 I am your host, Winston Welton. I am delighted that you're joining us today for this very special edition of Out and About, a show where we explore a variety of topics, organizations, and events with the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. As a disclaimer, any views or opinions expressed by me are strictly my own and not connected with any organization. Joining me in the studio today, I am delighted to have Charlene Chan Lum and Bruce Lum of Save Alamoana Beach Park, Huey. We also have Dr. Brian Bagnall, president of the Greater Waikiki Outdoor Circle. And today we're going to be talking about the issues involving the Alamoana Beach Park and the proposals that have stirred a little bit of controversy and are still stirring some controversy, as well as some successes that we've had from the city in making the park more beautiful. So we'd like to share that with you today, and we welcome you to the show. And thanks to you all for being my guest today. Thank you for inviting us. So we have been going around and around with the city a little bit on this. You started this Beach Park, Huey. Tell us just a brief history about what that is. Well, basically, the mayor has had a plan for a few years about what he would like to do the park. And various citizens have talked about, you know, keep it clean, keep it green. But the plan has continued with some, a few more costly projects. And so Save Alamoana Beach Park, Huey forms because we were trying to let the public know what they were about and try to inform the public because they haven't had any city state, city town hall meetings in the last two years. And how long has your coup been going on for? It's, as I said, just kind of, we were part of Malama Moana and then we formed this group in the beginning of this year. Okay. And Malama Moana is another group that's also interested as is the greater Waikiki Outdoor Circle. And tell us, Dr. Magnal, about the outdoor circles involvement in the park as far as you're aware and its history. It goes back a long way. Louise Dillingham in 1929, remember the canal that her husband was very much involved with was completed around about then. And she was president of the outdoor circle. And she was a major mover and shaker of getting Alamoana Park as it is today. And the trees, the feeling of open space. So we feel a strong connection to what she did all those years ago and all those women who fought to have a beautiful place in the city with trees and open space. Trees and open space. And I think that's an important point with what we're looking for is to preserve a sense of open space that open space is actually critical to the park itself, to its original design, and to a city that's bursting at the seams right now. As you were saying earlier, Shard, that this is like a country park for a lot of folks that live in this area because they don't get a chance to go to the North Shore or Kailua. There is so much cement around our city nowadays that and people are stuck in those little apartments. So truly Alamoana Beach Park is like a country park for a lot of people that can come out and camp or put their tents up and go to the beach and go fishing. Just run around and enjoy the big open spaces that are there for them. So you know, trying to preserve the park the way it is that way so that it is kind of like part of the country for these people is really important and many many generations people have enjoyed the park that way. And it's an amazing park because when you go there at night and I was there just the other day, it's looking terrific now and to see everybody doing all the different things they do there. Swimming, paddling, walking. It's just an amazing place. The combination of the beach and the park. It's a unique place I think almost in the world. And you, the city had proposed about 20 or so major changes in there and maybe 15 of them have gone by pretty uncontroversially like redoing the bathrooms and that sort of thing. Brian, what sort of changes have you seen at the park that are positive? Well remember when the mayor first talked about what he wanted to do and there were going to be colored walk paths and people said, well we don't want that. So I think they're focused initially on getting the essentials fixed and I think they're done now. The irrigation system, the grass has never looked better. The trees have never looked better. They're just finishing, repaving the road. Magic Island and the parking lot there is just being done and it's, it's look, it looks terrific. And I think it's, it's the way the park was meant to be. And so my feeling personally would be congratulations. It looks great. Time to stop. I'd rather doing anything. Leave well enough alone. Leave well enough alone. And Bruce, would you agree with that? Is the park looking good? Is it time to leave well enough alone? In fact, just the other day I was saying to Charlene, we should write to the mayor and congratulate him on picking up on the key things that we wanted was for him to just love the park. And right now the park does look like it's getting more love. And the certainly the driveway down the center is a real welcome improvement since we don't have all those potholes anymore. If you remember all back a couple years ago, that's what people were really saying. I think Dick Allgaier said at one time very emphatically at the end of one of his videos, he said, please fix the blink potholes. So it's just a matter of like catching up on, I think I saw director Nicota saying sometimes 30 or 40 years of kind of deferred maintenance. And I think