(BIVN) – A $4,645 grant from the contingency relief account of Kona councilwoman Karen Eoff will be used to enhance the Cultural Education Center at Kohanaiki Beach Park.

“This is my contingency funds,” Eoff said, “and this is to enhance the development of the Cultural Education Center at the County beach park. It’s basically for signage indicating some of the features that are being developed in a native plant garden.”

The effort to preserve the Kohanaiki shoreline was used as a model example of conflict resolution by Mayor Harry Kim, who recently pitched his plan for peace on the contested summit of Mauna kea to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents.

“I look at a place called Kohanaiki in Kona,” Mayor Kim said, where over a decade ago the community realized “a dream of seventeen miles of coastline in Kona that will forever be protected from resorts.”

“Look to Kohanaiki,” the mayor said. “I consider that the template.”

Kim said he asked the developer seeking to build on the lands, also known to beachgoers as Pine Trees, “to help me Kohanaiki as a template of what can be done of working together. I believe it is the best template in a
world, bar none.”

If you have time, please go look at it,” Kim urged the Regents. “The whole coastline was given to the people of Hawaii. The whole coast, and they built the road, the showers, the toilets and camping areas. As he developed in the back, that the community agreed on. Of a recognition the Pine Trees is a special place of family.”