State Senate Majority Leader Cal Kawamoto charged Wednesday that the University of Hawaii's highly paid "dream team from the East Coast" headed by President Evan Dobelle is shattering the dreams local residents have for a West Oahu campus. Senator faults UH leaders
Kawamoto complains that West
Oahu plans have been curtailedBy Bruce Dunford
Associated Press"If you're going to bring a dream team together and come down here, don't shatter our dreams," he said.
"Our dream was 900 acres, our dream was a big campus, a Pacific Rim university, a four-year strong liberal arts college."
The latest proposal from the university administration is to put the West Oahu campus on 27 acres in "downtown" Kapolei and combine it with Leeward Community College, now located near Pearl City, said Kawamoto (D, Pearl City-Waipahu).
Dobelle and Vice President for External Affairs and University Relations Paul Costello were out of town Wednesday and could not be reached for comment.
However, university spokesman Jim Manke said no decision has been reached on the West Oahu campus site, noting as recently as last week university officials were looking at a 320-acre site east of Kapolei Golf Course along Farrington Highway.
In 1995, Gov. Ben Cayetano announced an agreement with Campbell Estate to swap 54 state acres at Hawaii Raceway Park for 910 acres of estate land on the hillside above the H-1 freeway and adjacent to Makakilo.
The state, meanwhile, would provide $30 million in infrastructure on 500 acres on the Ewa plain previously designated for the campus and then sell that land for housing development, using the profit to build the first phase of the West Oahu campus to serve some 5,000 students.
That is the plan Kawamoto wants to follow, considering rising real estate values in West Oahu.
If it generates $100 million, "why not throw in another $100 million in and build the infrastructure? $200 million 20 years from now may have been a very cheap thing to have done," he said.
"I don't mind paying the salaries, I don't mind people coming from the mainland to maybe plan something, but let's go from where we started to bigger and better things," Kawamoto said. "But don't come in here and automatically take out 800 acres away from my campus."
At what he dubbed in pidgin as his "How you figgah?" news conference, Kawamoto questioned the hiring of Herman Frazier from the University of Alabama-Birmingham as the university's new athletic director.
He said local candidates should have been considered.
He also said he understands that the federal government gave $80 million and the Queen's Medical Center provided $20 million toward the $150 million in matching funds needed for the planned $300 million university medical school in Kakaako.
"Did we need a high-powered dream team to raise $50 million?" Kawamoto asked.
University of Hawaii
