Editorial: City mishandles Waikiki parking

There’s a buried treasure in Waikiki — an inexpensive municipal parking lot. It never should have been buried to begin with, of course, but now it’s up to the city and its private partners to dig it up, for the public benefit.

Besides the irritant of parking spaces being held in abeyance and revenues lost to the city, significant as those are, the most distressing part of the whole episode is how it demonstrates that government demands commitments from developers but, much too often, let them lapse, unenforced.

When developer PACREP 2 LLC started work in 2015 on the Ritz-Carlton Residences, the company made an agreement with the city to use the lot, located adjacent to the worksite near Kuhio Avenue and Kaiolu Street, as a construction staging area. The pact was to pay $750,000 over the four years for its use, reopening a renovated parking lot on March 31, 2019.

The company did not meet that deadline and was not held accountable for the revenue the city has lost in the eight additional months it took to finish. The city also stands to lose money because there are now only 50 stalls, as opposed to the 58 that had been there originally.

Worse yet, there’s been little effort to notify area stakeholders that the lot had become available — in particular nearby businesses that counted on parking for their customers. And it’s maddeningly hidden away, with insufficient and confusing signage.

It’s not as if the parking problems of Waikiki aren’t known to all; they’re largely the reason why local residents tend to stay away. In October 2017, the Honolulu City Council passed a bill creating a special traffic management district for the area. Its overseer, the nonprofit Waikiki Transportation Management Association is tasked with handling related concerns, including parking fees.

At the outset, this privatization of public transit issues merited some skepticism. Handing off the management of this aspect of public streets is problematic, especially when parking fees make public beaches less accessible. And if the tradeoff was to use fees to raise funds for Waikiki improvements, that plainly is not the result in this case.

When the association finally moved to provide the parking-lot sign on Kuhio Avenue, it was posted, with a misdirecting arrow, past the point where the driver must turn in and follow a curving driveway to the lot.

Rick Egged, association president, said the city took a long time to sign off on posting the sign, adding that the issue of improving the signage is under review. Whatever the reason for the delay, a correction should be made quickly.

In these times of tight city budgets, the loss of revenue is no small matter, and the loss was sizable. The developers paid only about one-fourth of the lot’s maximum revenue yield for the four years. The delay cost $440,000 in potential parking fees, and the fact that the lot sat largely unused since it reopened Dec. 5 subtracted as much as $150,000 more. The reduction in stalls translates to $288 less in meter payments each day.

Adding insult to injury, this is a project that garnered zoning exemptions, and if the full revenue potential of the lot was supposed to be part of the public benefits in return, those public benefits are owed.

The frustration to the community is that the value of Hawaii property is often sold too cheaply. Honolulu is undergoing redevelopment in prime areas, and there have been height limits and density restrictions that are waived in numerous projects. What the community has gotten back, in the form of affordable housing and other amenities, has been less than impressive.

And when the returns don’t come in at all, that’s simply unacceptable.