County moves ahead with Pahoa park plan

By HUNTER BISHOP

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Hawaii County is moving forward with development of a park in Pahoa village with funds previously set aside for a regional community park in Hawaiian Paradise Park.

The county offered to build a park in HPP last year with $5.6 million in capital improvement funds, but the subdivision association’s board of directors declined to transfer a 20-acre parcel to the County that was needed for the park.

The Puna Community Development Plan calls for new regional community parks in both HPP and Pahoa. So after the HPP plan fell through, the county’s Department of Parks and Recreation shifted its focus and funds to a 56-acre site in Pahoa behind the existing community center and swimming pool.

Members of the Pahoa Town Center Design Working Group, an offshoot of the Puna Community Development Plan, noticed recent activity on the Pahoa site, however, and were concerned that some small trees were being cut and that potentially significant cultural sites — rock walls and mounds and large trees — had been marked with pink tape.

The working group is still actively seeking public input on what will be built in the park, and a Pahoa Town Design questionnaire is currently circulating in the community for additional public input. So as surveyors hacked their way through the brush, questions arose about the money being used for the survey and whether the working group’s grass-roots planning efforts would be shunted aside by the county.

“I don’t feel like people are on the up and up, transparent, (we’re) not getting direct answers,” said working group member Bobby Garner. “The various working groups are being redirected and micro-managed as though there is some other agenda.”

But that’s not what’s happening, said parks planner James Komata of the Department of Parks and Recreation.

“Our surveyor is doing a topographical survey of the entire lower portion of the 56 acres,” he said. “They are only swinging machetes to do the line clearing, cutting nothing larger than a foot in diameter.” He said certain features are tagged with colored tape to mark what has already been surveyed, not to indicate removal.

WCIT Architects of Honolulu is doing the survey work for the county in advance of an environmental assessment for the project, which will be done by PBR Hawaii & Associates Inc. The surveying is expected to be complete by the end of the month, weather permitting, Komata said.

The park parcel, commonly referred to as a 56-acre site, is actually 71.1 acres including existing facilities — a community center, senior center, skate park and pool — that are adjacent to the 56-acre parcel slated for the new facilities.

According to a July 19 letter from Roy Takemoto, managing director for the Hilo office of PBR, the master plan “will explore alternative facilities and layouts including a covered play court facility for basketball and volleyball, a comfort station, and new ball fields.”

Garner, who is state coordinator for the Professional Disc Golf Association, would like to see a disc golf course built in the park and the community has offered up a variety of alternative cultural and recreational uses for the park.

Meanwhile, “they’re hacking large areas of ferns and palm orchards,” Garner said, describing old cane roads lined with guava that are “beautiful little tunnels, really significant trees, ohia with rock walls around their base” on the property. “It seems there was some real community intent to preserve some sites in there.”

Garner also complained that there is “no funding and no communication” in the CDP process that would help the working groups complete their task. “I can’t find out what the mandate is or where it comes from,” said Garner.

Mark Hinshaw, chairman of the Pahoa Town Center Regional Design Plan Working Group, agrees with Garner about the lack of funding. Since the volunteer working groups are part of the county’s CDP process, they should have paid administrative help to compile minutes of meetings and perform other chores, he said. Yet the working groups see funds being spent already on the park while they are still taking community input on the final plans.

Komata said the county will be having a community meeting within the next several weeks to present the current concept for the park and get additional community feedback.

“It’s important that everybody know that the conceptual plan is still a concept,” Komata said. “We know the action committee’s doing a town survey, and we will definitely be looking at the results. The park plan is not a done deal. We’re still open to input. Nothing is set in stone.”