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HawaiiMongoose

Hawaii is one step closer to getting a new stadium built

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The Hawaii state government's glacial process for getting a new Aloha Stadium built has just taken another step forward. The single remaining private development team that's still in the running to implement the project -- a consortium of equity providers, design firms, construction firms, and real estate development companies called Aloha Halawa District Partners (AHDP) -- submitted its formal proposal to the state today, just before the 2:00 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time deadline.

https://nased.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/NEWS-RELEASE-NEW-ALOHA-STADIUM-ENTERTAINMENT-DISTRICT-PROPOSAL-RECEIVED-FROM-ALOHA-HALAWA-DISTRICT-PARTNERS.pdf

The next step will be for a state committee to review the AHDP proposal and confirm that it meets the basic requirements outlined in the state's RFP. That review is expected to take six to eight weeks. Assuming the committee accepts the proposal, AHDP will be deemed as having been officially "selected" and the subsequent step will be for lawyers on both sides to negotiate the formal development contract. The target date to complete and execute that contract is next summer.

After the contract is executed shovels will actually hit dirt and AHDP will have three years to deliver the stadium, which is supposed to be ready for use in time for Hawaii's football opener against Kansas in August 2028.

Nine months to negotiate the contract may seem excessive, but it's not just a contract to design and build the stadium but also to operate and maintain it for 20 years, and to build out an entertainment district (housing, hotels, restaurants, retail, etc.) over that same period on the property surrounding the stadium. The state's contribution to the project is capped at $350 million (plus up to $50 million to pay financing expenses), with the remaining costs to be covered by profits earned by AHDP from the entertainment district. Reaching agreement on a long term legally-binding public-private partnership agreement that adequately addresses all of the project risks to the satisfaction of both the state and AHDP will be challenging.

Details of the proposal submitted by AHDP today, include the new stadium's planned capacity and renderings of the basic design, will not be publicly disclosed unless and until the state committee formally accepts it in six to eight weeks.  So sorry... there are no pretty watercolors to show yet.

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With the way CFB is going I’m not sure it’s smart dumping $ into a football stadium. Especially for Hawaii.

 

a lot of unknowns 

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On 8/1/2024 at 3:43 PM, LoFasZz said:

With the way CFB is going I’m not sure it’s smart dumping $ into a football stadium. Especially for Hawaii.

 

a lot of unknowns 

They don't have a lot of options unfortunately.  The stadium their currently using holds less than 10,000 people if I remember right.  Aloha Stadium is too expensive to fix.  

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So if this developer doesn't qualify or drops out then the project doesn't happen?

2024 is an election year and I understand candidates are both for and against building new Aloha stadium based on whether they see it complimenting or distracting from the general effort to rebuild after the Maui fires.

The current  state assembly voted not to build Aloha stadium.  The State Senate didn't advance the bill to a hearing or to a vote.

My experience in California politics is that the Assembly Speaker and other leaders in that house would do everything possible to disqualify the developer or to offer that developer a better deal somewhere else in order to get the money assigned in the state budget to another purpose.

Hawai'i is a different state but I don't think it's' THAT different when it comes to budget fights.  Plus  an unprecedented natural disaster makes people take stock and reprioritize.

my guess is that the sole developer is disqualified for some reason and eventually UH admin realize that if they want a football team, it will have to play on campus.

UCLA doesn't have an on campus football stadium so I'm always jealous of schools that do and don't understand why any school wouldn't prefer that to playing miles away.

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On 8/1/2024 at 11:43 AM, LoFasZz said:

With the way CFB is going I’m not sure it’s smart dumping $ into a football stadium. Especially for Hawaii.

 

a lot of unknowns 

The new stadium isn't being built solely to host UH football.  The intention is for it to serve as the major event venue for the state, as Aloha Stadium did historically.

The days of hosting the Pro Bowl are long gone, but the old 50,000-seat venue was used for many big-name concerts (Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, The Eagles, The Police, U2, Mariah Carey, Celine Dione, Bruno Mars, etc.), preseason NFL games, the Hawaii Bowl, the Polynesian Bowl (a high school all-star game featuring Polynesian players from across the U.S.), pro soccer exhibition matches, international rugby exhibitions, and even monster truck shows.  Many of these events were sellouts.  Aloha Stadium was also the site of weekly Friday night high school football double-headers that routinely drew 10,000-plus fans, and season-end high school football playoff games that drew over 20,000 fans.  Several local high schools even held their annual graduations there.

