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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, June 2, 2002

Turf issue just skims surface

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

Perhaps you've heard the line about how a donkey is really a horse concocted by committee.

If so, you wonder what is in store for Aloha Stadium, where the ongoing turf war crosses two jurisdictions — the Hawai'i Tourism Authority and the Stadium Authority — and remains without resolution.

Everybody talks about wanting to do the right thing and, at times, they even seem poised to find common ground. But while the right hand is doing one thing, sometimes the left seems committed to another.

Some of the brighter minds in the community are to be found on both sides of the aisle and, despite a nudge from the governor who appointed them, the debate rages on: Grass? Keep the AstroTurf? Rip it out and put something new in?

Frankly, most taxpayers, whose best interests should be driving this whole thing, don't care whether the games are played on grass, some sort of artificial turf or a bed of blooming daffodils. What matters is seeing that Aloha Stadium has the best surface for the investment and playing on it doesn't injure players or chase away the lucrative Pro Bowl or UH's opponents.

This much time into the issue, the hope was the groups would have long ago been on the same page. But sometimes it doesn't even look like they are operating from the same book.

One one hand, we're told the installation of FieldTurf, if that is what it is to come to, can be installed in a mere two weeks. On the other, it is said to be a five-to-six month task.

By one accounting, the whole deal is said to cost no more than $877,000. By another, it is up to $3 million or more.

Progress this isn't.

The groups have had too little and too late face-to-face dialogue. There are too many agendas tugging at their sleeves. Too often personalities come into play.

When one group has what would seem to be basic questions, the other struggles for answers. More than a year into discussion of the playing surface in Halawa not only is the issue not resolved, but the numbers have been further apart, the rhetoric pointed and territorial instincts pronounced.

And while it would be great if something is done in time for the rapidly approaching season, it is the kind of decision that, with considerable money involved, shouldn't now be made in haste just for the sake of making one.

When you step back and look at the big picture, the scary thing is that only the turf issue is on the table. But what happens when the amounts more substantial as they will be when the future of the whole stadium comes up for action?

With a facility in the sunset days of its 27th season this fall and repair costs that show no signs of going anywhere but skyward, the real hard questions and, indeed, the biggest decisions are the ones still to come.