that's me, the huge thing, of course, obviously. Yes. And you know, the mayor has been there for the last six, seven years. And so it's it's a good thing that they're beginning to do the roads, which, you know, and take care of the bathrooms because a lot of the common people, everybody, everybody, people have said, just keep it clean, keep it green, keep the bathrooms maintained. Fix what we got. Fix what we got, right. We don't really need a big $133 million project that's going to cost taxpayers more money. We just want to love the park the way it was intended. And the park is full now. There's no more parking spaces for extra activity. So if you go there in the evening or in the morning, particularly at sunset, it's full. There's no more room to be trying to get 500 more people in there with their cars. And so that brings us to several points, I think, that we wanted to touch on today. There's four main items, I guess, that are remaining of contention. And I think perhaps the mayor is listening and his managing director and the parks director, which I'm sure that they do watch out and about because this is the most important news you're going to get all day. If they are watching, then we have a few things there. And I think one of them is about the dog park. The other one is about parking. The other one is about the sand. I'm sorry, the sand replenishment and then the world-class playground. So Brian, you've been working on a, I guess we could call it maybe a mini task force put together by one of the neighborhood boards in the area about dog parks and tell us what you found because the city is proposing to have a dog park in Alamoana. Why is this not the best idea in the world and what are some alternatives to it? And what have you found in your research? Well, one of the council members, council member Fuganaga said, why don't you guys through the Kakaako Alamoana neighborhood board, they have a wonderful little community action committee get together. And because I'm a veterinarian, they thought I might bring some professional expertise into this. So I went around and studied some of the, now we're talking about fenced dog parks is a very special difference between an unfenced dog park and a fenced dog park. And so I went to visit some of them and took some photographs and studied also, there's a lot of literature about dog parks on the internet. The Kennel Club has a full document about it. So you don't need to reinvent things. You want to you want to build a dog park, read the Kennel Club booklet on what what a dog park requires. The AKC? Yes, AKC, American Kennel Park. And what have you found? Do you find that we don't needed a dog park at all? Or have you found that there's a better location for it? Or what are the reasons? I think the main thing is that fenced off leash dog parks should be in remote locations. The dogs often go there make a hell of a lot of noise. When people are walking their dogs to the park, you don't want them crossing heavy traffic and dangerous things. And you don't want you don't want crowds of people, because that can disturb the dogs and everything. So they tend to be the recommendation is remote locations about half to one acre. So that's like I have to one acre. Okay, we do have a couple slides on this one here, I think. So that is a view of our rigid of this. And we can actually look at that. And where that blue thing is right in the lower center, not the ocean, but the box is where this sort of world class playground is. And we'll come back to that. But the next one I think is about some dog parks here. So again, what you were saying is to be away from people, not residential areas, half an acre to an acre or more. What is the size that's been proposed for all I think the area that was originally suggested for the Alamoana Park was when you come in from the entrance right under the trees, right? It's it's not remote. It's not big enough. There's too many people going by there. And it just doesn't meet any of the criteria for a fenced dog park. And as well as that fence dog parks are pretty ugly, lots of fencing, lots of ugly signs and things like that. So it doesn't meet any of the criteria for successful dog. And I think we got another slide on this one here that's might show some of the many rules. It's a bit like going to Guantanamo Bay or a prison yard. All these scary things that the lawyers think. And so they're ugly. So you don't want them in a beautiful place. And this park is meant to be beautiful. So that's why this was taken. I think I took this at Hawaii Kai, great dog park for people, but in remote locations. So you're not looking at all this stuff. Okay. And Bruce, one of the things that concerns about this is that back in 1998, the city council had passed a not a guiding resolution of some kind of resolution of maybe you know, policy resolution, policy resolution. Thank you, Shar. Talking about balkanization of the park and the existing and imagining down the road that people were going to want to put all kinds of things in this park. And what was that resolution? How did they do you remember how they address that? Well, there's been so many resolutions. I need help from 9888. So 98188, 9888 being the year that they actually passed that resolution 20 years ago. Yeah, it was a 188th resolution in the whole year. And that resolution really was there to categorize the parks so that they could have in little pigeonholes, how the identification, easy identification of the parks for budget reasons. The during the budget process, they knew exactly what they were addressing. And