Aloha Stadium Manager Ryan Andrews bashed Gov. David Ige’s decision to scrap a convoluted public-private partnership for a new stadium and entertainment district in Halawa, opting for a simpler path focused on the stadium.
“Any change at this point will cause a delay or will cause us to have to start over, and that’s what I would hate to see, is to start this process over and to kick this project out even further,” Andrews told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” livestream program.
Bureaucrats might hate Ige’s move, but for taxpayers it’s a good thing.
Don’t we wish somebody had slammed the brakes and reset Honolulu rail early on, when the project was sputtering and obviously heading toward the costly disaster it’s become?
The stadium shows alarming signs of a similar grim fate.
It started as a sleazy gut-and-replace deal in the 2019 Legislature, after lawmakers couldn’t pass it through the regular order of public hearings and three votes in each house.
Legislators married the new stadium to a commercial entertainment district on the property, a giveaway to developers and contractors that would yield a hotel, tony restaurants, upscale retail and little of the affordable housing Oahu desperately needs.
Nearly every session since, lawmakers led by district Sen. Glenn Wakai have sloppily changed the plan.
They initially allocated $350 million for the project, then cut it to $175 million another year before upping it to $400 million this year.
Oversight was originally given to the Hawaii Community Development Authority, which governs Kakaako, then abruptly switched the next year to the Aloha Stadium Authority, which has no experience building a stadium — much less an entertainment district — and poorly managed the old stadium.
Ultimately, the Department of Accounting and General Services took the lead until the Legislature pulled another switcheroo this year and assigned the project to the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. Neither has relevant experience with public-private partnerships.
Amid all this the Stadium Authority closed the existing stadium without warning, leaving University of Hawaii football homeless and in danger of losing Division I status. The initially promised 2023 opening of a new stadium has slipped to 2027 at the earliest.
Growing numbers of fed-up citizens, and three former governors, have called for devoting the Halawa site primarily to workforce housing.
But DAGS and the Stadium Authority are defying Ige and lobbying gubernatorial candidates Josh Green and Duke Aiona, one of whom will take over in 10 weeks, to revive their PPP scheme.
DAGS lead Chris Kinimaka ludicrously suggests $400 million, well more than other recent stadiums have cost, isn’t enough.
Nothing good can come from this chaos.
Ige hasn’t detailed his plan, and as a lame duck won’t have final say, but he’s right a new stadium must be simplified and divorced from surrounding development. The $400 million allocated is plenty to build a stadium suitable to Hawaii’s needs without private involvement.
Affordable housing on the site is a priority, and any grandiose entertainment district that gives it short shrift should be a nonstarter.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
