With Prince Kūhiō Day on the horizon, Thursday morning's Stadium Authority meeting was held a week earlier than usual.
The plan remains for an agreement between the New Aloha Stadium and Entertainment District (NASED) and AHDP (Aloha Halawa District Partners) to be hatched by June 30 in order to begin the process of building a new Aloha Stadium.
The first step will be the demolition of the current stadium, with the intent of a fully functional stadium and surrounding entertainment district prepared in time for the University of Hawai‘i football team's season opener on Aug. 26, 2028 against the University of Kansas.
Stadium Authority chair Brennon Morioka has been in meetings with AHDP three times a week as the deadline looms.
"The conversations have actually ramped up in intensity because we're trying to hammer out some final details," Morioka told Aloha State Daily following Thursday's Stadium Authority meeting. "We had one big meeting (Wednesday). Very, very productive with all of AHDP's main players, a number of our key decision makers on our side as well.
"I think we've kind of hammered through pretty much all of the final details of the pre-development agreement, and that's one of the formalities that we have to go through for this contract execution. But everything else seems to be falling into place now. We'll continue those regular meetings, and I'm sure those will start getting a little bit more focused depending on what item we're talking, whether it's a financing item, a real estate master planning item. There's different people on both sides of the teams. And so those will start probably getting a little bit more focused as well."
Although June 30 is the target date for a contract to be executed, Morioka said talks could stretch beyond that.
"If we see an executable contract within our grasp, if the final execution slips into July or maybe even August, that's still fine," he said. "It still allows us to keep the schedule."
On Wednesday, new University of Hawai‘i president Wendy Hensel announced the search committee for UH-Mānoa's new athletics director, a process she hopes to wrap up by the summer.
Given UH's relationship with Aloha Stadium as the school's venue for home football games, Morioka hopes having the stadium agreement in place will be advantageous for UH's new AD.
"It's going to be very important. ... The new athletic director is going to basically inherit that relationship," Morioka said. "Hopefully we are negotiating it in the best interest of both the state and the university as a whole, because we are both two state sister agencies, and the underlying premise is that the University of Hawai‘i will get a far better deal than it than it had.
"The University of Hawai‘i had a good deal because they played rent free. The thing that they didn't have in the past was some of the revenue share from parking or concessions, ticket sales, that kind of stuff. And so the new agreement will include revenue sharing from all those other kinds of revenue sources that they didn't have before. So, the University of Hawai‘i will be getting a far better financial relationship with the stadium moving forward. The university is a main tenant and customer of the stadium, and so the new AD will have to spend a lot of time working with our team, working with the contractors on the construction of the new stadium, because it is going to be the home of the Rainbow Warriors."
Christian Shimabuku can be reached at christian@alohastatedaily.com.
