This has been a year of strong citizen pushback and organized opposition to government — backed building projects around the state. Certainly, many of the situations that have boiled over in 2019 have been simmering for years, but this has been an extraordinary time of salt-of-the-earth, everyday people just rising up and demanding that the overbuilding, developing and redeveloping just stop.
The efforts to stop the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea have been wrongly cast as culture vs. science, when it is actually about preservation vs. not-preservation. What is the opposite of preservation? The dictionary lists possible antonyms including neglect, destruction and ruin. If there is a thread connecting these various uprisings, it is those “opposites of preservation” in a small island community.
It’s easier to see out in the laid-back country communities or atop a proud mountain, but in urban Honolulu, a part of Hawaii that has been built up and paved over for more than a hundred years, the fight is to preserve just a stretch of open space in an already crowded beach.
On Saturday, members of the Save Ala Moana Beach Park Hui are holding what they’re calling a “Pop-Up Rally” to let people know their concerns about plans for the park. The rally is being held in the spot where a proposed 1-acre zip-line, splash-pad and concession-stand playground would be built. Their intended message, organizers say, is to let the city know, “enough already.”
“We appreciate what has already been done to the park (fixing bathrooms, irrigation, road repair) but we don’t need to spend any more to ‘activate the park’ to make this a world class park,” the group said in a press release. “It already is the busiest park on Oahu and one that local people love as is.”
At the rally will be speakers sharing their concerns about the proposed project (which would be funded by private donations) and offering suggestions for other places in town to build a fancy playground, places that aren’t already so heavily used and full of world-class activities like a beautiful swimming beach. The event will start at 10 a.m., but members of the hui and Malama Manoa will be there early to do a volunteer cleanup of the park to further show their aloha for the place. Shar Chun-Lum, one of the organizers of the event, said all the City Council members have been invited, as has the mayor, the director of city parks and the private nonprofit group behind the playground idea.
The opposition to the proposed playground at Ala Moana comes after residents watched wide-eyed and silent in recent years as luxury housing towers rose up throughout nearby Kakaako. Ala Moana Regional Park, with its green lawns for birthday parties, water-balloon fights and just sitting peacefully on the grass, is, in some ways, the last thing left to preserve in an otherwise overbuilt part of the city.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@ staradvertiser.com.