in this particular case, I think what you're alluding to is 98 dash 1888 specifies that parks like all want to park are actually regional parks, but regionals are subset of the bigger label, which is multi purpose. So in all Moana, I think they we actually they have actually fulfilled that requirement because they're probably a more active activities in all the water park than any other park. One of the things that does say there is that they need to maintain open space, and that you can have active activities, but you cannot put up any permanent structures. Right. So permanent structures would be like the dog park with the fence around it, or like that playground with the big fence around it, which is pretty permanent structure compared to the open green space. Well, they built lots of things after the war. Remember the the what's the name of the gate ball or the yes. And they and those were before 1998. Yes. And so there's enough concrete and there's enough things there. And everybody agrees now all around the world that people, particularly as we're being urbanized, need open space, just space to breathe. It has an amazing effect on people to be able to go into a park and feel open space. And they do that in New York with Central Park. Okay. And so the park has this guiding document for 20 years because they realize this sort of thing, whether it was a Ferris wheel or a dog park or a, I don't know, a world class play whatever it is that they said, we need to make a policy now so that it's easier just to say no more. It doesn't matter what it is because we have, we just can't put this here, but we have some other alternatives for the dog park brand. What did what did your task force come up with some solutions? The recommendation is that if you wanted to build the perfect fence dog park not too far away, it would be kakaako or waterfront park. They've got slopes, they've got the dog owners need trees to sit in the shade. There's lots of area there and it's remote and it's out of the way and there's lots of car parking. So that would be the ideal place. In the meantime, they had previously wanted to put a dog park in Mother Waldron Park. That is slated to have a school built sometime. And so our suggestion was if you've got a few years before they build the school, put a temporary fence dog park there and then when they build the school take it down and then kakaako or waterfront park might take another year or two to get the transfer of the ownership and the funds and things like that, but that would be the perfect place. Yeah and I just, you know, saw on the news that George at Deemer talked about how they actually did agree to take over just a couple of days ago and they got two point two four million dollars to make improvements to the park. So you know it sounds like a perfect time to build that right in. Yeah more money is coming from what I understand. So we have this wonderful space in kakaako and obviously as we can all see by driving by that all the cranes are going to continue down as Kamehameha Schools and Howard Hughes continues to develop that lots of high rises in the area. Those people have dogs, what percent have dogs would you say Brian in this country's state? Oh my gosh I don't know the exact number but it's pretty high I think it's 50% or something a lot of people have dogs and in this area here. It's one of their selling points right the towers will advertise that you can bring dogs into your condo and that would be another question I would raise with the city council is shouldn't there be like a zoning thing that says that every condo that has a building? Many of them do I was in the AO building above Whole Foods recently they have a very nice little fenced dog park right by their swimming pools there. Well I'm going to say that those are nice for the people that just want the dog to walk one meter and then do his business and come back but if you want a dog to let have a chance to be a dog we need a proper dog park. That's why if you have one acre you can do that and the dogs can run. Let's go for three acres and make it even bigger. I don't think so because there's a lot of fencing required and the Humane Association has just donated quarter of a million dollars to build one up near the University Avenue. They're expensive and as you can see from that previous picture a lot of fencing and then also if they run by the city they have to close them a half day a week and have staff come and maintain them. There's a lot of money involved and that you need to say well is that really a priority? Well for me it's a priority because I am a dog owner and I say both and not either or but it's all good questions for the mill and they do cost money so we have a lot of different organizations that might come in and take over friends of the dog park and that sort of thing but in any event we have a few more issues that we have to tackle after the break. We do have a one-minute break here. I am talking today with Charlene Chun Lum and Bruce Lum of SAVE Alamoana Beach Parkoui as well as Dr. Brian Bagnall president of the Greater Waikiki Outdoor Circle. It is my honor to have them today. Stay tuned and we will be back live in a moment. Thanks to our ThinkTech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Mon Lee and the friends of ThinkTech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. Duane Kurisu. The Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. MW Group Limited. The Schindler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Polo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Oh, we are