Long-Term Lease, Water Deal Saves The North Shore’s Airfield From Closure
The threat of an imminent shutdown had loomed over the aviation businesses there for several years.
No more uncertainty: The North Shore’s Dillingham Airfield, now officially known as Kawaihapai Airfield, is staying open for decades.
On Friday — the last day of the airfield’s most recent five-year lease on Army-owned land — state and U.S. Army leaders announced that they’d signed a new lease to keep the popular Oahu aviation hub running an additional 50 years.
They also found an acceptable way to keep water service flowing for the airfield and about 30 surrounding water customers. A private company, Aqua Engineers, will manage the water system after the Department of Transportation said it could no longer run the system due to federal regulations.
The deal, which was laid out in Gov. Josh Green’s chambers, ends several years of anxiety for at least a dozen North Shore businesses at the airfield and their 130 or so employees over whether that regional economic hub would shutter.
The threat of imminent shutdown has loomed since at least 2020, when DOT said it would end its latest five-year lease early and close the facility.
The agency later reversed that decision, but it has occasionally sent letters to airfield tenants warning it would still close the facility if it could not secure guarantees of a longer lease, plus assurances over how the airfield is managed and who runs its water system.
Without a longer lease, DOT said, it could not secure the long-term federal grants it needs to uphold and repair the airfield. However, local Army officials in Hawaii could only approve five-year lease extensions, DOT Director Ed Sniffen said Friday.
That impasse required the U.S. Army Garrison Hawaii commander, Col. Steve McGunegle, “going up the chain” in recent months to secure a 50-year lease guarantee from Army brass in Washington, D.C., Sniffen added.
Said Green: “This thing was getting sticky and I didn’t want us to get sued, frankly.” He didn’t specify where that potential litigation might come from but added that he instructed Sniffen to hammer out a solution.
“It had drifted long enough,” Green said of the uncertainty surrounding the airfield.
Aqua Engineers President and CEO David Paul said Friday that the company agreed to take on the challenge of managing the aging Dillingham Public Water System, which also serves the YMCA of Honolulu’s Camp Erdman, after seeing reports on the news and getting calls from people concerned about the situation.
The Army Corps of Engineers is pursuing funding to help stop the remaining leaks along the water system, Paul said.
Those leaks were rampant in recent decades. In 2000, the system was leaking 2 million gallons a month at various points, according to Ben Devine, a parachute mechanic at the airfield and leader of the grassroots organization Save Dillingham Airfield. By 2022, the state managed to cut that in half, he said.
By February DOT had further reduced the monthly leakage to 160,000 gallons, Devine said. Green quipped Friday that the Dillingham water system “was essentially a sprinkler system from hell before we fixed it.”
Paul added of his company’s handling of the water system that “it’s not a simple contract … but everyone’s willing to corporate” and that makes him optimistic that Aqua Engineers can meet the challenge.
Devine said the intensive work behind the scenes in recent weeks to finalize a new lease and operations plan for the airfield would reverberate in the community for years.
“The nature of this really allows the (lease) to be renewed very easily, so we’re looking at generations more of general aviation on the North Shore,” he said Friday.
