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OHA’s purchase of building is a real boondoggle

It never made sense for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to spend $21,370,000 to purchase the 80-year-old Gentry Pacific Design Center and spend an additional $6,758,000 to convert parts of it into a temporary office spaces to house OHA’s headquarters.

Now, add to that the fact that OHA can’t make any more investments using our Hawaii Direct Investment Policy unless we can renegotiate our loan terms with Bank of Hawaii and complete the relocation of our offices to Gentry; and OHA has until February 2014, when our current lease expires, to move into a design center that wasn’t meant to be an office building.

What a complete boondoggle.

We could have saved ourselves all of this aggravation and moved our headquarters to the AAFES building that OHA now owns in Kakaako instead of spending money trying to make an old building fit OHA’s needs.

Rowena M. Akana

Trustee-at-Large

Office of Hawaiian Affairs

Honolulu

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