. The neighborhood park is at the end of University Avenue next to Ala Wai Elementary School.

Improvements planned during the closures include planting, fertilizing and aerating new grass; trimming trees; removing graffiti; and cleaning comfort stations.

The closures will not affect park amenities that do not need maintenance. These include baseball fields, a soccer field, parking lots, a recreation building, a community garden, a dog park and canoe hale buildings, the city said.

Parks and Recreation classes and programs, as well as league play or other activities allowed with permits, will continue as scheduled.

Regular park hours will apply to areas excluded from the 24-hour closures.

Posted closure hours are 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily for the neighborhood park and 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily for the community park.

Comfort stations will be closed but portables are being brought in, parks Director Michele Nekota told the City Council Parks, Community and Customer Service Committee on Tuesday.

Three other nearby parks — Old Stadium Park, Moiliili Community Park (also known as Moiliili Field) and Crane Park — were closed for maintenance at the beginning of September. They are scheduled to remain closed through Nov. 5.

Several dozen homeless people who have been camping at those three parks were forced to leave, and a number set up tents at Ala Wai.

But Nekota told the parks committee that removing homeless from the parks is not the priority.

“Really, we’re not targeting anybody,” she said. “We’re actually looking at the actual grass and the maintenance of it. … We’re just maintaining the areas that need to be maintained.”

City officials said homeless outreach crews have been out in the area to inform those camping there about the impending closures and offering to take them to shelters.

Tim Streitz, chairman of the McCully-Moiliili Neighborhood Board, said the number of homeless living at the parks has climbed noticeably since the Old Stadium Park and Moiliili Community Park closed. Most are along a chain link fence on the Diamond Head end of the neighborhood park, which is next to a two-story walk-up apartment building and closest to Kapiolani Boulevard.

There are about 30 people living out of about 15 to 20 tents, Streitz said. “There had been maybe like four tents or so beforehand.”

Those displaced in September also scattered to the sidewalks of other areas in the neighborhood, he said. “There’ve been random encampments all over, and they’ve been shuffling around a little bit … as they get complaints from the nearby residents.”

For a time last year, people were living “up in the trees” near the dog park on the elementary school side of the park, but they left after the trees were cut down, Streitz said.

During the parks committee meeting, West Oahu Councilwoman Kymberly Pine asked how the city decides which parks to close for maintenance.

“I just feel … we see a lot of attention being placed on maintenance of town parks that are damaged, but not on the Leeward side,” Pine said. She noted that the grass is often brown or damaged at Asing and Ewa Mahiko community parks, as well as at Oneula Beach Park and other city facilities along the Waianae Coast.

“At a tiny park in Waianae, we have the same amount of people who use all of Manoa (District) Park in a little tiny park that’s maybe an eighth (in size) of Manoa’s,” Pine said.

Nekota, in response, said she met with Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi, who represents an area that includes Old Stadium Park and the Ala Wai parks, and “she gives me a lot of feedback.” She told Pine, “I would love to meet with you and just talk about it.”

Pine said, “I just want to make sure we’re never accused of favoring rich areas over poorer areas.”