This is why the state government is willing to invest $350 million-plus in the project.  While it would be great to have the state's only FBS college football team as the new stadium's anchor tenant, the facility will be needed regardless of whether UH uses it or not.

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On 8/1/2024 at 1:18 PM, Wyobraska said:

They don't have a lot of options unfortunately.  The stadium their currently using holds less than 10,000 people if I remember right.  Aloha Stadium is too expensive to fix.  

The temporary on-campus stadium (Ching Field) holds 15,000 fans.  And you're correct, the old Aloha Stadium would be more expensive to fix than replace.  The salt air from adjacent Pearl Harbor has rusted away too much of the structural steel to make a repair practical.

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On 8/1/2024 at 5:50 PM, Bruininthebay said:

So if this developer doesn't qualify or drops out then the project doesn't happen?

2024 is an election year and I understand candidates are both for and against building new Aloha stadium based on whether they see it complimenting or distracting from the general effort to rebuild after the Maui fires.

The current  state assembly voted not to build Aloha stadium.  The State Senate didn't advance the bill to a hearing or to a vote.

My experience in California politics is that the Assembly Speaker and other leaders in that house would do everything possible to disqualify the developer or to offer that developer a better deal somewhere else in order to get the money assigned in the state budget to another purpose.

Hawai'i is a different state but I don't think it's' THAT different when it comes to budget fights.  Plus  an unprecedented natural disaster makes people take stock and reprioritize.

my guess is that the sole developer is disqualified for some reason and eventually UH admin realize that if they want a football team, it will have to play on campus.

UCLA doesn't have an on campus football stadium so I'm always jealous of schools that do and don't understand why any school wouldn't prefer that to playing miles away.

If the current project goes off the rails then building a permanent stadium on campus has been and continues to be a possible second-choice alternative.  In fact three former Hawaii state governors issued a press release last year advocating for the current Aloha Stadium site to be fully dedicated to affordable housing, and a portion of the money appropriated for the new stadium to be redirected to the university to build it on campus.  If the state can’t reach a satisfactory agreement with AHDP to build a new stadium and entertainment district at the current location, I believe a no-frills permanent on-campus stadium will be the fallback.

As for why an on-campus stadium isn't the state's first choice, there are three reasons.

First, the amount of space on campus is constrained and it would be difficult to wedge a new stadium larger than the current 15,000-seat temporary facility into the existing athletic complex.  It's not impossible but trade-offs would be necessary that would compromise the quality of the fan experience. 

Moreover, as explained in the post above, the new stadium is intended to serve many purposes other than hosting UH football games.  That means it needs to be broadly accessible to everyone on Oahu, and the current Aloha Stadium location is ideal from that standpoint.  It sits at the approximate center of the urbanized areas of island, at the crossroads of the major freeways serving the city, and the new Honolulu Skyline rail transit system runs directly to it from both the urban core and the suburbs.  By comparison the UH campus is much harder to get to.

And finally, the residents who live in Manoa Valley where UH is situated already have to fight quite a bit of traffic to get to and from their homes, and so they're dead-set against building a large permanent stadium on campus that will exacerbate the problem.  Manoa is one of the most wealthy neighborhoods in Honolulu and a lot of folks with political influence live there.  Their opposition would be difficult to overcome.

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I understand the legislation authorizing New Aloha to be premised on three competing primary developer bids.  A single bid development contract gives that developer no incentive to keep costs in line with the budget in what is generally considered  the "classic" form of the boondoggle.

Competing interets are going to zero in on the single biggest potential source of funds to construct their favored projects rather than New Aloha so there will be a ton of lobbyists working to disqualify the single bidder.  I doubt it takes more than a single legislative session to disqualify the single bidder to develop New Aloha if the Assembly leadership is against it.

I'm curious how much this is being discussed in Assembly and State Senate campaigns leading up to the fall legislative elections because nearly everyone in Hawai'i knows the impact of the Maui fires hasn't been dealt with yet and so I presume candidates are talking about what they'll do about it. 

Hopefully Hawai'ians and Hawai'i residents can give insight about whether New Aloha is being talked about in election campaigns right now.

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On 8/6/2024 at 8:41 AM, Bruininthebay said:

I understand the legislation authorizing New Aloha to be premised on three competing primary developer bids.  A single bid development contract gives that developer no incentive to keep costs in line with the budget in what is generally considered  the "classic" form of the boondoggle.

