Busy Kapalama satellite city hall to move

Oahu’s busiest satellite city hall and driver licensing operations at City Square will relocate two blocks to the new Kapalama Hale in the coming weeks, about nine months later than originally anticipated.

Satellite city hall services will open at Kapalama Hale on June 21, while driver licensing operations will make the same move and open at the new site June 28, Mayor Kirk Caldwell announced Tuesday.

Kapalama Hale is at the 55,000-square-foot former Sprint Building at Dillingham Boulevard and Alakawa Street. Since April 2015 the city has been leasing the facility at $154,000 a month. But that will end next year when the city exercises its option to buy the building outright for $27.5 million.

City Design and Construction Director Robert Kroning said the city will recoup the cost of the purchase in 14 years because of savings in rental fees.

RCK Partners, which owns City Square, asked the city to vacate the location to make way for expansion of its Chinatown Marketplace retail venture.

When the city first announced in June 2015 that it was moving down the street, Kroning told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the goal was to relocate satellite city hall and driver licensing operations to Kapalama Hale by the end of September 2015.

But in late October, Kro-ning revised the relocation date for the two offices to April. He cited inability by the city and a contractor to agree on the cost of renovating the interior of the former Sprint Building as the major reason for the delay.

Asked about the further setbacks, Kroning said Tuesday that they were due to many factors, including a delay in shipping building materials from the mainland.

“We had set an aggressive schedule and hoped to move in earlier,” Kroning said. “The actual construction of this is taking longer than we had hoped.”

Kroning estimated the overall cost of construction at about $5.5 million, of which current building owner Tradewind Dillingham LLC has agreed to chip in $1 million. The current landowner has also recently added a new air conditioning system and backup generator.

The $154,000 monthly rental for the building is about $34,000 more than the city is paying combined to RCK and other private landlords for city office space that is to be relocated, Kro-ning said. During the same period, the city has been paying City Square landlord RCK about $114,000 monthly.

Kroning said that paying two rents was necessary to allow the city to conduct its renovations.

Members of the City Council Budget Committee last month criticized the administration’s handling of Kapalama Hale, questioning why the city is paying lease rent on a building it intends to purchase.

But city officials told the committee that initially, the landowner was not seeking to sell the property.

“It always makes sense to buy when you can,” Caldwell told reporters Tuesday.

Other city agencies are expected to move into the building later, starting with the Equal Employment Office, the city Ethics Commission, the administrative offices of the Department of Customer Services and the Neighborhood Commission, Kroning said.

The new Kapalama Satellite City Hall and driver licensing operations will feature modern self-service kiosks for some transactions as well as a push-notification queuing system dubbed “Aloha Q” which will allow customers to spend less time in line, city Information Services Director Mark Wong said. “There are no lines. We don’t have any queuing stanchions or lanes as the other facilities have. The only line you may see is before the facility opens.”

The building was originally built to house the headquarters of Verifone, the electronic payment company, and contains much of the “high-tech” infrastructure needed to install the new technology, Wong said.

The Aloha Q will allow people to go online off-site and sign up for slots at an estimated time, he said. “You check in, you can go get a hot dog or go buy a plant at the Home Depot. But you don’t have to be here. The system will interact with you on your mobile device” and give an alert on when to return for the transaction.

The touch-screen kiosks eventually will be programmed so people can pay water bills, purchase transit passes and register vehicles, Wong said. He added that the kiosks were designed, by his department, to work with the queuing system.

Meanwhile, a revamp of the old printing systems connected to mainframe computers, some of which still use carbon paper, will allow the city to operate in a more centralized and efficient manner, saving about $100,000 annually, Wong said. “None of those old printers are going to be coming over here.”

The location includes a 23-stall parking lot in front of the satellite city hall side of the building, while a 188-stall lot is on the makai side of the building, next to the busy Costco gasoline station.

Alakawa Street is often backed up because of the long lines flowing out of the gas station. Costco plans to add eight pumps to ease the backup after Kapalama Hale opens, Kroning said.