Park Planning

Planning a new park unit is both an exciting and challenging opportunity. Each stage of planning and development is analyzed from multiple perspectives to ensure that impacts to the cultural and natural resources that NPS stewards are minimized. This park planning page highlights the planning already completed and planning currently underway.

General Management Plan

The park has begun work on its General Management Plan (GMP), a multi-year process which welcomes communities, partners, and the public to help the park identify major management and decisions needed. A planning page has been established where the latest GMP information is provided.

While the GMP is underway, the park continues work to preserve and restore historic structures and features and providing educational and intepretive opportunities for the public. Visit our Learn about the Park section to learn more about these efforts.

Honouliuli Gulch and Associated Sites Final Special Resource Study and Environmental Assessment

In 2015, the National Park Service prepared this assessment to determine whether the Honouliuli Internment Camp and associated WWII incarceration sites in Hawai‘i were nationally significant, suitable, and feasible for inclusion into the national park system. The resource study evaluated 17 sites. It was determined that Honouliuli Internment Camp was nationally significant, was a feasible addition to the national park system, and showed a need for NPS management.

Foundation Document

In 2019, the Foundation document was completed. This document is the first strategic document step necessary for the creation of any new park unit. The purpose of the document is to establish a unified understanding of the site's purpose, significance, major interpretive themes and fundamental values. The Foundation document looks at the issues a new park unit is facing and forges a roadmap of planning and data needs to address these issues. Especially because Honouliuli is a new unit of NPS, a primary benefit of the Foundation Document is the opportunity to coordinate all levels of future planning and management from this unified understanding of what is most important about the site. There are two versions of the Foundation document available, the full-length version and a summarized version.

Preliminary Planning Process (P3)

In 2021, the park completed the preliminary planning process to identify what documentation is needed to move forward to the GMP process. The P3 identified that a cultural landscape inventory and a transportation study to include a road engineering study to identify critical access issues and a historic roads and trails study were needed. The transportation study, identifying several possible access options for bringing the public into the site, was completed in 2023. The cultural landscape inventory has been submitted to the Hawai‘i State Historic Preservation Division; it studied the interplay of historically significant landscape characteristics (topography, vegetation, natural systems, etc.) with other historical and archaeological features.