For 40 years North Kona residents have agitated for a regional park in their rapidly growing community. One longtime resident said he never saw his neighbors as unified and adamant about anything as they are about the need for that park.
They have lobbied one Big Island mayor after another to get the park built. They even persuaded then-Gov. Neil Abercrombie in 2011 to designate 190 acres of state land in Kealakehe for park use, but the project stalled. Today that land remains a dry, empty lava field dotted with shrubs and fountain grass.
Those long years of delay may finally be ending, thanks in part to a federal lawsuit filed over the nearby Kealakehe sewer plant. To settle that lawsuit the county agreed in April to upgrade the plant to produce highly treated wastewater, which would provide recycled water clean enough to spray on playing fields.
At the same time, Mayor Kimo Alameda’s office is pursuing a new proposal to develop the park on a new site on Hawaiian homelands between the sewer plant and Honokōhau Harbor, which would make it far easier to develop the park and deliver water to it from the plant.
“Now I think it’s possible,” Alameda said.
Hawaiʻi County has big plans for the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant and the lands around it. The plant is slated for an overhaul so it can produce treated wastewater that can be used to water playing fields. County officials are also seeking access to the Hawaiian homelands around the plant to develop them into the long-sought it Kealakehe Regional Park there. (Cameron Miculka/Civil Beat/2020)
Alameda suggested in an interview Wednesday the county may be able to commit $50 million to $100 million to the project in the years ahead, and said he wants to break ground at the new site within the next eight years.
“It’s going to come, because it makes sense,” said Bo Kahui, a longtime advocate for the park and founder of the nonprofit West Hawaiʻi Parks and Athletic Corp. Kahui is a former soccer coach who has been pushing for the project for nearly 15 years.
“We need the county and the state to bring these community facilities to fruition,” Kahui said.
Tracing A Long, Messy History
Certainly other administrations have tried. The Kealakehe lands mauka of Queen Kaʻahumanu Highway were first proposed in 1985 as the site of a Kealakehe Sports Complex that was supposed to include a gym, swimming pool, tennis courts, concert hall and more.
Two years later then-Big Island Mayor Dante Carpenter announced a plan to build a new sewage treatment plant at Kealakehe that would produce treated effluent. The plan was for the county to dispose of the effluent by using it to water a golf course.
In 1991, then-Mayor Lorraine Inouye signed a deal to have a Japanese developer build a golf course where the sports complex had been planned, but that idea didn’t work out.
Endangered plants were discovered on the golf course site, forcing the developer to repeatedly redesign the project. When the Japanese real estate bubble burst in the early 1990s the developer ended up without the money to build the course.
The County Council even agreed in 1995 to provide up to $15 million in public funds to salvage the golf course project. Then-Mayor Stephen Yamashiro explained the golf course was needed as “the final phase of the sewage treatment facility” because it provided a way to dispose of the treated wastewater. The project still failed.
The golf course was never built and neither was the sports complex. Years later, Kahui and other residents pushed to revive the park idea.
They helped formulate a master plan for a regional park in 2013 that called for five full-sized soccer fields, a covered play court for volleyball and basketball, a multipurpose stadium for football and soccer, and six baseball diamonds.
The project stalled again until the administration of then-Mayor Mitch Roth moved ahead with an environmental assessment for the park complex almost a decade later. Alameda said that document was never completed.
A pipe discharges wastewater from the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant to a disposal percolation basin, which is essentially a hole in a lava field that drains into the groundwater. There is evidence the wastewater then finds its way to Honokōhau Harbor, and two years ago harbor users sued over the dumping. (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2024)
So, Where Does The Sewage Go?
The Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant did not encounter those kinds of delays. Construction of the sewer plant was promptly completed in 1994, which then presented a problem for the county.
Since no golf course had been built, the county’s plan to dispose of the effluent wouldn’t work. Instead, the county for the last three decades has been dumping wastewater that hasn’t been as highly treated from the plant into a pit in a lava field about 3,700 feet upslope from Honokōhau Harbor.
That’s been a concern for harbor users, environmentalists and cultural practitioners, among others. Bob Fitzgerald, a former county parks director and 50-year resident of North Kona, said it bothers him every time he drives by the plant.
“It’s disgusting to see this kind of water just dump into this big pit,” he said.
