The phrase "Second City" has been appearing in Honolulu planning documents for decades, a reference to a plan for directing development toward what’s long been called Kapolei.

More recently, some observers have started to question: Is the concept ever going to become reality, or is it just going to be more urban sprawl on the Ewa plain?

"So far we have a city hall, state building and court house, a regional library and police station, three buildings constructed by Campbell (Estate), and a school," said Kioni Dudley, one of many outspoken opponents of recent development projects in this Leeward Oahu region. "This is not a Second City.

"The Second City was supposed to provide professional jobs in the area and take people off of the freeway," he added. "Without the Second City, Kapolei is just a sprawling suburb composed of multiple bedroom communities."

Kapolei has some assets that could help it become more or less independent: Campbell Industrial Park and a deep-draft harbor are nearby to supply some of the jobs. Retail development has begun to form a nascent commercial sector; there are some government offices; the blueprints show the future University of Hawaii-West Oahu campus and the long-debated elevated rail terminus.

But as anyone can see from the rush-hour gridlock on the H-1 Freeway, Kapolei is a long way from achieving the critical mass of a self-contained community. And a pair of recent state Land Use Commission decisions — approvals of the Ho‘opili project in Kapolei and Koa Ridge in Central Oahu — have turned up the volume on the community conversation about urban planning from background-noise levels to full blast.

Much of the talk from project opponents has centered on the loss of active — and prime-quality — agricultural lands in these areas. That’s been a major focus of the Sierra Club and Friends of Makakilo, of which Dudley is the chief spokesman. They were among the intervenors in the back-to-back LUC cases now awaiting the written ruling before deciding whether to challenge it, first through commission reconsideration but ultimately in court.

"From a legal perspective, I think we have so much of the record to show how valuable this land is," said Sierra Club attorney Elizabeth Dunne, about the Ho‘opili site. "So if there’s really any land that they’re going to deny a petition on, and enforce the constitutional provision, it would be this land."

In its review of the Koa Ridge development proposal, the commission also heard from Richard Poirier, chairman of the Mililani/ Waipio/Melemanu Neighborhood Board, one of the official intervenors in that case. Poirier raised the agricultural issue and placed special emphasis on the impact on traffic.

Unlike Kapolei, he said, residents along the Central Oahu corridor don’t even have the prospect of rail transit to help with their morning and evening commutes.

And Poirier, who retired in 2006 as the planning program administrator at the state Office of Planning, had a particular interest in what he described as "a broken comprehensive planning and zoning system." Even in its own General Plan, he said, the policy was changed in 1989 to "encourage growth in the secondary urban center at Kapolei and in the urban fringe areas in Ewa and Central Oahu to meet housing needs" that Honolulu, the primary urban center, couldn’t accommodate.

He pointed to the plan’s population policy guidelines that were amended. The plan policy now is that by 2025, Central Oahu would have 17 percent of the island’s population, while Ewa would have 13 percent.

"It became legalized sprawl," he said. "You can develop anywhere. … They keep adding to this inventory (of urban land) so it becomes a land bank for the private sector."

David Tanoue is director of the city Department of Planning and Permitting, which oversees the General Plan and the process of revising it. Critics of the recent projects complained that the city blueprint was supposed to be reassessed for new editions every five years, but Tanoue said that since the City Charter was amended in 1998, a comprehensive review is now required only once in a decade.

The plan was revised six times between 1989 and 2002, and now is in the midst of a review and update, he said, with a public review draft to be released later this year. More details are online (http://honoluludpp.org/planning/OahuGenPlan.asp).

On the Kapolei issue, Tanoue acknowledged that residential projects are outpacing job-producing developments, but added that these are catching up. He cited as examples UH-West Oahu and the 344-acre Kapolei Harborside project, projected to offer about 4,000 industrial and related jobs.

But, as if to underscore that such developments often proceed in fits and starts, last week the developer of the Ka Makana Ali‘i mall in East Kapolei announced that construction has been delayed.

Even with all the puzzle pieces falling into place, Tanoue said, there will always be an Ewa-Honolulu commute.

"Our proposed revised Ewa Development Plan, which goes before the Planning Commission June 27, notes that in 2035, there will be about 164,000 people living in Ewa, with 87,000 jobs," he said, in a written response to Star-Advertiser queries. "By far, the number of jobs in the primary urban center (Honolulu) will dominate the landscape for the foreseeable future and will continue to be the job location center on the island.

"That is why a mass transit system has been a critical component of the directed growth policy in the General Plan for the last 35 years," he wrote.

Assuming rail moves ahead, it wouldn’t eliminate traffic, some have observed, contemplating a further watering down of the directed-growth policy. City Councilman Nestor Garcia introduced such a resolution earlier this year. The measure, which failed, proposed that "another way in which the city can work towards alleviating congestion in the Central and Leeward areas is to examine and re-evaluate its regional development/sustainable communities plans to spread future growth to other areas of Oahu."

And there are some planners who argue that not enough has been done to promote more than the most conventional residential and retail projects. One is Tom Dinell, a UH-Manoa professor emeritus of urban and regional planning.

The government response to the massive traffic burden posed by development in Ewa and the Central Oahu "fringe," he said, were adaptive: primarily, the $5.27 billion rail project.

"No one that I know of in a position of leadership suggested spending $2 billion or $3 billion on subsidizing private firms to locate in the Ewa area rather than on rail so as to create a real second city, rather than trying to ameliorate the transportation problems we created through relatively massive fringe development," Dinell said.

An investment by government and landowner Campbell Co. (formerly known as the Campbell Estate) would be necessary to prod Kapolei toward true second-city status, he said, subsidizing the development of sites for private-sector employers.

Up to this point, Dinell said, Kapolei development has followed the path of least resistance.

"Campbell Estate facilitated a great deal of residential development," he said. "It was as if the estate and others were saying, ‘If we have enough people living here, the jobs will come.’ Of course, no one said that.

"Developers love building on flat, undeveloped agricultural lands, particularly if the cost of the land is attractive and someone else has put in the off-site infrastructure," he said. "Increasing density in the central urban core, as smart growth proposes, is a much less enticing possibility."