back and we are live. I'm Winston Welton. This is Alden Wanda ThinkTech Live Streaming Network Series. Today we are talking with Charlene Chun-Lung and Bruce Lum of Save Alamwana Beach Park. As well as Dr. Brian Bagnall, esteemed president of the Greater Waikiki Outdoor Circle. These wonderful folks are involved in wanting to protect and preserve the best that we have about Alamwana Beach Park and other areas in our city. And so that's what we're talking about today. We have talked about the great things that the city has done to Alamwana Beach Park already, like repaving it. We're starting to put in a lot of trees. Irrigations fixed. Tree care. Tree care. The bathrooms are renovated, although it was $900,000. It took 8 months. It took 8 months. Oh my goodness. Maybe that's a process we need to look at, but that's a different topic than what we're looking at. However, that's a trauma taxpayers' perspective I think. We had looked at dog parks. So, Brian, you're on a task force. We already talked about that. Kakaako is the place for that. That's a better place. Definitely not in this park. And not vulcanizing. So we're not violating council policy resolution 98-188 from 20 years ago. And we had a couple of other issues on there. One is about parking. So the city has just a lot of parking. I don't think they're going to restripe it right now. They're actually putting in some parking delineation. But the question is, so this whole idea of perpendicular parking that they're proposing, it's pretty much unsafe, and we're talking about being disruptive to traffic. And truly, they just did repay them for $1.2 million. So in order to make the perpendicular parking, they're doing that again. So when we talk about how we use taxpayers dollars wisely, that kind of makes you wonder, why would you do it? You know, because you don't... And they have given us comparable to say, oh, look, we do this in other parks. But I think if you look at, well, there's a couple slides. We have a slide here that shows why perpendicular parking is less safe than parallel parking. So you've seen this graphic before. So here's a picture that they said was a comparable Sandy Beach Park. But if you take a look at this, this isn't...look at where the main parking is like on the other side of the freeway. It's not on the main thorough fare. And Bruce, do you want to say anything about that? Yeah, so in the SDIS comments that they sent back to anybody who made comment about the parking, one of the things that the city has come back with is, well, there are parks around the island that DPR has that is comparable. That they are comparable. But I've printed out all of the Google map pictures and so forth and I'll tell you, there's only one that even comes close to being possibly comparable and that's Kailua Beach Park. Which is the next slide. Oh, we have that next slide. And the comparable thing, the strongest comparable thing is that one road you see coming from the left and going through the main park and then coming back out over here on the big curve on the highway. Well, that's one way. So that's hardly comparable for Alamoana. In addition to that, these stalls were sized under the old code. So the stalls are much smaller, which means there's a lot more distance between two rows of perpendicular parking. So as a comparable, I find that a little hard to accept. And then when you look at all the other pictures, you really get the sense that, wow, they have a lot of these perpendicular stalls, but they're kind of like Sandy Beach or less in terms of the relationship. There's another slide. We've got another slide there that shows maybe one of that as well. Oh, maybe not. Maybe got taken. But so yeah, it just basically is still a big question about the need to do the perpendicular parking, especially since you're making a parking lot in the keyhole, which supposedly is going to put up almost another hundred spaces. So that could be actually adequate for overflow of the parking. And the question that I've actually suggested that they might want to do a survey for about a year and say, is that enough? And certainly if you don't... It's based on some use data rather than just thinking on top of the head. This is a dangerous way to park. There's a lot of kids. There's a lot of activity you can't see. Especially on the two-way parking because you're having people that could be backing up any traffic. It's going to be a great option all along the park. We all know we live in a very limited space state and a while we'll get smaller. And what happens is in today's active family and athletes, they use very large vehicles to bring whatever their toys to the beach. So yeah. Another one which is okay, so parking, that's one beach nourishment. This one has a lot of problems all over just from environmental point of view and getting to the beach. Let's see a picture if I got the beach nourishment on. There's some of this. Can you speak to this? Sure I can. So what this slide shows is that the beach has various ways that our community uses this. When we say local people use this park and this for locals, what we mean is that anybody who's been a resident in Hawaii who really tries to co-exist with the environment instead of tries to modify it in order to be more aesthetic to them or more comfortable. What you see here is a lot of participation by many groups of many levels. So it's very diverse use of the park. And there's a next slide here that... So in this slide, you see that a lot of families get together. We have a group of people here. This is how they actually pass on the