Recent news of a planned regional shopping center for Kapolei has thrust the expansion-minded state agency that caters to Native Hawaiians into the spotlight. Area residents might want to prepare themselves for more of the same.

The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands plans to push deeper into the business of developing Kapolei, where the 85-year-old agency is displaying ambitions beyond creating homeownership opportunities for Native Hawaiians.

From leasing 67 acres for a Florida developer to build a mall, which alone can bring in as much as one million square feet of retail and commercial space, to shelling out $7 million for the infrastructure improvements needed to build the University of Hawaii’s West Oahu campus, the agency is gearing up to become a major player in Kapolei.

“We want to help provide great opportunities to live, play, work, and learn in Kapolei,” said Micah Kane, chairman of the Hawaiian Homes Commission. “Kapolei is our flagship community.” A key sign of that is a regional meeting the agency has planned for December 13th, when it hopes to build a powerful coalition that could give the area political clout to confront growth issues such as traffic congestion and school overcrowding.

The agency is looking to play a lead role in a coalition made up of 15 to 20 representatives from major landowners and organizations with a strong stake in Kapolei’s future.

“We are identifying people who have a good following and who can be a conduit to the larger community,” Kane said. “We plan to address roads, water, sewer, utilities and public facilities. We want to come to a consensus as to what the priorities are and hold policymakers accountable to what needs to be accomplished in the next one to three years.”

The agency is seeking to rally everyone from the Campbell Estate to the University of Hawaii around the area’s cause. It even plans to enlist the help of others such as the Navy Region Hawaii and the area’s neighborhood commission as a traffic weary public is growing more ambivalent about development. Maeda Timson, chairwoman of the Makakilo/Kapolei/Honokai Hale Neighborhood Board, is among those who believe that the area can benefit in a big way from the agency’s vision for Kapolei. However, she insists that the biggest challenges aren’t rooted in the cars clogging once quiet streets. “Everyone’s first concern is traffic,” she said. “Yet, an equally important issue is the area’s crowded schools,” Timson said.

“The state has not done a good job of bringing schools into the area,” she said. “The schools aren’t coming with the development and that’s a real problem. We have one high school and it’s bursting at the seams. The state needs to put in more schools immediately.”

For its part, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is increasingly seeking to build new neighborhoods for qualified Hawaiians.

In fact, the agency is on the verge of achieving a goal it has aggressively pursued since the late 1990s: turning Kapolei into a hub for Hawaiian homes. “It will be the largest Hawaiian homes community in perhaps the next four to five years,” Kane said.

Kane added that the actual build out is expected in about ten years when Kapolei is projected to become home to between 2,500 and 3,000 Native Hawaiian families.

He adds that the agency started out in Kapolei with about 156 families in the late 1990s.

Looking ahead, the agency intends to make good on its goal of reaching out to a different demographic.

It has targeted about 1,400 non-Hawaiian families for homes in a 2,400-unit subdivision planned for Kapolei, one of 18 regions where the agency has established a presence in the state.

“Last year, about 60 percent of our development investment was in Maui County,” Kane said. “This year and next year, we’re shifting over to Kapolei, which is taking the lion’s share of our development investment.”

To boost visibility, the agency is moving ahead with plans to relocate its office from downtown Honolulu to a new building in Kapolei, where construction is expected to start in January on the $20 million project.

Plans call for a 50,000 square foot office park with about 150 employees. It will be built on a site near the Kapolei Middle School and adjacent to the planned regional shopping mall.

“We’re looking at the end of 2007 or early 2008 at the latest to move in,” Kane said. “We will be actively pursuing quality people who want to the work close to home.”

At the same time, the agency is betting that the planned shopping mall will bring even more jobs to Kapolei, where it gave a developer a 65-year lease on land for the project.

Kane said the Kapolei mall could potentially compete with the Ala Moana Shopping Center, which is regarded as the largest mall in the state, when it opens in the first quarter of 2009.

Just as significant is the income that the agency expects to generate from the lease. Kane said the agency will annually see $5 million to $6 million from the lease which will help its strategy to become financially independent by 2013, the expiration date for a land settlement agreement that entitles the agency to a $30 million annual payment from the state legislature.

“There are other opportunities like this for us throughout the state,” Kane said. “But we see a good working relationship with the neighborhood board as important to our effort. It is critical that we work together to not only sustain, but elevate the quality of life in the Kapolei area.”