Hawai'i Community Development Authority

It’s been a quarter-century since the closure of Barbers Point Naval Air Station launched high hopes for Kalaeloa, with visions of a bustling local community of housing and mixed-use vitality. Instead, the former military base on Oahu’s West Side remains an arid, underused patchwork of 3,700 acres — mired by an unreliable electrical system left by the Navy as well as parcels of questionable environmental quality. It is high time that Kalaeloa’s potential be realized, underpinned by much-needed improvements in infrastructure, financially enabled by the military.

It’s encouraging to hear that a new partnership between the Navy and the state Hawaii Community Development Corp. (HCDA) starts with $18 million to upgrade the 1930s electrical system, being used by Kalaeloa Airport, film studio facilities and the Hawaii Army National Guard. Thanks to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, the Navy is required to pay reasonable costs to transfer all customers from its old electrical system; the improved infrastructure will become part of the Hawaiian Electric grid when completed.

The high cost of infrastructure that girds any new community is underscored here: HCDA, mandated in 2002 to oversee Kalaeloa’s redevelopment, has spent at least $12.5 million to build the Enterprise Energy Corridor, upgraded infrastructure along Enterprise Avenue now transferred to Hawaiian Electric. And last year, the Legislature appropriated $47 million to HCDA for more electrical upgrades — which now, hopefully, can get defrayed by even more military investment.

Since the naval station’s 1999 closure under the federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program, resolving issues with utility infrastructure and land transfers have taken longer than expected. Even one Navy Region Hawaii official in a June HCDA meeting cited the difficulties as “BRAC gone wrong.”

Now, signs of life, slowly but surely, are emerging, adding to the optimism stoked by the military’s pay-in for electricity upgrades. These include:

>> 500-plus acres of Kalaeloa Town now under development by Hunt Companies Hawaii, which has invested heavily in the area since 2009. The company is working on infrastructure to link its area projects, such as the new Veterans Affairs center and housing that subdeveloper Gentry Homes will be building; preliminary plans call for 389 homes on 30 acres.

>> An April blessing for a new $36 million transportation project, funded by the James Campbell Co. The new stretch of state highway will be a direct link between the H-1 freeway and Kalaeloa Harbor, and a second way in and out of Campbell Industrial Park.

>> Conveyance to the city of 400 acres that includes Kalaeloa shoreline areas, a campground and cultural sites. Plans are underway to design a public space, which could include pickleball courts, tennis courts, camp sites or a future community motorsports park, Mayor Rick Blangiardi said in June.

Amid all this recent progress, however, come problems with Kalaeloa’s conversion and restoration after decades of military use — and misuse.

In June, a long-held plan for the state to assume three parcels at Kalaeloa was scuttled, after HCDA’s board rejected 213 acres due to cost concerns for conservation and environmental cleanup. Two parcels contained mostly remediated trap and skeet shooting ranges — envisioned for solar farms, and portions of which were suitable for residences. But a third, unfortunately, included the so-called “Ordy Pond,” a 10,000-year-old natural limestone sinkhole — culturally significant but contaminated by military ordnance disposal in the late 1960s to ’70s.

This harkens, of course, to lingering environmental doubts after the 2021 Red Hill fuel-spill disaster — never far from residents’ minds as a reminder of the Navy’s failed stewardship of Hawaii’s aina.

“The redevelopment of Kalaeloa is an extraordinarily complex undertaking that will occur over the course of a generation or more,” HCDA’s website says. Indeed, decades of aging infrastructure and neglect have left Kalaeloa’s potential languishing — but now come hopeful signs of revitalization. Whatever public costs that come with it, the military should be made to help pay for some of the problems it left behind.