Hawaii Public Radio: The Conversation
December 13, 2018
By Catherine Cruz & Ryan Finnerty
CREDIT WAIKIKI NATATORIM / FLICKR / CC BY 2.0
Transcribed by the Kaimana Beach Coalition.
Catherine Cruz: Christmas is coming up fast, but even faster is a deadline to submit your two cents about the future of the Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial. A long-awaited draft Environment Impact Statement has a deadline of Christmas Eve. The latest twist is that the preferred option is a modified deck design, not tearing down the structure, to make way for a memorial beach and building a new arch inland that has been the Mayor’s personal preference.
The draft EIS design puts the modified design as cheaper than just demolishing it, but is it? Opponents question the inclusion of costs to build an ocean safety building as part of the beach option. The city had proposed it once before, but then pulled back after push back from a park watchdog group and park users.
We invited Robert Kroning, the city’s Design and Construction Director, to stop by yesterday afternoon to talk about the EIS and the modified deck option.
Robert Kroning: It allows us to maintain pretty much the entire structure that’s there now, the Natatorium that we know today. The only real difference being the walls that hold up the deck. And that allows the ocean to flow through and so we have a circulation system that is still ocean and where we don’t have to do all the work to meet pool rules, which are quite stringent. Two sides of the swim area will be – are made of fiber-reinforced polymer. It’s like a very hard plastic-type material, and it will be bars, not necessarily mesh. Bars so that there’s free movement from vertical movement up and down.
CC: So more like a grate?
RK: Right. Or a fence sort of construction. And one of the important parts of having a basin that is good to swim in is to make sure that the water within there is not too stagnant so it’ll allow the flow with the currents and the wave action.
CC: The Kaimana Beach Coalition has raised some questions about liability, if whether that system is in use anywhere else, if it’s been tested anywhere, and if that would be any type of a liability or concern for swimmers that might get caught in some tricky conditions over there.
RK: I don’t think that this structure exists in this type of a swimming area the way we’re looking to design it. But there’s certainly testing that goes on, and it will be fully vetted and tested for safety and for all those concerns.
CC: Currently the Natatorium houses I think some offices for the ocean safety folks that guard that beach, so what does the EIS include as part of that plan?
RK: Our ocean safety folks have been giving us some guidance and information on what they would require and how they would operate if it were a beach. Or even if it were a perimeter deck, because they would be responsible for the perimeter deck option. And then the Department of Parks and Recreation if it becomes a pool would provide the lifeguards for that. And they’re analyzing and determining how they would operate it and so forth. So the numbers that are in the EIS right now are their initial analysis on the operations and the numbers of lifeguards that they would need throughout the day so we can get an annual cost for providing those lifeguards.
CC: But I would think you would need more lifeguards than if it’s a basin? Is that right?
RK: If it’s a structure, intuitively it seems like that, so you might say that it – I think whether it’s a beach versus a perimeter deck or a pool, there’s probably different operating hours that they would operate. And so some of the difference in numbers may be related to that. A pool more than likely would be closed a little more often than a beach would be throughout the year and may not be open as long as the beach would need lifeguards to be stationed. So those kind of things are still under analysis by the departments.
CC: From what I understand there’s a segment in the EIS that calls for a separate lifeguard building.
RK: For the lifeguards, if we maintain the structure that’s there now, whether it’s for a pool or for a perimeter deck, we will most likely keep the ocean safety folks in the structure that they’re in now, under the bleachers is basically where they have their offices. And we would upgrade them and renovate them as part of the project. If we turn it into a beach, well that structure goes away so we would need to create, find another space for that operation to work out of.
CC: The administration had plans for a standalone lifeguard building on the other side of the aquarium, so is that where this would be sited?
RK: It could be. Again, it’s open, we haven’t made a final decision on any of that. So those are the things that would have to be finalized in the construction for that.
CC: OK. The reason I bring that up is I think that the preservation society, the watchdog group of the park, had raised some questions about whether that was the best place, taking green space away from park users for a lifeguard building which – it’s an administration building [that] could be anywhere else.
RK: Right. So the answer hasn’t been determined yet. It may not go there, it may go somewhere else.
CC: And is the price of building that building included in the EIS?
RK: It is.
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RK: It’s about 1.8 is what we’re estimating that.
CC: And are those the same figures that were just lifted from the previous design, or was it – are they new figures?
RK: They’re adjusted. We have to take into consideration that the staff that is being, for lack of a better term, evicted from their offices in the Waikiki War Memorial will have to be housed somewhere. And so whether it’s actually in that spot or somewhere else I don’t think is that critical right now to the EIS but the estimate on what it would cost to put them somewhere does need to be included.
CC: OK. I just raise that because there was push back and concern about whether is was an administration building, if it should be sited in that park or somewhere else, and just build a lifeguard stand.
RK: Right. So that will all have to be analyzed. But in the end it still adds costs. The property that the Waikiki War Memorial sits on, basically the structure, is state land, so DLNR, but there’s been an Executive Order to the city to maintain and take care of it. And so that’s why the city is involved and pretty much [are] de facto owners of that property and doing what we need to do with it. The land behind it is City and County land and is a part of I think counted as part of Kapiolani Park.
CC: And the Trust.
RK: And the Trust.
CC: Commercialism has been something that has been raised by the Kapiolani Park Preservation Society and the Kaimana Beach Coalition. How do you address that?
