The Captain Cook Fire Station will be renamed the Kealakekua Fire Station in a ceremony on Tuesday.
North Kona Councilman Holeka Inaba spearheaded the name change for Hawaii Fire Department Station 6 to give the Hawaii County facility a moniker proper to the area and to further a stalled 2022 effort by fellow Big Island lawmaker, state House Rep. Jeanne Kapela, to urge the federal government to re-designate the town of Captain Cook as Ka‘awaloa, as the area was known before Western contact.
Inaba said that while the resolution was shelved after crossing over to the Senate in 2022, the use of the name Captain Cook could be addressed at the county level. The resolution, as introduced by Kapela, a Democrat who represents constituents in South Kona, Ka‘u and a portion of North Kona, also requested the county remove all references to Captain Cook as a place name.
“We wanted to change the name to the ahupua‘a. Station 6 will now be known as Kealakekua,” said Inaba.
For clarification, the physical town of Kealakekua is not located in the Kealakekua ahupua‘a, but rather in the Kaumoo ahupua‘a, per Ahu Moku System maps kept by the state. The history of the Captain Cook Fire Station is limited, however, it appears the facility was established in the mid-1960s.
The official change of the station’s name, which also appears on the fire trucks and ambulances it houses, comes without public input, a move that elected and other county officials say is permitted, but has raised eyebrows among some community members, including a former councilwoman and two lawyers familiar with council and government procedure.
Captain Cook resident Brenda Ford, who represented South Kona for eight years on the County Council before being term-limited in 2014, said any renaming of a county facility needs to be done consistently, and include public input.
“This needs to be put out to the public,” she said. “There are more long term ramifications to this. I object to the fact that it wasn’t brought before council. There is a decision being made in a vacuum. This is not proper. We need open government. We need transparency.”
Previous changes of names of county facilities have gone before the council, where the public is afforded the opportunity to chime in and all is recorded, archives and council records show.
Most recently, Bill 212 made its way through committees and the council last fall to rename in County Code the Pahoa District Park in honor of the late William “Billy” Kenoi. In 2016, renaming the Makalei Fire Station also went before the council with a resolution to rename the North Kona facility the Makalei Fire Station and Daniel R. Sayre West Hawaii Training Center.
The changes were brought differently — bill versus resolution — because the process of renaming of facilities owned by the county is not clearly defined in Hawaii County Code. Only the renaming of Department of Parks and Recreation facilities is outlined in County Code, with the requirement that any change be done via a bill and ordnance.
Fire Chief Kazuo Todd said he wasn’t involved in the renaming process, and assumed there was public input before signing off on the name change.
“I didn’t see this as a pressing issue,” said Todd. “I am neither for or against it.”
Mayor Mitch Roth verified the station could be renamed without a resolution from council, and at the mayor’s discretion.
“We determined that under current rules there does not need to be a public hearing, although probably that would have been a little bit better had it been done that way,” he said. “This is a manini thing in the way the process was done. We are going to be fixing the process.”
Ford called the exercise of power without input a “slippery slope.”
“There is a legislative process. There is due process. To exercise power without authority is unconstitutional,” added an attorney and former judge familiar with council procedure who asked to remain anonymous due to their continued practice. “What the mayor is doing obfuscates the law.”
Kona Councilwoman Rebecca Villegas did not take issue with the renaming process since it is not codified for such a facility.
“This is something I think is relevant and a valid change,” she said. “In an era where the solutions to the issues we face as a global community reside in the wisdom of our host culture, I believe it’s also time to recognize the wisdom in the names Hawaiians gave to those places. There are solutions residing within the names that existed long before Captain Cook ‘discovered’ these islands.”