Mayor wants to
buy eco-camp
site for city park

By Lois Taylor
Star-Bulletin

Mayor Jeremy Harris wants the city to rescue the North Shore waterfront proposed for a "eco- camp" and preserve it as a park.

If the city condemns and then buys the land along the Kawailoa shoreline, it will quash the controversial eco-camp proposed by the father of eco-tourism, Stanley Selengut.

"We have a very limited, finite amount of coastline and we want to preserve as much of our open space as possible," Harris said.

The public's access to the waterfront -- although a rough, rocky and nearly unswimmable coastline -- has been a question mark throughout the eco-camp debate.

Several generations of families have camped and fished there and want to keep coming back.

But Selengut said the public will have as much access as they currently have, or more, to the waterfront because his plans call for a public parking lot. None exists now.

The mayor will submit a budget to the City Council in March to acquire the coastline called Pua'ena Point.

"We may or may not acquire the entire property," Harris said, "that will depend on cost and financing."

Some North Shore residents have criticized the city for buying land intending to preserve it as a park but leaving it untouched because of a lack of money.

But Councilwoman Rene Mansho believes it's better for the city to buy the lands and let them sit idly, until the city can do something with them.

"It could be developed in the future into a park, and it would be protected from any commercial development," Mansho said. "The shoreline area needs to be preserved for the future."

But where will the city get the money and how will it maintain it? asked Scott Ezer of the Honolulu planning firm Helber Hastert & Fee, which drafted the eco-camp's environmental impact statement.

"If the city condemned it, the city has got to pay fair market value for the property. Rene Mansho quoted $10 million, which is quite low," Ezer said.

The city would use bonds, Mansho said. But the Council would have to approve it.

"I'm not trying to stop it," she said. "I'm trying to have community input. I want an eco-camp for the North Shore. But the city's plan is keeping the country country. We've already had an overdeveloped shoreline."