A local environmental and cultural group called Hui Mālama Honokōhau finally filed a federal lawsuit against the county two years ago over the dumping. The lawsuit alleged the county had failed to obtain a permit to deposit the effluent there. The suit also alleged dumping of the treated sewage is illegally polluting the ocean.
According to the lawsuit, the county has been pouring 1.7 million gallons of treated effluent a day into the disposal pit, and that those “polluted discharges” have been migrating to the ocean, releasing nutrients and other contaminants into harbor waters.
Mike Nakachi, president of Hui Mālama Honokōhau, said the community always believed the treated sewage would be used to water fields or other facilities in dry North Kona, “but it never happened, it just went right into that puka, and we’ve really felt the consequences since nothing got done.”
Ocean users at Honokōhau have suffered from bacterial infections, and the harbor has been beset by algal blooms that make the water stink and turn brown, Nakachi said. “We’re seeing this nutrient loading happen three, four times a year,” he said.
In April the hui and the county reached an agreement to settle the lawsuit that requires the county to upgrade the sewer plant by 2029 to produce higher-quality effluent, suitable for spraying on playing fields.
A settling pond at the Kealakehe sewage treatment plant just outside Kona on the Big Island includes aeration lines that pump air into the ponds helping to settle out any sludge that exists in the water. The green edge is an algae bloom that comes and goes with the seasons. (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2024)
The legal settlement also requires the county to complete a Reuse Feasibility Study by next fall to analyze various projects for reusing the effluent, including plans “to establish and maintain the Kealakehe Regional Park.”
Within six months of completing that feasibility study the county must select a reuse project that must be operational by spring of 2031, according to the settlement. The reuse project must use at least 100,000 gallons of effluent per day.
Is Kealakehe Regional Park Ripe Yet?
Hawaiʻi County Council Chair Holeka Goro Inaba describes the relationship between the sewer treatment plant and the regional park as “the chicken before the egg” problem.
The wastewater upgrade was delayed because there was no ready use for the recycled water, he said, and the park was delayed in part because there was no water available to keep the grass alive on the playing fields. Average rainfall in the area ranges from 10 inches to 20 inches per year.
“The fact that the county has been forced to make progress on the wastewater treatment plant I think definitely leans towards some progress on the park front,” Inaba said. “It definitely paves the way.”
The park project also has a political component to it because it became a campaign issue in the mayoral contest last year between former mayor Roth and Alameda.
Roth said his administration essentially revived the Kealakehe park plan by moving ahead with the sewer project and bringing park advocates together to re-start the effort.
But Alameda criticized the lack of playing fields in West Hawaiʻi, citing that as example of disparate treatment between Hilo and Kona. He pledged during the campaign to push harder for parity in county facilities services between East and West Hawaiʻi.
“We have to find space for fields,” he told the audience at a Civil Beat forum in Kona last year. “We got the space, we don’t have the political will. We can get it done under the Alameda administration.”
The original plan called for construction of the Kealakehe Regional Park mauka of the Queen Kaʻahumanu Highway on the slopes of Hualālai, but Mayor Kimo Alameda contends it would be too expensive to develop soccer, football and baseball fields there. Alameda hopes to develop the park makai of the highway between the county wastewater treatment plant and Honokōhau Small Boat Harbor. (Courtesy Hawaiʻi County Parks and Recreation)
Alameda said in an interview this week the new idea for a land swap with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to advance the park project grew out of a site inspection at the originally proposed park site.
It quickly became clear during the site inspection that the slope of the land on the original park site would make it wildly expensive to build ball fields there, he said. The county would “basically have to flatten the side of the mountain.”
But land owned by DHHL across the highway and next to the sewer plant is flat, and Alameda said DHHL officials like the idea of a land swap that would allow it to develop homes on the slope where the park was originally planned.
“If we really want to make this a reality, we’ve got to figure out a way to bring down the cost,” Alameda said.
Kahui, a longtime advocate for the park, notes that DHHL is one of the largest developers in West Hawaiʻi, and has hundreds of homes planned for the area.
“When you look at the growth in this area, this park becomes almost necessary,” he said.
Civil Beat’s coverage of environmental issues on Hawaiʻi island is supported in part by a grant from the Dorrance Family Foundation.
Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change and the environment is supported by The Healy Foundation, the Marisla Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.
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