Mayor Kirk Caldwell appears to be on pace to hit his goal of upgrading aging restrooms and playgrounds at 40 Oahu parks and has even found the resources to install new play equipment to replace broken items at an additional dozen facilities.

Caldwell’s E Paka Kakou initiative, however, has been less successful in finding additional groups or individuals in the community willing to adopt and take care of the city’s more than 500 parks in various capacities.

The initiative was announced by Caldwell in February during his 2015 State of the City speech. He promised to pump $2 million into park refurbishments and set a goal of overhauling 24 comfort stations and 16 playground apparatus sites by March. The Council approved the additional $2 million for the 2016 budget.

As of Wednesday, the city has renovated 22 comfort stations and 10 sets of playground equipment.

Next on the comfort station list, with improvements expected to wrap up in the coming weeks, is the city’s busiest comfort station: at Ala Moana Beach Park near Magic Island. The city is scheduled to announce today that Nuuanu Valley Park is the 11th with renovated playground apparatus.

“They’re our front yards and we need to treat them as such,” Caldwell told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “We’ve neglected them in ways that are not defendable, and we are committed to do something about it.”

Additionally, Parks Director Michele Nekota was able to scrape funds from her department’s budget for 13 new sets of playground apparatus to replace equipment around the island that was beyond repair, Caldwell said.

The upcoming fiscal 2017 budget will include a new $2 million to allow for further renovations, Caldwell said. “It’s going to be a long march to get to every restroom that needs to be dealt with,” he said, noting that there are 213 comfort stations maintained by the Parks Department.

“It’s not a one-year priority,” Caldwell said. So, “it should get the sustained commitment … in terms of money, to keep going forward.”

Nekota said her department is squeezing as much out of the $2 million allotment as possible, adding that a new comfort station would cost a minimum of $550,000.

Renovations of most comfort stations are being tackled by city parks crews. Each takes between three to six weeks, depending on exactly what needs to be fixed, Nekota said.

Each of the refurbished, “semi-new” restrooms get a coat of MicroGuard, a protective maintenance coating that is supposed to make restroom tiles and other surfaces easier to clean and maintain. “We retile it sometimes, we replace broken tiles, we replace the fixtures like the urinals, the toilets, the sinks … all of the plumbing fixtures.”

A crew of four now does the plumbing renovations at the comfort stations islandwide. The same crew also is responsible for fixing irrigation systems at all parks.

Nekota said the new budget, which Caldwell must deliver to the City Council by March 1, is expected to propose four new positions for a second crew to work on the project. Eventually, she said, she’d like to see a crew dedicated to irrigation and plumbing assigned to each of the island’s five parks districts.

Other park crews handle the rest of the work, including carpentry, painting and tiling.

Contracted vendors, meanwhile, are responsible for placing the MicroGuard material in the comfort stations and replacing play apparatus parts, city spokesman Andrew Pereira said. Each playground renovation takes three to four weeks, depending on the scope of work, he said.

Ewa’s Asing Community Park was one of the first to see its comfort stations upgraded. A check on Wednesday, nearly a year later, showed no damaged fixtures or graffiti. There is staining on the floor tiles, but it is still a vast improvement when compared with the park’s “before” photos.

The sinks at Asing — and other newer or upgraded comfort stations — are placed on the outside of the structure to discourage vandalism, as they are out in the open. There are no soap or paper towel dispensers.

Ewa Beach resident Jay Gonzales, 42, said he’s happy with the condition of the renovated facility and was impressed that the cleanup has held up after nearly a year. “I never go inside the ladies room, but overall, it looks pretty good.”

Half-jokingly, Gonzales suggested a mirror and hand sanitizer dispensers be installed near the sinks, perhaps as a reward to the community for keeping the facility in decent shape.

Historically, the city Department of Parks and Recreation has been criticized for not being able to keep up with cleaning and repairing damage, and Nekota said she is doing her best to fight that stigma.

The department has 256 authorized positions. As of December, 225 of them have been filled. Pereira said a vacancy rate of up to 25 percent is typical across all city agencies due to retirements, departures and other general attrition.

As a result, the city is trying to fill about 40 positions. The Parks and Recreation Department joined the Department of Facility Maintenance last month to hold a job fair at Ala Moana Beach Park for prospective groundskeepers.

Councilwoman Kymberly Pine, who heads the Council Parks Committee, said she’s happy with the progress of the initiative and the news that Caldwell intends to put in another $2 million in next year’s budget. “I would double that amount if we could,” she said.

While “a good first step,” more comfort stations and playground apparatus still are in disrepair, she said. “I’m worried it’s going to take take hundreds of millions of dollars to get to the level of where we need to be.”

The other part of the E Paka Kakou initiative attempts to address that concern by calling on the community to become more involved and take charge of their parks in some fashion. It’s an effort Pine has also pushed.

The city’s Adopt-A-Park program, which celebrated its 30th anniversary last fall, consists of 280 active groups, said Pereira, the city spokesman. That list includes seven groups that have been added since February, when Caldwell’s call for volunteer groups first went out.

The total is fewer than the 289 Adopt-A-Park groups that the city reported in February. Pereira said that’s because the older list included groups that the city has since determined to be inactive.

Finding groups to adopt parks in her West Oahu community has not been a problem, Pine said.

She pointed to community advocate Shirley Swinney, who has been helping the nonprofit groups Ulu A‘e Learning Center and Halau Kaululaua‘e gain formal Adopt-A-Park status. The two groups, both of which are led by Kumu Hula Miki‘ala Kanekoa, have already been cleaning the hula mound and a 2-acre area around it at Kapolei Regional Park, including graffiti cleanup. weeding and other work. The area is known as the center of Kapolei, she said.

Swinney, who has helped at least one other nonprofit gain Adopt-A-Park status, said there is soon to be a rededication of the hula mound. “We really, as a community, are not just looking to government for the answers to all of our problems, we really want to be part of the solution.”

Caldwell said the overall state of the city’s parks will need community participation. Community organizations such as canoe clubs are being urged to, if nothing else, step up monitoring of the facilities they use to help prevent vandalism, he said.

“‘Kakou’ means we go together on this,” he said. “And yes, the city needs to do its part to maintain and renovate our facilities. But we’re asking the public, the community, to also malama (take care of) these parks and help so they don’t get trashed again.”

FACT