Honolulu Weekly

As City officials continue to move toward Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s plan to tear down the 82-year-old Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial and build a beach on the site, the University of Hawaii is backing a proposal for the Waikiki Aquarium to expand its facilities into the area and construct what’s being billed the world’s largest aquarium.

The proposal comes after a series of meetings between members of a task force created by the mayor to assess a demolition-based study of the site completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in May, along with decade-old restoration plans from the project that the mayor scrapped during his first week in office in 2005.

Recent debate over what to do with the Natatorium–which has been shuttered due to public safety concerns since 1979–has focused largely on restoration versus demolition and beach creation, but aquarium officials say they’ve reassessed the property’s potential value to the community.

“My objectives are two-fold,” said Waikiki Aquarium Director Andrew Rossiter. “One, to honor the memory of the war dead in an appropriate fashion and, secondly, to provide a resource to the largest part of the community as possible, not just special interest groups.”

The proposal entails building an enclosed structure on the footprint of the Natatorium that would contain a massive tank to house schools of large fish found in off-shore waters.

“Big schools of tuna, sharks, giant ocean sunfish, maybe manta rays,” said Rossiter. “It would be 100 yards long and 40 yards wide. The access would be through the side and then there would be acrylic tubes, walkways, so you basically walk under the water so you can see these things zipping all around you for a really unique, immersive experience.”

Rossiter says his plan would also improve the adjacent Kaimana Beach area to better serve the public, like providing an ocean entry point with disabled access. The plan would also entail relocation of the memorial’s famed archway, a feat that City officials have proposed in their beach construction plan but that some engineers have deemed impossible due to the hollow construction of the 200,000-pound Beaux Arts structure.

Rossiter emphasizes the cultural implications of relocating the arches, which he says would be positioned to frame the May sunset behind Puu o Kapolei, which long signified an important seasonal change that dictated fishing regulations and the planting of crops in Hawaiian culture.

“It was a really important annual event that was celebrated right around the site between the Aquarium and the Natatorium,” said Rossiter. “It’s really moving, and it would be good to rekindle people’s interest in just how queued up ancient Hawaiians were to the celestial calendar and how it was used to regulate marine resources.”

The task force hasn’t yet had the opportunity to formally respond to Rossiter’s plans, but he says that he believes those who are both intensely pro-restoration and those who are fervently in favor of beach creation are likely to oppose it. And while the mayor has repeatedly declined to comment on the issue, Rossiter says that in Hannemann’s meeting with the taskforce earlier in the summer, it was “very clear that the mayor wishes to demolish” and that Rossiter “doubt[s] it very much” that the Natatorium has any chance of evading demolition.

Cost questions resurface

In the same vein, some task force members say that City officials have presented convoluted data and failed to clarify information gathered by the City or by City-commissioned groups when asked to.

“The City has been very good about providing documentation,” said Historic Hawaii Foundation Executive Director Kiersten Faulkner. “They have not been good about explaining the discrepancies between their presentations and what the documents actually say.”

Faulkner gives the example of the City’s price estimate for completing the restoration that Hannemann halted in 2005. At the time, $5 million had been spent on what was to be an $11-million-dollar restoration project.

“The City said about $2 million is work that would have to be repeated, so that would leave you with a price tag of $8 million to complete that plan,” said Faulkner. “When they presented that option to the taskforce in June, they had a price tag of $17 million. Then, when they presented that option last week, they presented a price tag of $22 million. So the question I had was how do you get from $8 million to $17 million to $22 million? I still do not understand how that calculation was done. It’s the exact same plan. So even with an inflationary factor, it doesn’t explain the changes.”

City officials say that the cost hike for restoration reflects a change in the value of today’s dollar compared to what they estimate to be adjusted for inflation just two years from now. Rossiter also points out what he believes to be gaps in cost estimate for the new beach proposals.

“The proponents of the beach scenario have said it’s going to be free and, looked at very naively, yes it would be,” he said. “But, unfortunately, the sand is going to need replenishing, and that’s a big cost.”

Outside of concerns over the accuracy of specific cost estimates, worries over moving forward with any multi-million-dollar project in this economic climate continue to surface. These are worries that Rossiter says his plan–which he says would remove the public burden of funding the future of the site both in the long term and the short term–would alleviate. He says the project would be paid for using private bonds and other investments, and the cost would eventually be recouped by revenue from the facility.

“Obviously in these present times, it’s unrealistic to expect the university to pay for the project, it’s unrealistic to expect the state and it’s unrealistic to expect the city,” said Rossiter. “I have the support of the chancellor at the university and my boss, the vice chancellor, and the university is willing to pay for a feasibility study.”

But the real gain, he says, will be as both a community resource and as a boon to intellectual capital in Hawaii. “It would be the world’s largest aquarium,” said Rossiter. “Since they built Ala Moana decades ago, when was it that Hawaii could last state that it was the biggest or best at anything?”