The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has taken a major step toward reopening to the public Midway Atoll — a wildlife and military history icon — with the release yesterday of its draft interim visitor services plan.

Visitors could start flying to Midway as early as next year under the plan.

Midway generally has been off-limits to the public since 2002 — with the exception of volunteer workers, the occasional sailboat crew and passengers of cruise ships that infrequently stop there. In that year, the former visitor plant operator left the atoll in a dispute with the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The new plan covers the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, the Battle of Midway National Memorial, and the Midway Atoll Special Management Area of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument. It was prepared by the Fish and Wildlife Service in cooperation with the state and NOAA, which share jurisdiction over some of the land and water within the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Midway would be the only island in the marine national monument to be available for public access. Ultimately, public access will be guided by a permanent management plan that will view Midway as a part of the larger marine national monument.

The plan proposes to allow no more than 30 visitors at a time on the island during 2007 and no more than 50 at a time from 2008 until a permanent plan is in place. Visitors will be permitted on the island generally only during the albatross nesting season, from November through July. The presence of the albatrosses — the most numerous of the nesting seabirds on the island — is a major draw for wildlife lovers. The rest of the year will be used for construction and maintenance of the island's aged infrastructure.

The plan says that no additional funding is available for the visitor program, so a visit to Midway will be required to reflect actual costs of transportation, food and lodging. For visitors, a trip to Midway, under the proposal, would not be cheap.

Airfare is listed at $2,000 per person, and the combined cost for lodging, meals and visitor and entrance fees would run $230 per day. There's no camping. Lodging is in a no-nonsense old concrete military officers' quarters.

That translates to a minimum per-person cost for a week's stay of about $3,600. Renting a bike, a golf cart or snorkel gear would be a few dollars more.

When it was a Navy base, Midway was developed to sustain a population of about 5,000 people. Fish and Wildlife is in the process of downsizing facilities to make them more efficient for small numbers of people.

"The new, more economical systems are designed to support a population of no more than 200 individuals, including interagency personnel, volunteers, researchers and visitors," the draft plan says.

Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com.