ISLAND VOICES
Solution can be found on Stairway

By Chris Anderson

A respectful FYI to those involved in management of the Stairway to Heaven:

To the City & County: Your vision of repairing the stairs and opening them in the context of a Ha'iku Valley Nature Park and Cultural Preserve is wonderful.

You found the money and repaired the stairs. You spent more money on formal planning and "visioned" with dozens of stakeholders from the community. The result was a park modeled somewhat after Hanauma Bay, with limited, controlled access, security guards at entrances, parking on the premises and nonprofit assistance to help renovate and manage the park and stairway and educate visitors about the natural and cultural treasures in the valley.

This is doable, but it must be funded, so you have to prioritize. You can't have this "green gem in a necklace of parks ringing O'ahu" if you spend yourself naked funding vision teams and Sunsets on the Beach and every other scheme someone hatches to please a constituency.

To the DHHL: I can understand if you're holding out for the greatest possible return in the land swap with the City & County. You own most of the valley, and your responsibility is the welfare of your homesteaders. But if homesteads cannot be built there, as you concluded five years ago, then wouldn't it be a good thing to have developable C&C land elsewhere that you can prepare for homesteaders now? The C&C is broke, and that's not going to change for quite awhile; please stop insisting on a straight acre-for-acre swap, and accept something between that and the city's proposed value-for-value swap.

It would be mostly a win-win for you and the city, and the valley can finally be re-opened to Hawaiians and everyone else as a living example of ancient Hawaiian lifestyle and cultural practice.

To our legislators: Permanently "closing" the stairway will not work unless you remove every last section of the stairway that we as citizens just spent $875,000 repairing. I understand my neighbors' extreme frustration, and I understand your concern for them as constituents, but nothing will stop hikers from attempting this hike if the stairs are still there. Trust me, I've lived next to the primary access in Ha'iku Village for 20 years, and watched as entire groups of hikers climbed over "no trespassing" signs on 6-foot-high gates to get to this legendary hike.

Chris Anderson has been a Haiku Village resident since 1983.