If Hawaiʻi lawmakers agree on a visitor impact fee for access to its state parks and trails, it’d be the first in the nation to do so statewide.
How much the fee will be, who it will be applied to and how long it will last is still up in the air, as lawmakers debate Senate Bill 304, which is awaiting conferees from the House of Representatives as the end of the state Legislature's session nears.
House tourism chair Rep. Sean Quinlan of Oʻahu’s North Shore said the management of visitors needs to be coupled with the conservation of natural resources.
“We don't want to make a knee-jerk decision that has unintended consequences,” he said earlier this month. “We want to be very, very thoughtful about this, but our intent is not to upset the applecart or to blacken Hawaiʻi’s good name as a vacation destination. The intent is to make sure that we're doing the right thing by our people and by our ʻāina.”
The state already imposes a transient accommodations tax — commonly passed on as resort fees — where the money goes into the state’s general fund.
What’s different here is that this impact fee would go directly to a conservation fund managed by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
Quinlan said the state’s hands are tied in just how a fee like this can be imposed and where the money can go.
“If we were to enact a green fee, because of the Constitution, it's a very narrow nexus, and we have to actually spend that money on remediation of visitor impacts,” Quinlan said, adding the money cannot go to social services or construction, like a tax might.
“It has to be directly related to visitor impacts, which to me suggests that the money would go directly to the Department of Land and Natural Resources, which I think if you ask most people in the state, they would say that DLNR is critically underfunded.”
Conservation funding
Hawaiʻi is home to about a third of the country's endangered species, Emma Yuen, native ecosystem program manager for DLNRʻs Division of Forestry and Wildlife, said in an interview last week.
"We have so many species — close to 500 that are endangered of our plants and animals," Yuen said.
With the resources and funding the state has now, DOFAW manages close to a million acres across the state. Conservation efforts range from protecting native forests and watersheds to planting Indigenous trees.
"We also work very closely to protect our extremely rare species, like our rapidly declining forest birds, our invertebrates like our rare snails, and everything in between," Yuen said. "We have a huge kuleana."
DLNR's Division of State Parks, on the other hand, is primarily in the game of visitor management, DSP Assistant Administrator Alan Carpenter said.
"Visitor management varies quite a bit, and for many, many, many years, it was basically that the parks were wide open — come one come all — we didn't do a whole lot to mitigate the impact," Carpenter explained.
But since 2019, the state has transitioned certain overrun sites to reservation-only systems, beginning with Hāʻena State Park on Kauaʻi.
"In more recent years, we have begun to see the number of visitors increase to the islands in general, but to our parks in particular," Carpenter said. "Things kind of started reaching a boiling point at some of the real popular areas."
With a reservation system, the Kalalau Trail has been able to whittle down visitors from 750,000 annually about 20 years ago, to an established 100 people per day capacity now.
"We began this new realm of managing access for out-of-state visitors," Carpenter said.
Since Hāʻena's makeover, ad-hoc reservation systems have opened, or will open, at Diamond Head State Monument on Oʻahu and ʻĪao Valley State Monument on Maui.
A pay-to-play model has long been a national park standard. But a license for full access to state parks and trails would be something new to Hawaiʻi.
The concept isn't wholly innovative on its own, with other countries like Palau and Ecuador's Galapagos Islands having their own $100 green fees for visitors.
Carissa Cabrera, project manager for Hawaiʻi Green Fee Coalition, has been working on something of this nature for about two years. The coalition has studied different price points and whether the program would be a fee or a tax.
"Ultimately, our coalition chose to back the license because licensing authority helps protect funds for their intended use," Cabrera said.
A license at $50 is "really a sweet spot from our perspective," Cabrera said, which could generate $400 to $500 million annually.
A visitor impact fee was part of Gov. Josh Green's campaign promises and listed as a priority of both the House and Senate. Early on, it seemed like a point of contention between the administration and the Legislature.
"That's probably the one bill that has the most difficulty for people to wrap their minds around at the Legislature right now," Green told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s Spotlight Hawaiʻi on Monday. "It's a big change. Anything that we're the first in the country to do always causes some concern."
Green said he is in favor of a more directed approach, with possibly 20 sites under one license, which he said lawmakers are heading toward.
"But they may just ask us to do a workgroup or a task force going into next year to finalize that," Green said.
Implementation
Should an impact license be enacted, staffing and enforcement measures will still need to be worked out. Would there be somebody checking licenses at the parks’ gates, or would it use an honor system?
Another idea: an app.
"The idea would be that whether when you get off the plane or you get off your cruise ship, there's a kiosk right in front of you with a QR code multilingual, saying, 'Hey, Hawaiʻi visitor, download this app, this will help you on your trip,'" Quinlan explained. "In that app, we would have our environmental license/green fee, the ability to purchase it, if one so chooses."
But it would never be a requirement to visit Hawaiʻi, Quinlan said.
"If you're just going to Waikīkī and you're just going shopping, don't buy the green fee, because you won't be using any public resources," he said.
As the bill currently stands, the license would start up in July 2025. The measure also calls for the state to formulate a strategic plan and timetable for implementation.
But some locals are split on whether they'd like to see a fee imposed.
"I think that anybody that's reasonable understands the need," Kevin Dick of Hawaiʻi Kai said. "I wouldn't have a problem paying it myself if it's going to make things better."
But Dick said there could be some downsides.
"If you have a family of six and they have little kids, do you really want to charge everybody $50? That's $300, say for a family of six, and that might be a little prohibitive," he said.
But down the trail, Peyton Jones, who lives near Diamond Head, said there may be another way to tackle this.
"I had my friends come out to visit, and it's so expensive for them anyway," Jones said. "It's not just the airfare and expensive hotel, you add another, whatever it is, $50... I just think that's a lot, and they could probably make it up somewhere else."
