Coco Palms may yet live on

[Editors Note: This blog originally written on 5/1/2009]


50 years ago Coco Palms was the premier resort on Kauai, built on a royal coconut grove on the east side of the island near the Wailua river. The land here is considered sacred by the Hawaiian people. Anyone who has travelled the highway through Wailua has seen the dilapidated buildings on the mauka side of the highway. It has been this way since Hurricane Iniki in 1992. The landowners had obtained permits to rebuild the resort, but were not able to attract enough investors to get construction started and so the project stalled. Important requirements of the original permit included cleaning up the site and reopening the coconut grove that lies on state leased land. However absolutely nothing has been done at the site. Since many residents (and visitors) of Kauai feel that there are already enough resorts, especially in Wailua, they do not want the Coco Palms rebuilt, but instead see the area become a park.

The original permits expire next month and so the landowner went back to the planning commission to ask for an extension. This week the planning commission voted 6-1 to extend the building permits for the Coco Palms resort for another 3 years. However they did add new conditions including cleaning up the site, complete nomination of the fish pond to the National Register of Historic places and create a plan to manage the drainage ditch near the fishpond.

Given the current economic climate and the fact that Kauai has added thousands of new units in the last few years but that visitor counts are dropping fast, I don’t see this project going anywhere soon at all. It will be interesting to see what happens three years from now when the extension expires. My personal hope is that somehow the people of the island will figure out how to obtain the land and create a park for everyone.

Alan