March 2007 | Small Business News
Pearl Harbor Visitor Center Ordered Shut Down
By Andrew Walden, Hawaii Free Press
“You have until April 30 to pack it up and clear out.” That is the message the Bill Bigelow of the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center says he is getting from the National Parks Service.
A dizzying series of bureaucratic paper-shuffles has seen the 65-year Navy lease for the Visitor Center’s Halawa Landing site transferred to the National Parks Service which is invoking its rights in order to cancel the lease held by Visitor Center partner, Ford Island Ventures. This, in spite of verbal promises Bigelow says were made by former commanding Rear Admiral Mike Vitalli in a talk with the 170 employees of the Visitor Center and its vendors last May.
After nearly two years in operation, receiving rave reviews from visitors who no longer have to wait for hours in what used to be an untended, glass-strewn area to visit the USS Arizona, Bowfin and Missouri, the vendors will be out of business and the employees will be out of work. With most WW2 veterans now in their 80s visitors are going to be back to the old days of long lines in the hot sun. The Visitors Center is owned and operated by retired Marine Patrick Brent.
Prior to construction of the Visitors Center, Halawa Landing was a disused parking lot familiar to the police who used to regularly arrest drug dealers there. Critics connected to competing, and very profitable, “non-profit” vendors at Pearl Harbor, and their for-profit suppliers, complain about the venture, established as part of a Navy privatization drive which is also bringing much-needed Navy housing to Pearl Harbor at no expense to the taxpayer. To them a competing free enterprise is somehow not morally suitable for hallowed ground which for years had been a law-enforcement problem area.
With Pearl Harbor now under the command of a new Rear Admiral, Tim Alexander, and the lease transferred out of Navy control, the Visitor Center has appealed to the Parks Service Western Regional Director Jon Jarvis, based in Oakland, CA to extend its lease on a month-to-month basis until the Parks Service comes up with a plan for the site. According to Bigelow, Jarvis refuses to even discuss the possibility.
The Parks Service has planned to construct a visitor center on the site but will not have designs for several years, funding later than that and cannot break ground for at least ten years. By then, surviving WW2 veterans will be in their 90s.
Comments may be directed to Jon Jarvis, the West Region Regional Director, at: (510) 817-1304; Fax 510-817-1485; mailto:jon_jarvis@nps.gov c/o the National Park Service Pacific at One Jackson Center, 1111 Jackson Street, Suite 700, Oakland, CA 94607
Background Links:
http://tinyurl.com/2vnpe9
http://tinyurl.com/3dseom
Andrew Walden is the editor and publisher of Hawaii Free Press, a Big Island newspaper.
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