Satellite City Hall to move from Kapalama

The city will relocate its bustling Kapalama satellite city hall and driver licensing offices at City Square this fall to the former Sprint building several blocks away on Dillingham Boulevard, city administration officials confirmed Wednesday.

Those offices will also be joined by most divisions of the city Department of Community Services as well as the city Ethics Commission at the building, 925 Dillingham Blvd., in what is being renamed Kapalama Hale.

Also set to move into the two-story 61,896-square-foot space are the Neighborhood Commission, the health branch of the Department of Emergency Services, and a yet-to-be-determined section of the Honolulu Police Department, said Robert Kroning, the city director of design and construction.

The goal is to relocate the City Square offices by Sept. 30 but the timetable for moving the other agencies is fluid, Kroning said.

The city and RCK Partners, which owns City Square, agreed that the city would not stay at the former Kapalama Gem store location beyond its current lease, which ends this summer.

Glenn Kaya, RCK managing partner, said the city asked that it be allowed to stay through October until the city’s new location could be up and running.

At City Square since 1996, the driver licensing office takes up about 12,000 square feet while the satellite city hall operates out of 2,500 square feet, Kaya said.

Shari Kajiwara, who heads the Department of Customer Services, which oversees satellite city hall, driver licensing and motor vehicle registration functions, said the new location will join the two City Square offices along with a largely “back of the house” vehicle registration operation that will be relocated from the Chinatown Gateway building.

The city will be leasing the Kapalama Hale site the first two years and then has an option to purchase the site in the third, fourth or fifth year, an option the city intends to exercise, Kroning said.

While the lease for the entire Kapalama Hale site will be about $154,000 a month — about $40,000 a month more than the combined lease costs of the offices relocating there — purchasing of the property would allow the city to recoup that difference in seven years and then, in the long run, save money from no longer renting, Kroning said.

“Eventually, this should save us some money and we’re consolidating the offices to a much nicer site,” he said.