City extends downtown Honolulu preschool lease for six months

Plans for a major overhaul to the city’s Civic Center underground parking structure are forcing a large preschool sitting atop it to vacate the premises, but Mayor Rick Blangiardi on Tuesday announced a six-month lease extension and admitted to miscommunication with school officials.

The city informed Seagull Schools in February it would not extend its lease for the Frank Fasi Municipal Center grounds location, which was set to expire Aug. 31, giving it only six months to find another location. The extension allows school operations to continue until February.

Seagull Schools CEO Megan McCorriston said Blangiardi and city Managing Director Mike Formby “made a good-faith effort to offer us an extension of our current lease. … We’re pleased that we have almost a year now to examine the possibilities of where we can relocate these families, because our goal is to provide them with uninterrupted child care service.”

McCorriston said the school has long known that the repairs would be needed “at some point in time.” However, she said, “The ending of our lease was just very sudden. We were always operating under the impression that we would have at least a year before anything was happening” that would necessitate ending the lease to start construction.

Seagull Schools, which has five locations on Oahu, prioritizes city workers’ children at its downtown location, which is licensed for an enrollment of 264 children. Currently, it has just over 220 enrolled and has begun admitting children from a waitlist of about 150.

During a news conference held Tuesday, Blangiardi said he was “deeply sorry” for any heartache or consternation that occurred, and took responsibility for what he described as a miscommunication and failure by city officials to communicate with the school. “We’ve learned some stuff in all of this with respect to how to conduct ourselves when we were probably excited about the project a little bit,” he said.

McCorriston said she hopes the school can remain in the area, but so far has been unable to find a location.

The aging parking structure has trees and grass growing above it, so tree roots and water drainage have likely undermined the structure, a city spokesman said.

In addition to closing the preschool’s doors, the project, which might require a complete or near-complete reconstruction, poses a potential major parking dilemma for the city workers and the public as nearly 1,000 parking stalls housed in the City Center parking structure will be off-limits during demolition and construction.

In all, 72 public stalls, 797 employee stalls and 106 city motor pool stalls will temporarily be lost.

While the administration has a plan to relocate the employee parking and motor pool, it has not come up with alternative parking for people doing city business at the Fasi Municipal Building and Honolulu Hale, as well as at police headquarters, which has only a handful of stalls for the public.

City Design and Construction Director Alex Kozlov said, “The duration of the project will be determined by the extent, locations and depth of the damage. We are conducting investigations now.”

He added, “After we get a complete picture, we will develop and communicate a plan, sometime in the summer of 2022. Our intent is to restore the structure completely while minimizing inconvenience to everyone.”