knowledge to their family as to how to co-exist with our environment. And in all, one is a lot of ocean environment. So the thing about the sand, whether it's the next slide or not, we might have pulled that one. But the thing about the sand is they're talking about 77 cubic feet of sand, which is... cubic yards, I'm sorry, which is about 21 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of sand that they're going to put on this beach indiscriminately because they kind of want it to look like all even for people to lie and enjoy the beach. There's a lot of big-time environmental issues here. This is a very serious thing that we've missed with them. The collection area is sort of near to the drainage of the Alawai Canal, which has its own issues and that sand really hasn't been tested. I think, and from what you were saying, that the sand would go right up to the top of the wall, existing walls, so... And 78 feet out. And 70 feet eight. So when the water comes up, it'll just wash right over the wall. So we oppose it. We think it's not necessary at all. It's not about how to do this. We're just skimming over the cultural impacts. And the real important one is that the impact on the actual habitat there for all of the biota and all of the fish that we all enjoy and so forth that live there, you pretty much wipe out their smorgasbord. That's their table. There is an elephant in the living room. There's lots of cards with that. It's called the Elephant in the Living Room, kind of the proposed world-class playground. So we've got another slide on this. Tell us about the world-class playground. What's the issue? What are the issues with this? If we go back to the open green space that we talked about in the very beginning and the whole concept of the park as being a place for people of all kinds of ages and abilities to be able to utilize the park the way they want to, whether it's doing sports, especially the area where the playground would be. The amusement park would be. A lot of times on the weekends families have their weddings or baby showers. There's big events like the lantern floating and other things. This area is just full of people. Engineer Robert Crowing of the city said, this is dead space. That's exactly what it's meant to be, open space and it's enjoyed by thousands and thousands of people. We've got 98188. The thing about having it open is that people who rent it for the weekend they put up their structures but they take them down. Once you put the playground there's a picture of the proposed playground in the next slide. Let's see if we've got the proposed playground on here. This big playground which you don't actually see is that they would have this fencing around to protect it at night with lighting, et cetera. Basically what it is is we're giving away public land to private interests. The city is going to maintain this? Supposedly. Look at how long it took them to repair that bathroom. 40 years. This is a monster in the making and it doesn't belong here. There's not room for it. There's already a Children's Discovery Center and loads of parking and it's remote. There's something to that effect that says that the city or the regional plan says that this space is for that in Kakaoka, is that right? There is an original plan that says that there's this Kaki Zone. And a Kaki Zone sounds like it would be for Kakis to have a playground where the parents are walking the dogs or one parent's there and one grandmother's over here. It's like a blank canvas. It's a lovely space and now they're dealing with all the problems of ownership and homelessness and everything and they could make that a treasure place. We'll envision a treasured space Kaki Zone and have, again, this part of it are very great ideas. This is the basin and so we've got the two very contentious elements just move down the road a little bit where there's plenty of space and a safe place and as the city takes ownership of this and reclaims this for the people it'll be... Can you imagine that right on smack dab on Kakaoka Gateway Park which is very close to the bus line very close to the road easy to get to. It's impossible for us to solve all of these in a half an hour but I think you all have done an amazing job of explaining these four basic issues of the parking sand nourishment the world class playground and the dog park needing to have something the city look at this and say needs a lot more discussion a lot more argument. We did find what we've done but let's leave well enough alone and so if people want to get in touch with you you can go to alamoneabeechpark at gmail.com or Waikikioutdoorsircle.org Waikikioutdoorsircle.org Outdoorsircle.org Anyway, thank you so much for being my guest we'll come back and discuss this again let's see what happens in the city I mean let's celebrate the alamone park it's beautiful as it is Thank you to our officials who have done such a beautiful job improving this and thank you for watching our show so you can hear about community concerns I am Winston Welch and this has been our show for today on Think Tech Live Streaming Network series we've been talking with Charlene Chan Lum Bruce Lum of Stave, Alamone Beach Park as well as Dr. Brian Bagnall the president of the Greater Waikiki Outdoorsircle you can Google over those and find more information get involved, call the city if you care thanks for tuning in and we welcome your feedback thanks to our broadcast engineer Robert McLean our floor manager Eric Calander and to Jay Fadella our executive director I'll see you here every other Monday at three Aloha everyone