In the 1980s, football fans enjoyed a memorable series of TV ads that aired during NFL games featuring controversial plays of past games.

In one of them, for example, a player jumps high into the air to receive a pass, grabs the ball, and controls it — until he hits the ground in the end zone, when the ball comes loose. Is it a touchdown?

“You make the call!” exhorted the voiceover by Harry Kalas, who had previously broadcast Hawaiʻi Islanders baseball games.

It’s a fitting metaphor for the status of $350 million that the Legislature appropriated for a new Aloha Stadium in Hālawa. Similar to those controversial football plays, the outcome hinges on rules and how they are interpreted. Does the stadium funding, which was originally made in 2022, continue until the present and beyond? Or has the deadline for spending the money passed?

Here are the facts.

In 2022, the Hawaiʻi Legislature passed Act 248, appropriating $350 million in general obligation bonds for a capital improvement project, a new stadium at Hālawa. It was part of the supplemental budget for fiscal year 2022-23. This Act amended the previous biennial budget for 2021-23, enacted in Act 88 in 2021.

But Act 88 came with a condition: If capital improvement funds are not “encumbered” — meaning committed through a signed contract or similar obligation — by June 30, 2024, they expire.
That deadline passed without the signing of a contract.

So — is the money gone? Not necessarily.

In June 2025, according to a media report, State Comptroller Keith Regan, who heads the Department of Accounting and General Services, extended the encumbrance deadline to June 30, 2026.

When asked in personal communication for the legal basis for this extension, DAGS cited Comptroller’s Memorandum No. 2023-16 and HRS 40-90. But that raises more questions than it answers.

The memorandum applies to “claims encumbrances,” which cover non-contractual obligations. But building a stadium clearly requires a contract encumbrance. Since no contract was signed, it’s unclear if any encumbrance — of any kind — legally exists.

Even more confusing, HRS 40-90 appears to apply to encumbrances becoming void, and not whether they can be extended.

It’s puzzling.

Meanwhile, the stakes are enormous. The stadium is just one element of a large 98-acre project on public land in Hālawa. As broadly envisioned, the project also includes commercial space and housing, with a potential total cost of $2 billion.

In October 2024, DAGS and the Stadium Authority selected Aloha Halawa District Partners as the developer of the project. Six months earlier, at a Stadium Authority meeting, a deadline of June 30, 2025, to sign a contract was announced. However, that deadline also came and went.

The Hālawa site is the largest parcel in urban Honolulu that is available for development. It is public land, and public funds are involved. But so far the public has received little information about the details of what is planned.

Did the $350 million appropriation expire on June 30, 2024, as stipulated in Act 88?
Or was it lawfully extended — despite the absence of a contract — under the Comptroller’s memo and HRS 40-90?

You make the call.

(And for the record — it wasn’t a touchdown.)