A 1980 Punahou School graduate has been named acting superintendent of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, which includes the USS Arizona Memorial.
Rhonda Loh is chief of natural resources management at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
"I’m actually pretty excited to be back in Honolulu, which is where I’m originally from," Loh said. "I have fond memories of being in first grade going to the memorial."
Hers is an "acting" position up to four months, "so it’s a developmental opportunity for people such as myself to learn more about what it takes to lead and be a superintendent," she said.
In 2004 Loh received the National Park Service Pacific West Region director’s resources management award, and in 2009 she received the Department of the Interior Partners in Conservation award.
Loh replaces Superintendent Paul DePrey, who came to the Arizona Memorial in 2008.
DePrey, who oversaw the memorial and its campus during a time of turmoil, was named superintendent of Salem Maritime and Saugus Iron Works National Historic Sites in Massachusetts.
His last day at the USS Arizona Memorial is Friday, said spokeswoman Abby Wines. Loh starts Monday.
Shortly after DePrey arrived at the Arizona Memorial, a proclamation issued by President George W. Bush folded it into a larger World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.
The Dec. 7, 1941, sunken battleship grave in Pearl Harbor is the No. 1 tourist attraction in Hawaii, with nearly 1.8 million visitors a year.
Officials said DePrey’s tour time at the Arizona was typical, but his tenure in later years was marked by a ticketing scandal, poor employee morale and communication, and unkempt grounds — even though $56 million had been spent just a few years before to create a new visitor center campus.
For about seven months in 2013, the park service and its nonprofit fundraising arm, Pacific Historic Parks, diverted a portion of what were supposed to be free memorial tickets at the door for walk-up visitors, and instead sold them with an audio tour for $6 apiece to tour companies, according to a park service investigation.
A year ago DePrey told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, "We stopped the (ticketing) program because I learned that I made a mistake."
DePrey told the Salem News that morale and maintenance issues were addressed "head-on."
"I want to be very forthcoming and let folks know that we worked to improve the situation when we realized there was a problem," DePrey told the newspaper.
DePrey said he wasn’t aware that park tickets were being handled improperly, according to the newspaper. He also said federal budget cuts were a factor in employee morale and maintenance problems.
Wines said it was unclear when a permanent replacement for DePrey would be picked.
According to a Hawaiian Botanical Forum biography, Loh is a certified faculty member in the tropical conservation biology and environmental science graduate program at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
Loh was a key organizer of a joint initiative by the National Geographic Society and the National Park Service last month in which teams of scientists, Hawaiian cultural practitioners, students and the public sought to discover and inventory as many living plants and creatures as possible in the 333,086-acre Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
