In its 2018 update, Howzit Kohala described "the occasional joke of the petroglyph swinging a golf club into the lava field." The joke worked because everyone in North Kona knew the punchline. This land was supposed to be a golf course. Then it was supposed to be a sports complex. Then a regional park. For four decades, none of those plans came to fruition; the site remained under a state land designation and was covered in fountain grass.
The Kealakehe Regional Park story spans decades of planning. Civil Beat's reporting describes how a federal lawsuit over water quality at Honokōhau Harbor, filed by people seeking cleaner water rather than ballfields, intersected with plans for the park.
The Land That Was Supposed to Be Three Different Things
The 190.5-acre parcel, identified in county records as TMK (3) 7-4-020:007, has never sat still on paper even while it sat perfectly still on the ground. In 1985 it was floated as the Kealakehe Sports Complex, with a gym, pool, tennis courts, and a concert hall. By 1987 the plan shifted to an 18-hole golf course that would double as a disposal site for treated sewage effluent. The golf course collapsed for financial and environmental reasons, and the county built the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant in 1994, which left it holding treated water with nowhere sanctioned to put it.
In January 2011, Governor Neil Abercrombie signed Executive Order 4355 to set the land aside for public uses including a wastewater reclamation field, a golf course, or a public park. The county hired Kimura International to draft a master plan, released in 2013, that priced a full build-out at $89 million, later recalculated to roughly $96.1 million in 2018 dollars. That plan called for four phases stretching from covered basketball courts and a tennis complex all the way to a football and soccer stadium, a baseball complex, an amphitheater, and even a dog park and archery range. An environmental assessment contract was signed with PBR Hawaii and Associates in 2019. No construction followed.
Meanwhile the plant kept running. For three decades, the county has piped treated but not fully reuse-grade wastewater from Kealakehe into a percolation basin, essentially a hole in a lava field, about 3,700 feet upslope from Honokōhau Small Boat Harbor. Civil Beat quoted Bob Fitzgerald, a former county parks director and 50-year North Kona resident, saying: "It's disgusting to see this kind of water just dump into this big pit."
The Lawsuit That Wasn't About a Park at All
That percolation basin is where the real movement started. A local environmental and cultural group called Hui Mālama Honokōhau, made up largely of harbor users and cultural practitioners concerned about water quality, filed a federal lawsuit against the county over the dumping, arguing the wastewater was finding its way to the harbor itself. Nobody involved in that suit was arguing for soccer fields. They wanted cleaner water in the bay.
To settle the case, the county agreed in April 2025 to upgrade the Kealakehe plant so it produces highly treated, R-1 grade water, the kind that is clean enough to spray on playing fields rather than dump into a lava pit. The settlement requires the county to complete a Reuse Feasibility Study, due this fall, that evaluates options for the newly available water, including establishing and maintaining a regional park. Within six months of finishing that study, the county has to pick a reuse project, and that project has to be operational, using at least 100,000 gallons of effluent a day, by spring 2031.
None of that settlement language mentions ballfields as a requirement. It mentions clean water disposal as a requirement. The park only enters the picture as one of the more useful places to put that water once it exists.
How Wastewater Reuse Connects to Park Planning
Hawaiʻi County Council Chair Holeka Goro Inaba has described the relationship between the treatment plant and the park as a chicken and egg problem: the water upgrade sat idle because there was no approved use for the recycled water, and the park sat idle because there was no water to keep grass alive on a site that gets between 10 and 20 inches of rain a year. Inaba told Civil Beat: "The fact that the county has been forced to make progress on the wastewater treatment plant I think definitely leans towards some progress on the park front. It definitely paves the way."
Bo Kahui, the former soccer coach who founded the West Hawaii Parks and Athletic Corporation and has pushed for the park for roughly 15 years, is one of its public advocates. The settlement sets a deadline for selecting a water reuse project, and a regional park is among the uses being evaluated for the treated water.
Where the Fields Might Actually Go
Mayor Kimo Alameda's administration is now pursuing a change that would have been unthinkable to the park's original advocates: moving the project off the original mauka, upslope parcel entirely. The county is pursuing a land swap with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands for an alternative site on the makai side of Queen Kaʻahumanu Highway, adjacent to the wastewater treatment plant itself and closer to Honokōhau Small Boat Harbor. As of this July, county parks records confirm those discussions are underway between the county, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, and DHHL.
Alameda has floated a $50 million to $100 million county commitment over the years ahead and said he wants to break ground at the new site within eight years. Kahui told Civil Beat: "It's going to come, because it makes sense."
What 2031 Actually Promises, and What It Doesn't
It is worth being precise about what the settlement deadline covers, because it is easy to round up. Spring 2031 is the deadline for the county to have an operational water reuse project moving at least 100,000 gallons of recycled effluent a day. It is not a deadline for a finished park. Even in the most optimistic reading, the water infrastructure that would let grass survive on that site arrives around 2031, an eight-year groundbreaking target under Alameda's own framing lands closer to 2033, and the four-phase build-out envisioned in the 2013 master plan would extend years past that.
What that means for anyone living here now: the fields your kids are practicing on this fall are still the ones they have always practiced on. Old Kona Airport Park remains the primary recreational facility serving the West Hawaii region, and it stays heavily used year-round by schools, leagues, and casual walkers alike, which is exactly the crowding this second facility was proposed to relieve back in the 1980s. The legal and financial pieces are moving in a way they have not moved in years, based on the most recent reporting from November 2025 and confirmed still active in the county's own project list this July. That is real progress. It is also progress measured in years, not seasons.
The honest way to hold both facts at once is this: the joke about the petroglyph swinging a golf club into the empty field may finally be losing its punchline, but it is losing it slowly, on a timeline set by a wastewater settlement rather than a ribbon cutting.
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