07/19/21-INNOVATIVE ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT OF TOURISM AT HĀ’ENA STATE PARK BEGINS WITH THE COMMUNITY

For immediate press release: July 19, 2021

INNOVATIVE ADAPTIVE TOURIST MANAGEMENT AT HÄ€’ENA STATE PARK BEGINS WITH THE COMMUNITY

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(Hā’ena State Park, Kaua’i) – One morning in late June, an officer from the Kaua’i Police Department wrote down 25 parking tickets before grabbing another ticket book to write 25 more. He was one of two officers to issue car after car tickets. day.

Rental cars lined up on both sides of the adjacent K Freeway adjacent to Hā’ena Beach County Park and those fined $ 235. The parking enforcement is one of the tools used to achieve the goals of the neighboring Hā’ena State Park (HSP) master plan. More importantly, is a new adaptive management structure that incorporates community participation as its core.

At a meeting in June, the Land and Natural Resources Council signed a one-year revocable license (RP) for the non-profit organization Hui Maka’āinana o Makana to oversee and manage a system reservation, including collection of parking and entrance fees. as well as an integrated shuttle system to reduce the number of cars entering the park each day.

“Legislation that increased previously low parking fines along national highways is yet another tool to ease congestion in the tourism industry along rural roads adjacent to high-demand national parks like Hāʻena. This is an essential incentive to ensure compliance with the capacity-based reservation system. People need to understand that there have been decades of negative impacts on rural communities. Visitors should not try to circumvent reservation rules, ”said Curt Cottrell, administrator of the DLNR division of state parks.

Since the northern shuttle system resumed operations last Sunday after a lengthy COVID-19 shutdown, this is exactly what has happened in some cases. People have been turned away because they did not have an identity document to prove their state of residence. Some of the parking spaces at HSP are reserved for Hawaiian residents only. Out-of-state visitors must book in advance, even if arriving at the park with a Hawai’i resident. Reservation information is available on: www.gohaena.com

“Having a successful park entry system is a multi-pronged endeavor. It’s a bit like using the carrot and stick approach; increased fines and consistent enforcement for no-parking zones, coupled with exceptional shuttle service to increase access due to limited legal parking. This can be a successful formula that gives visitors the opportunity to come to the park in a pono way, ”said Joel Guy of The Hanalei Initiative, which operates the shuttle system.

Cottrell added: “There is no single recipe for managing sensitive cultural resources, sensitive natural resources and a fluctuating tourism industry. We are committed to providing parking spaces for residents. We know that the slots available to visitors are selling out every day, but there is no right place to assign these numbers. So there is a lot of monitoring, monitoring and working with the hui system and the shuttle to handle the right number of visits and make it economically viable and sustainable… a lot of moving parts to work with and that’s the adaptation part.

The HSP master plan limits daily visits to Hāʻena to 900 people.

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Media contact:

Dan Dennison Senior Director of Communications (808) 587-0396

[email protected]