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Wires will be hidden
on Kailua’s main street

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By Harold Morse
Star-Bulletin

The Kailua Vision Team has turned the corner in its quest for underground power lines along Kailua Road between Oneawa and Hahani streets.

Don Bremner, project champion, told last night's vision team meeting that work on a median strip and on underground ducts for the lines will be completed in 2001. The jobs will go out to bid soon.

Undergrounding will take perhaps six months and median work three or four months, Bremner said. "Streetlights come after that."

Hoped-for ornamental streetlights will have to wait until fiscal 2002. These lights likely would put cost estimates $360,000 over the $1.2 million already in the city 2001 budget for the underground and median work.

Utility lines already are underground on the makai side of that part of Kailua Road, but lines on the mauka side remain above ground. Some 2002 money will be needed to unstring lines from poles and put them underground as well as purchase new lights.

If ornamental lighting goes in, it would mean 11 wooden poles on the mauka side, near Liberty House, would be removed and 22 lights installed on both sides of that segment of Kailua Road. Since ornamental streetlights provide only half as much illumination as standard city lights, twice as many would be needed.

Also discussed was the Kailua Gateway Park Master Plan.

This deals with park acreage near Mokapu Saddle Road and along Kawainui Channel across from Kawainui Marsh, at the end of Kaha Street. Some 15 acres of city-owned land farther south, now overgrown and lying idle, is eyed by some for possible park expansion.

Paula Loomis, vision team co-chairwoman, said the gateway park is just a concept now -- with $90,000 in the city budget for master planning of the proposal to expand the small existing park.

About 25 people attended the vision team meeting at Aikahi Wastewater Treatment Plant.