Lee Cataluna: Visitor pledges are only the beginning

In February 1994, Bumpy Kanahele and members of the Ohana Council held a peaceful protest in Waikiki telling tourists, very plainly, to go home.

They walked up and down the beach handing out educational flyers. They held signs along the roadway. They did lots of media interviews, making the point that President Bill Clinton had just signed the Apology Resolution, acknowledging America’s illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government, and now it was time for the restoration of Hawaiian sovereignty and the return of Hawaiian lands.

The bold protest attracted a spate of media attention. Imagine saying something to tourists beyond, “How may I be of service?”

Twenty five years later, peaceful protests have evolved beyond pamphlets into physical barricades and resolute groups of highly organized activists. The targets of recent protests have changed, too. No longer is it about “beaches they sell to build their hotels.” Now it’s a big telescope consortium, a wind power developer, the city’s fixation on building a ballpark along the Waima-nalo shoreline. These are not tourism-driven projects. They all fall under a category of, according to their supporters, “for the good of all.”

Tourism, meanwhile, has grown beyond what anyone could have imagined 25 years ago. Hawaii residents, fed up with illegal vacation rentals in once-quiet neighborhoods, now wish all those visitors would take their rolling suitcases and their bad driving and go back to the beach-side hotels that were built to handle them and leave the local houses for local families. The bad guys are not so much the hotel developers anymore. They’re the owners of the illegal vacation rentals who, with big-money backers, have fought to do whatever they want regardless of the law or neighborhood impact.

Nobody is telling tourists to go home. On the contrary, most discussion recently is how to, politely but firmly, get visitors to behave themselves while they’re here.

Kauai started asking visitors to take a pledge not to mess up the island. The pledge is written as a promise to the children of Kauai that today’s vacationers will not ruin Kauai’s future. Hawaii island issued a similar pledge after the horde of tourists who showed up to see the active eruption last year and who, predictably, went tromping where they shouldn’t and put themselves in all sorts of danger.

Now the Honolulu City Council is considering a similar visitor pledge. It can’t hurt and it might help, but if it is written in the vague, overly careful language of gentle suggestions rather than straight-up rules, it might not make a difference. Hopefully, the City Council will come up with some clear directives for their pledge: stuff like “Don’t stay in an unlicensed vacation rental,” “When a sign near a beach says NO PARKING, don’t park there,” “When a sign says NO HIKING or PRIVATE PROPERTY, know that the sign pertains specifically to you.”

The pledge has to be specific and direct. None of the squishy language of eco- spiritualism and soft-­focus memes about footprints. Throw in some fines and criminal penalties as well. Pamphlets don’t do much.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@ staradvertiser.com.