Rising opposition to historic and cultural preservation, especially in the Legislature, is presenting steep challenges for the new Oahu board that itself was stalled for decades by politically powerful development interests that blocked full implementation.

Now, the nine members of Oahu’s new Historic Preservation Commission are grappling with preservation problems left unaddressed since the 1990s. But pressure is building from real estate developers and some housing advocates who want to curtail or limit historic preservation to encourage new construction.

The commission was authorized in 1993 by the Honolulu City Council amid widespread public concern that many of Honolulu’s iconic sites were at risk of destruction. But developers worried it would inhibit construction and a succession of Honolulu’s mayors declined to establish the board.

In April 2023, when Honolulu was the only large destination city in America without a historic preservation commission, Mayor Rick Blangiardi became the first mayor to name commissioners to the panel.

Since July, when the board finally began meeting, almost every monthly commission meeting has brought some new concern to light. Among the issues that have caught the commission’s attention are reports of negligent and illegal treatment of human remains, willful destruction of historic landmarks, slipshod archaeological surveys and communication glitches between government agencies that cause unfixable damage to treasured sites.

In the Legislature, real estate developers have been pressing lawmakers to limit the number of properties eligible for protection. They argue that bottlenecks at government agencies, including Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting, where projects are first presented for review, and the perennially underfunded Hawaii State Historic Preservation Division, which reviews some of the projects for potential problems, have slowed the pace of progress.

Kiersten Faulkner, chief executive of Historic Hawaii Foundation, a historic preservation advocacy group, said many bills have been proposed that would limit the number of historic properties by imposing a fixed new standard.

Now, any building that is older than 50 years is considered potentially historic, a rule that mirrors the federal standard, although genuine historic properties also need to be significant and possess architectural integrity, she said. One proposed rule would permit buildings only more than 100 years old to be considered historic, or, by another proposed standard, built before Hawaii statehood in 1959.

That would exclude many significant buildings, such as the apartment complex where President Barack Obama lived as a child, built in 1965, Faulkner said. Other measures would only consider properties historic if they are officially and formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a time-consuming and costly process. These measures only narrowly missed becoming law, she said.

“What is happening is terrifying,” she told the commission in a February briefing, noting in a memo to the board that she had actively opposed seven such bills this session. “This keeps coming up, over and over, and frankly I am concerned about it.”

The commissioners, volunteers who include four cultural historians, two architects who have specialized in historic preservation, two archaeologists and an architectural historian, are also extending support for projects whose advocates have long been ignored.

In an interview, Commission Chair Kehaunani Abad, a historian and executive at Kamehameha Schools, said she was very pleased with the board’s progress in the eight months since its first meeting.

“We have great rapport. There’s great alignment among the commissioners,” she said. “Some may be surprised by that. We are a very diverse group but our experiences with the historic preservation process have led us to many of the same conclusions.”

Abad said she and the other Oahu commissioners want to avoid becoming part of the problem. She said they are committed to ensuring that their actions streamline interactions between the city and state preservation officials, remove redundancies and avoid additional costs being imposed on property owners at the last minute. They are working with city and state officials to make sure agency databases, including DPP and SHPD, interact more smoothly, she said.

A History Of Disrespect

Over the years, a number of historic sites on Oahu have been bulldozed, mishandled or allowed to fall into ruins. In 2022, despite years of warnings by historic preservationists, a building known as the Queen’s Retreat, a property that had inspired the song Aloha Oe, fell into disrepair and burned down. In 2023, a city contractor negligently destroyed historic paving stones dating from the sandalwood era in Chinatown, a national historic landmark district. The Marconi Telegraph site, also a national historic landmark, was partially demolished by its new owner last year, a situation that is still under investigation by city officials.

The general lack of respect for historic properties has been a long-standing problem, according to the commissioners, all of whom have been involved in working in the field for years.

“Iolani Palace itself was slated to be torn down to make way for a parking lot,” recalled Commissioner Hailama Farden in a recent interview. “I can’t imagine Honolulu now without the palace.”

Native Hawaiian historical sites have often been allowed to decay or suffer willful damage, said commissioner and historic preservation advocate Mahealani Cypher.

A commission working group examined the state’s historic review databases and determined there are 567 designated historic landmarks on Oahu but at least 4,000 additional significant properties that do not have landmark status. The commissioners found that the records appeared incomplete and that most sites were disproportionately concentrated in urban Honolulu. Much information is missing, according to the group’s report, because although more than one-quarter of the land on Oahu is controlled by the federal government, federal agencies are not required to report the findings of their own archaeological studies back to city or state officials. So they don’t.

The magnitude of the work ahead is “gargantuan,” Abad told her fellow commissioners.

The city has given the commission some support. Council member Esther Kiaaina, who championed the creation of the commission, had arranged for a full-time professional staff member to be hired, likely to be a historic preservationist or archaeologist with a city planning background. Until then, in addition to clerical support, the commission is being staffed by city planner Michael Kat, a trained archaeologist with historic preservation expertise.

But city officials are also signaling they are keeping a close eye on the commission to make sure it doesn’t take steps that could add complications to the development process. City planners are raising concerns in meetings about commission proposals that might be illegal, excessively expensive, duplicative or would require legislation to be enacted.

The commissioners also are hesitant to overstep or aggravate tensions between strained and overworked agencies that need to work collaboratively, records of their monthly meetings show.

In October, the Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs passed a resolution asking the commission to take action to prevent careless construction companies from destroying burial sites. The problem has been particularly acute in Kailua, where at least 157 iwi kupuna have been dislodged in the past 34 years, despite the passage of state burial laws in 1990, the association reported. That law prohibits removing, destroying or altering any burial sites except as permitted by local burial councils.

The association told the commission it wanted the sand berm of Kailua to be declared a “highly sensitive area of significant adverse impact to iwi kupuna.”

Kihei de Silva, representing the Kailua Hawaiian Civic Club, told the commission that a pool construction company operating in Kailua callously dumped a pile of excavated sand containing human bones in a horse paddock in Waimanalo. He said this kind of thing has happened repeatedly in Kailua, resulting in his family being drawn into the crisis of handling human remains on a number of occasions. He asked the commission to do what it could to require every construction project in Kailua to be required to hire a cultural monitor or archaeologist to keep watch over the sites.

The commissioners decided against trying to press for that kind of monitoring, which some noted could be expensive, impractical and hard to arrange. Instead, the commission decided that city officials should flag all projects in Kailua as potentially problematic if they involve excavation and are built on what is called “Jaucus” sand, which is a type of soil found on the shoreline. They are preparing a letter to the DPP chief explaining the factors that increase the probability of burials being found in a particular place and urging more strenuous efforts to identify potential problems.

Last month, the commission unanimously endorsed the Burial Sites Working Group’s 2023 report to the Legislature, which addressed a number of problems in administering burial laws and called for more stringent enforcement.