Category Archives: Planning

Caldwell administration proposes to rename Thomas Square

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At its regular meeting next week, the Honolulu City Council’s Committee on Parks, Community Services and Intergovernmental Affairs will consider a proposal from Mayor Caldwell’s to rename Thomas Square.

The committee is scheduled to meet on Tuesday, August 20, at 9 a.m. in the council committee room.

Resolution 19-178 proposes renaming Thomas Square “King Kamehameha Ill at Thomas Square,” sort of an homage to the administration’s redesign of the park near downtown Honolulu to include a “statue of King Kamehameha Ill, the stone wall stating the state motto, and a flagpole baring the Hawaiian flag…”

The resolution was drafted and submitted by the Department of Parks and Recreation. It was filed “by request.”

Of course, Caldwell’s redesign of the park already obliterated the pathways that were laid out in the design of the British Union Jack, in honor of Admiral Richard Darton Thomas, who restored the islands sovereignty in mid-1843 after the kingdom had been taken over by another admiral and his warship earlier in the year.

The paths were eliminated despite having been repeatedly cited as key historical features and designated for retention in the city’s own Thomas Square Master Plan.

Keep in mind that the park was named “Thomas Square” by the Privy Council and King Kamehameha III in 1850. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that we best honor Kamehameha III by continuing to honor this decision.

Testimony on Res. 19-178 can be submitted online prior to Tuesday’s meeting.

See:

“Does Thomas Square makeover include Union Jack?” ilind.net, August 10, 2018

“The jury is still out on Thomas Square,” ilind.net, June 3, 2018.

Richard A. Greer, “Kulaokahu’a and Thomas Square: From Boom to Bust to Now,” Hawaiian Journal of History

City Council to vote on expansion vs regulation of vacation rentals

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The Honolulu City Council will vote tomorrow (Wednesday, April 17) on two bills dealing with vacation rentals.

Chuck Prentiss, a retired planner for the City & County of Honolulu and a former executive secretary of the Honolulu Planning Commission, and a former chair of the Kailua Neighborhood Board, urges support for Bill 85, and strong opposition to Bill 89 CD1.

“If Bill 89 CD1 gets adopted our neighborhoods will forever be resort zones,” Prentiss warns.

Here is his email distributed earlier this week.

Aloha.

If you oppose vacation rentals in you neighborhood please testify or submit testimony at this Wednesday’s City Council hearing.

Bill 85 (good bill) which has new enforcement measures and Bill 89 CD1 (bad bill) which would allow up to 4,000 more B&B’s islandwide (up to 350 in Kailua) are up for second reading at the meeting.

Please support Bill 85 that will provide new methods to enforce against illegal vacation rentals. Please strongly oppose Bill 89 CD1 that would allow the new B&B’s.

The meeting notice link is below and can also be found on the City Council web site. The two bills are shown on page 9 of the agenda.

Submitting testimony is very easy, the instructions are given on page one on the agenda. Even a simple “support Bill 85 and oppose Bill 89 CD1 would help.”

It is crunch time for these bills and our neighborhoods. There is only one more City Council hearing after this one and that will be just a formality. So please take the time now to attend or submit testimony, if Bill 89 CD1 gets adopted our neighborhoods will forever be resort zones.

We need a lot more testimony than was submitted at the last hearing. It now or never!

See:

Honolulu City Council Agenda for April 17, 2019

Link for submitting testimony
(Submitting testimony is very easy and only takes a few minutes)

San Francisco raises the bar

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The San Francisco Planning Commission just drew their line in the sand.

After a developer illegally demolished a landmark home and then retroactively applied for a permit to replace it with a home about three times the size, the commission instead voted 5-0 to require him to build an exact replica of the historic home.

Planning Commissioner Dennis Richards said he hopes the commission’s action in the 49 Hopkins case will send a message to speculators accustomed to ignoring city planning and building laws with few or no repercussions.

“We are tired of seeing this happening in the city and are drawing a line in the sand,” said Richards. “You can have all the rules in the world, but if you don’t enforce them, the rules are worthless.”

Honolulu, are you watching?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/City-requires-property-owner-who-demolished-13467909.php?t=6225f72057&fbclid=IwAR1rLMXdMInWgNAo5HIV0dqMHv1npvS45hT1PE_Kl-zVqU-203glnwv0aYY

Does Thomas Square makeover include Union Jack?

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Questions have been raised for years about whether the city’s makeover of Thomas Square was going to honor the past by restoring the walking paths that laid out the pattern of the British Union Jack.

When I blogged about it earlier, a defender of the city’s plan pointed out that the Thomas Square Master Plan specifically incorporated restoration of the paths. A quick check of the master plan confirmed that this was the case.

“Honor the Past,” the master plan said repeatedly. “Restore the British Jack paths.”

Well, the construction fences have come down, and Mayor Kirk Caldwell had a well-publicized unveiling of a large statue of Kamehameha III, with public comments about the importance of the park’s history.

But what is the status of the Union Jack paths through and across the park?

I haven’t had a chance to walk the entire park. But here’s a photo I took this week while standing at the corner of Beretania and Victoria Streets.

According to the Master Plan, there should be one of those restored walkways coming out diagonally from the center of the park to this corner.

As far as I can see, there’s no sign of such a path.

So if published accounts are correct, and the park renovations are complete, it looks like the Master Plan has been ignored, at least in this important respect, and that part of history has been obliterated, as critics apparently rightly feared.

I would love to be wrong. Can someone in the know assure is that those paths are “coming soon”?