A second attempt to build a bottling plant in Hilo has been abandoned after community opposition.
The 1893 Beverage and Kanaka Cafe was a proposed facility that would extract and bottle water from an aquifer beneath Hilo, the second such project in five years planned for the same site.
A draft environmental assessment for the project, published in April, proposed it would include a facility to bottle and sell throughout the state up to 200,000 gallons of artesian water per day, as well as an on-site cafe, located on a 2.5-acre parcel on Piilani Street behind the Manono Mini Mart.
But partners for the project announced Monday it has been dissolved after public backlash and a failure to receive support from key Hawaii County Council members.
“The 1893 Beverage Company manufacturing project has been dissolved due to the lack of support from the County Council,” according to a statement by Jeni Waipa, wife of DuWayne Waipa, president of Hawaiian Kingdom Brands, the business entity behind the proposed facility.
Jeni Waipa told the Tribune-Herald on Monday that Hawaiian Kingdom Brands retains control of the property — which according to real property tax records was purchased in 2021 by Arizona-based company Talon 1 Properties LLC, a partner of the Waipas, for $1 million — and is “going back to the drawing board” to determine what to do with the site.
“We’re not going to do a bottling plant, though,” Waipa said.
Waipa said she had received more than 500 letters of support from members of the community, and suggested that much of the public animosity toward the project had been “inherited” from Piilani Partners LLC, which had proposed in 2018 a very similar project, albeit without the cafe.
While that project was spearheaded by people from out of state, Waipa said, the 1893 Beverage Company was to be Hawaiian-owned and operated, and could have generated 50 or more local jobs.
But Waipa said that without the support of Hilo Councilwomen Jenn Kagiwada and Sue Lee Loy, she had been advised that the project had little chance of being approved.
In her statement, Waipa wrote that the councilwomen “expressed their personal opposition to this project mainly because of its usage purpose.”
Lee Loy on Monday said she met with the Waipas in May and though she didn’t explicitly oppose the project at that time, she said the Waipas were unable to provide answers to “really fundamental questions” about their plans.
“I asked about what kind of community outreach they had done, I asked if they had reached out to the state Commission on Water Resource Management,” Lee Loy said. “And they just didn’t have answers.”
Meanwhile, Lee Loy said that the announcement of the project led to dozens of emails from her constituents, mostly in opposition.
The Piilani Partners proposed project also incurred substantial and lengthy opposition from residents concerned about the use of an untouched aquifer for commercial gain, the potential for contamination, the generation of plastic waste, and the expected increase in local noise caused by a bottling plant next to the Wailoa River State Recreation Area.
Most of these concerns also were expressed in public responses to the Waipas’ proposal.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
