A decision on the fate of the shuttered archery range at Kapiolani Park should be made in the coming months, city Parks Director Michele Nekota said Tuesday.
Nekota told reporters that the Caldwell administration intends to either reopen the Kapiolani range or offer up a new facility elsewhere in urban Honolulu for bow-and-arrow enthusiasts.
The Kapiolani archery range has been closed since April 24, 2012, when an errant arrow was apparently shot 500 feet and landed at a court in the neighboring Kapiolani tennis complex.
Archers have repeatedly expressed frustration about how long it’s taken for the range to reopen. But a group of Kapiolani Park tennis players, citing safety concerns, said they still would prefer the archers not return.
"The city is looking at options throughout urban Honolulu to make sure that we have a safe archery range for the public," Nekota said. That means either safety modifications at Kapiolani region or a new location altogether, she said.
Mark Kato, state director of the National Field Archery Association, said Nekota’s comments Tuesday contradict assurances that archers have been given by other parks officials that the city has been preparing to put up fencing and that target stands had already been built and were ready to go.
Noting that he was unaware of the possibility of a new location, Kato said he hopes Nekota and other parks officials will consult with his group and other archers before making a decision.
"It’s pointless if it’s in a wind tunnel, and it’s pointless if we can’t get our distance," Kato said. Archers who compete nationally, like Kato, shoot targets 100 feet away or more.
The city has three other public archery range facilities: at the Koko Head Shooting Range in East Honolulu, Central Oahu Regional Park in Waipio and the Fort Barrette Archery Range in Kapolei. But Koko Head is windy and not conducive to archery, Fort Barrette is open only on weekends and is geared more for hunters, and Waipio is too far away for most Honolulu archers, Kato said.
Melvin Mung Lim, an archer for more than four decades and a member of Oahu Pacific Archers, said the city overreacted by shutting the range down so long and pointed out that the 2012 incident was the only one recorded in some five decades.
He and other archers have offered to move the range farther from the tennis courts. "We’ve had the runaround," Mung Lim said. "We haven’t gotten a response for three years."
About 20 to 30 archers had used the range daily on weekdays, double or more on weekends, the archers said.
The number of archers has grown significantly in recent years, they added, pointing to the high-profile "Hunger Games" movie series and other media as major draws to the sport, especially among the younger set.
John Veltri, a spokesman for the group Friends of Diamond Head Tennis, said there have been more than one incident involving arrows landing in or near the tennis courts. "There have been accidents in the past, and there will be accidents in the future," he said.
The park is heavily used by everyone from runners to people simply seeking shade to read a book, he said. "We just don’t know how you can safely have a weapons range in a public facility like this when there are so many people around."
Nekota said one of the reasons it’s taken so long for a decision is that the city has gone through several parks directors in recent years. Nekota joined the city last spring.
Reopening the Kapiolani range with improvements would likely run into resistance from the Kapiolani Park Preservation Society, which oversees the park and is dedicated to maintaining its free and open nature.
Alethea Rebman, the society’s president, said archery is "a pretty low-impact use" of the land, and her group is not opposed to the archery range staying open.
However, she stressed, her group would oppose "any further paving of the park" as well as any fencing separating the archery range from the rest of the area.
Fencing would mean no one else could use that portion of the park, even when archers aren’t around, Rebman said.
Parkgoers on Tuesday afternoon said they generally favor reopening the range.
Maunawili resident Erika Bermudez said Oshen, her 8-year-old son, uses a bow and arrow along hunting trails and would likely want to use the range at some point, she said.
Manoa resident Krista Hiser and her husband, Liam Skilling, have occasionally eaten lunch at that end of the park while waiting for one of their children to finish classes at La Pietra-Hawaii School for Girls over the years and have never been fazed by the presence of archers.
Hiser said she’s always felt the presence of an archery range in the dense urban area as "insane but also kind of cool" and something that should be allowed to continue.