Competing interets are going to zero in on the single biggest potential source of funds to construct their favored projects rather than New Aloha so there will be a ton of lobbyists working to disqualify the single bidder.  I doubt it takes more than a single legislative session to disqualify the single bidder to develop New Aloha if the Assembly leadership is against it.

I'm curious how much this is being discussed in Assembly and State Senate campaigns leading up to the fall legislative elections because nearly everyone in Hawai'i knows the impact of the Maui fires hasn't been dealt with yet and so I presume candidates are talking about what they'll do about it. 

Hopefully Hawai'ians and Hawai'i residents can give insight about whether New Aloha is being talked about in election campaigns right now.

We're still a couple of weeks away from the primary elections but so far there's been nothing in the Hawaii media to suggest local politicians are taking positions against the NASED project.  That's probably because the Democratic Party dominates the state and governor Josh Green is the titular party leader and he's a strong advocate of following through to complete the project as currently envisioned.  The construction unions are also politically powerful here and they're generally on board with the project for obvious reasons.

After details of the AHDP proposal are publicly released in September things could change, especially if the stadium design is underwhelming and/or AHDP is asking for more time or money to do the job than the RFP specified.

As for the Maui situation, there's been a lot of negative news about it in the media but the cleanup of the fire damage is actually well along and efforts to adequately house the affected population are making progress.  Also an agreement has been reached to settle the lawsuits filed by fire victims against the utilities, county and state, which will funnel a total of $4 billion to the victims to help them rebuild.  For a comprehensive look at the current situation check out this video that was posted on YouTube yesterday:

 

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On 8/6/2024 at 3:12 PM, HawaiiMongoose said:

That's probably because the Democratic Party dominates the state and governor Josh Green is the titular party leader and he's a strong advocate of following through to complete the project as currently envisioned.

You are making a HUGE erroneous assumption that the internal Democratic Party dynamics favor authorizing New Aloha.  HB2664 was passed 37-14 in the House so it's very likely that the bill will pass again.  A lot of Democrats in the Hawaii House of Representatives voted for this bill for it to pass with 72% of the vote.

https://legiscan.com/HI/drafts/HB2664/2024

The State Senate didn't bring the bill up to a vote, which indicates this bill probably have passed if voted on, so State Senate leadership killed the bill in committee without a vote.

All that's needed to kill the current plan is to find a reason to disqualify the only eligible developer for the project and the leadership of the Hawaii House of Representatives is motivated to do that because they also passed a bill to kill the new aloha plan.  

The argument traffic is the reason UH can't have an on campus stadium for games six Saturdays a year simply makes no logical sense as there are way more people coming to campus Monday through Friday when there is no football game scheduled every week the university is in session.

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On 8/8/2024 at 11:10 AM, Bruininthebay said:

 

You are making a HUGE erroneous assumption that the internal Democratic Party dynamics favor authorizing New Aloha.  HB2664 was passed 37-14 in the House so it's very likely that the bill will pass again.  A lot of Democrats in the Hawaii House of Representatives voted for this bill for it to pass with 72% of the vote.

https://legiscan.com/HI/drafts/HB2664/2024

The State Senate didn't bring the bill up to a vote, which indicates this bill probably have passed if voted on, so State Senate leadership killed the bill in committee without a vote.

All that's needed to kill the current plan is to find a reason to disqualify the only eligible developer for the project and the leadership of the Hawaii House of Representatives is motivated to do that because they also passed a bill to kill the new aloha plan.  

The argument traffic is the reason UH can't have an on campus stadium for games six Saturdays a year simply makes no logical sense as there are way more people coming to campus Monday through Friday when there is no football game scheduled every week the university is in session.

 

I assume no such thing.  You asked whether politicians running for seats in the Hawaii legislature are discussing the stadium project in their election campaigns and I simply responded that at the moment they aren't saying much about it.  I also said that could completely change when details about the AHDP proposal are released in a few weeks.  At that point, if the proposal has obvious shortcomings but the administration has decided to approve it anyhow, quite a few of them could choose to buck the governor and unions and launch a crusade to derail the project.  But until the proposal details are disclosed they appear to be keeping their powder dry.

My response was based on what I'm seeing in the local Hawaii news media which I pay attention to every day for any shred of information about the stadium project.  If you come across information about current political campaigning in Hawaii that contradicts what I've reported then by all means please share it.

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