RK: We have no plan to commercialize the area at all. So it’s not part of what we’re proposing as any of the alternatives or any of the actions going forward.
CC: OK. But I mean, does it allow for any commercialism?
RK: In the future, anybody interested in commercializing the area could attempt it and would have to go through all the different – probably, maybe even have to do an EIS again just to do that action and would get the scrutiny of pretty much the same players that are part of the stakeholders of this project. So I’m sure the Kapiolani Park Trust would get involved and all the stakeholders of the area as some kind of an attempt to commercialize the area would be proposed. I just know the Caldwell administration has no interest in commercializing it right now.
So Mayor Caldwell is the decision maker, I mean, he’s the one we’re doing this analysis for. And yes, initially based on him wanting to do something, so why this all got started again in the first place, because he understood very clearly that it was just unacceptable to leave the Natatorium in the condition that it’s in. And so at the time that we went forward and we were looking at OK, if we’re going to do something, what is the proposed action we should propose? And there had been a task force under the Hannemann administration that had kinda reviewed and looked at the situation and came up with the beach alternative as what was the most appropriate. In about 1999 we were inches away from completing a full restoration of the whole Natatorium. And what happened was there was a lawsuit that came about, and in the end the judge decreed that we need to stop until the Department of Health could develop pool rules, because at the time there were no rules for saltwater pools.
It took two years for them to do that, and when they did, the rules that they instituted then made it impossible for the project we were going forward with to be complete ’cause it didn’t meet the pool rules. So once that happened everything pretty much stopped again. And it took until Mayor Caldwell because mayor to say no, we need to do something. So based on all the information that had happened before, we decided well, it looks like there’s really only two options. We can either build it according to pool rules or demolish it and turn it into a beach. So the proposed action when we first started this again was, turn it into a beach, that’s what he thought was the best option and that’s what he wanted to do.
So move forward to today, in all that time that’s gone past we’ve done the Environmental Impact Statement process, which is a lot of analysis and review and consultation. And in that time what we’ve discovered is that we do have the ability to do another option, which is now this perimeter deck. And that took quite a few iterations. We had attempted that once, we had consultations with the State Historic Preservation Division, who had said “we want you to try to save a little more of the structure”. So at first we went through an iteration and they were basically, “save the bleachers and then get rid of everything else in front of it”. And so we had stakeholders come in and look at that and nobody liked that, it was horrible, forget it, none of that. So then we went a little bit farther and we developed what is now the perimeter deck. We were still quite uncertain that this would be acceptable to the Department of Health as not being classified as a pool.
And so it took us a while before we could get to meet with them where they said, they took a look at it and have agreed, yes, this does not have to meet pool rules. So once that happened, that allowed us to now include it as an alternative. With that as an alternative and a relook at all the analysis on – an EIS looks at many things. Historic, cultural, economic, costs, fiscal-type things, and local input for – and then actually how it affects the true physical environment, like marine biology and corals, and shoreline, and everything. So the whole gamut things that it looks at. And after we’ve done the analysis on all of those different categories what we’ve realized is the perimeter deck is probably the best of the three options. We’ve presented it to the mayor and talked to him about it and said, you know, we originally went with the beach, we think that’s not the best option anymore, we’d like you to change your proposed action to be the perimeter deck. And he has agreed to that.
CC: OK. And the big question he said is the money part of it.
RK: Certainly. None of these are perfect answers, right? There’s passion, it’s [a] passionate issue on two sides. You get your preservationists and you’ve got your Kaimana Beach turn it into a beach type opinions. The nice thing I like about my role is I just stay objective about the whole thing and try to look at the data. It’d be nice if we could throw the data in a machine and it would pop out an answer, but it doesn’t, so there’s still some subjectivity to it. But yes. So cost is one of the important aspects of this.
What I think a lot of the people are misunderstanding, the actual capital costs of the perimeter deck are the least of the three options. Clearly the no action is the cheapest, but that’s not an option. So the perimeter deck is about 3 million dollars less expensive in capital costs than the beach option. And then the turning it into a full pool is much more expensive.
CC: What about the issue of the silt and the sediment at the bottom, because there’s concern about the degradation of the environment, not just for the swimmers in the area but also for the aquarium on the other side?
RK: No, of course that’s a concern that everybody should have. And it’s actually a concern for all the options that we go forward with, and so it’s being analyzed very closely and in the end it’s not really a show-stopper in the sense that any of the options will have a different result. It’s manageable. It’s manageable through all kinds of protections that already exists. Once we finish with the Environmental Impact Statement we still have to go through all kinds of permitting. One of them will be water quality, so whatever we do within the footprint of the project, whether it’s turn it into a beach or leave it as a perimeter deck or turn it into a pool, we’ll have to make sure we’re complying with water quality rules and everything that the permit entails.
CC: OK. Alright. So, still a very long process to go.
RK: Unfortunately, yes.
CC: OK. So when will we see a final EIS published?
RK: We’re hoping a final EIS is gonna happen this summer. Middle to late summer is when we should get the final EIS. And once that happens we are budgeting to have the design begun almost immediately.
CC: That was Robert Kroning, Director of the City’s Design and Construction. The EIS deadline for comments again is Christmas Eve. Kroning says if there are historical, cultural or safety issues you believe the report overlooks, send in your testimony. For links to the EIS, check our Facebook page, theconversationhpr.
