A new free Waikiki hula show is attracting visitors and kamaaina alike, but legal challenges on how it will be funded are lingering.

The Kilohana Hula Show, which opened Feb. 15, is a joint creation of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement and the City & County of Honolulu. A modern take on the Kodak Hula Show, which began in the 1930s and ended in 2002, the one-hour show, held at the Waikiki Shell Amphitheater, is free for attendees. It runs Sundays through Thursdays at 9:30 a.m.

CNHA CEO Kuhio Lewis said the show has attracted 400 to 500 attendees daily since its opening and that the show is “very important” to the Native Hawaiian community.

“It’s a chance for us to tell our story, to share our culture and be a part of Waikiki in a meaningful way,” Lewis said. “We’re part of the production of the show, whereas usually we’re just hired for an hourlong gig here and there. It’s where you start to see Hawaiians have some sense of place in Waikiki.”

To fund the operation of the show — which Lewis said is approximately $130,000 each month — CNHA plans to hold revenue-generating activities on the evenings the hula show is held. Lewis said the organization is still figuring out exactly what the evening activity will be, but said it will not be called a luau. He said the evening activity would start after the Merrie Monarch Festival, but “the sooner, the better.”

“It is a regenerative model, where if you’re going to have these beautiful, free events, it has to somehow be self- sufficient,” Lewis said. “The concept was to do an evening activity that generates some revenue, so it would be ticketed, and then it would help pay for the free hula show in the morning that everyone can enjoy.”

But ongoing commercial use of Kapiolani Park breaks the park’s public charitable trust, according to the Kapiolani Park Preservation Society, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that Kapiolani Park, which includes the Waikiki Shell, remains free and open to the public.

“Reviving the Kodak Hula Show would be lovely. It could be a very nice thing for visitors and residents, but it has to be done properly,” KPPS President Alethea Rebman said. “(CNHA) has to follow the rules, and they can’t use (the hula show) as a wedge to set up a commercial business at the Shell.”

The trust, which was originally created in 1896, dictates that Kapiolani Park “be permanently set apart as a free public park and recreation ground forever” in its terms.

In 1988 the state Supreme Court ruled on a case between KPPS and the city, which planned to build a Burger King and construction equipment yard on the park’s property, where the court affirmed the trust and ruled against the city’s ability to lease the park for private commercial use.

Subsequent rulings in the 1990s further established rules for the park’s use, such as requiring public parking for park users and prohibiting advertisements that were unrelated to the park. The Kodak Hula Show was allowed to be held at the park as long as it didn’t charge an admission fee.

“We always say everybody wants a piece of the park,” Rebman said. “It’s sitting right there, it’s super tempting, it’s open and it’s like, ‘Why not? This would be the perfect place for fill-in-the-blank,’ and it is the perfect place for so many things, so I think that’s why people keep trying.”

Businesses illegally operating from the park include surf schools with makeshift offices consisting of desks under canopies, and temporary fitness centers, where instructors ask for “donations” to attend their classes. But Rebman said the establishment of a commercial luau five nights a week at the Waikiki Shell is “many, many, many levels beyond” workout classes or office spaces.

“People just want it for their specific thing, and with all good intentions, like, ‘This would be a great thing for the public if we only did such and such,’” Rebman said. “If any of that was allowed, there would really be very little left.”

Lewis said CNHA does not have a lease at the Shell, but instead a rental agreement that could end at any time and is not exclusive to CNHA.

“We’re talking about the Waikiki Shell. Nighttime events are there all the time,” Lewis said. “We’re renting it, just like any of the concert promoters, from ragers to reggae concerts. Everything has been over there, so I’m not clear on why a cultural event and a Hawaiian organization would be even questioned, so it’s a little disappointing, to say the least, that it’s even a conversation. It’s even, in some respects, offensive.”

The Waikiki Shell regularly hosts nighttime events, like concerts and music festivals, that charge admission fees. In a letter sent in February to state Attorney General Anne Lopez, whose department is the legal protector for the Kapiolani Park trust, Rebman wrote that the city’s normal operation of the Shell has been for “temporary special entertainments, generally on a one or two day basis.”

“Allowing … for exclusive use of the park grounds is not an appropriate or legal use of the Park, as it would restrict the free use of Park recreational resources for the public and dedicate a space for the benefit of one organization,” Rebman wrote in her letter. “This may be for the advantage of CNHA and may well be for the advantage of the City, but it is not according to the will of the donors of Park property.”

CNHA met with KPPS once in December, after their first rental agreement was signed. The organizations have not met since then.

Rebman said that at the December meeting, KPPS said it would be “happy to work with” CNHA and tried to give other suggestions as to where a commercial luau could be held, including Aloha Tower Marketplace and Sand Island.

“My concern is that their goals and their intent in meeting with us was to try to get around whatever our objections were,” Rebman said. “They amended the contract after they met with us to take out certain things that we had talked about to make it look less like a lease that we could object to.”

Lewis said that he reached out to KPPS because he “wanted to be proactive and share (the project) with them,” but was “surprised” by the organization’s reaction at the December meeting.

“I told them this is a rental agreement. We’re not getting a lease here. (The city) can boot us out at any time. It’s not exclusive,” Lewis said. “We agreed to disagree, and that’s where things are right now. There’s commercial activity there all the time, so I think they’re barking up the wrong tree.”

In her letter to the attorney general, Rebman asked for the rental agreement between CNHA and the city to be reviewed. The Department of the Attorney General said Wednesday that the investigation into the request is still ongoing.

Rebman said if the attorney general’s office doesn’t take action and CNHA proceeds with its plans to put a commercial business into the Shell, KPSS will file a lawsuit.

But the ideal result, she said, would be that CNHA continues running its free Kilohana Hula Show and drops its plans for commercial use of the park altogether.

“We’d like to not see the park used as a push-pull kind of toy to dangle out there. ‘Oh, we’re going to give you a free hula show, or we’re not going to give you a free hula show, or we’re going to, but only on these conditions,’” Rebman said. “More due diligence should have been done before going in and getting people enthused about the whole hula show returning.”

But Lewis said that if holding a revenue-generating activity in the evening were not possible to sustain the hula show, CNHA would “have to recalibrate.”

“I don’t know that we can sustain a whole show that’s costing that much money without some kind of revenue generation,” he said, “but if we didn’t feel that this was in compliance with what the trust doctrine allowed, we wouldn’t have moved forward, we wouldn’t have made this investment. So we feel very confident that we are aligned to what is allowable with the trust and what is allowable at the venue. I don’t have any plans to move this thing anywhere else. I think we have a right to be there, and we’re going to proceed with our plans.”