"Closing on Thursdays will help ensure garbage collectors can regularly access their bins," Honolulu Botanical Garden Director Joshlyn Sand said in October 2025. She was announcing the weekly day of rest that the public had just picked for Hoʻomaluhia Botanical Garden.
Honolulu's busiest botanical garden chose its closed day partly so that ʻōpala trucks could reach the bins of the people who live on Luluku Road. The City has made or proposed several changes since then: the Thursday closure, the road repaving, a relocated main entrance and a possible tourist entry fee. Most of them come back to the same stretch of road, which the garden shares with its neighbors at 45-680 Luluku Road in Kāneʻohe.
Why Thursday Won the Poll
The City asked the public to choose between two days for a weekly closure, Tuesday or Thursday. The three-week poll drew 3,472 votes, and 76% picked Thursday. The weekly closures started on January 8, 2026.
When Hawaii News Now first reported the poll in September 2025, the reasons given were maintenance and limited staffing. Sand told the station that a closed day lets staff "effectively and safely get in to do the work that we need to do." The trash pickup issue came out of the survey. Sand said the process brought "valuable insight from the neighboring community," including how garden visitors and their vehicles affected ʻōpala pickup for Luluku Road households. That gave Thursday a second purpose.
Staffing hadn't kept up either. KITV reported that Sand told the Kāneʻohe Neighborhood Board staffing was nearly the same as when the garden opened, even though its programs and maintenance needs had grown.
One Road, Roughly Three Times the Visitors
The pressure on Luluku Road shows up in the attendance numbers. City figures show 193,996 visits in 2015 and 650,882 in 2024. Fiscal year 2025, July 2024 through June 2025, reached 723,495. The City's planning page also cites a record of about 724,000 visitors for calendar year 2025. On either count, the garden now gets more than three times as many visits as it did a decade ago, and all of that traffic uses the same road.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that Sand identified Luluku Road as the garden's main entry and exit and said it needed maintenance. The same article put the City's annual expense budget for the botanical garden system at about $1.4 million, with roughly $700,000 of it going to security.
Part of the visitor surge started at the entrance road itself. In 2022, KHON spoke with garden program specialist Daniel Babbitt, who said photos taken near the entrance had helped drive the increase. He also explained the no-stopping and no-road-parking rules and the "No photography on the road" signs, which went up because people were stopping in the road and blocking traffic.
The road inside the garden has since been rebuilt. The City repaved all 2.4 miles of the garden's main road under a $1.184 million contract, with staged closures that depended on the weather. The work was finished in January 2026.
The Master Plan Moves the Front Door
The Thursday closure and the repaving deal with today's problems. The garden's first master plan would change things for the next twenty years, and it also starts at the property line.
The City presented the near-final plan on August 5, 2026, at an informational session at Windward Community College. The Department of Parks and Recreation and its consultants, ecoLogic and StudioOutside, prepared it after workshops, focus groups and public meetings that began in fall 2025. Of the proposed improvements, the first one on the City's list is "an enhanced entrance further away from nearby homes." Renovated facilities with more interactive features and new community gathering areas follow.
The City's own planning page lists the first goal of the process as "managing visitation and alleviating congestion to improve public safety."
The proposed fee comes from the same reasoning. The City describes a tourist entrance fee "similar to Hanauma Bay" as a concept "already gaining traction" that would help pay for the improvements. In September 2026, the free preview of a Pacific Business News story was more direct. It said the City plans to add entrance fees by 2028 "to reduce traffic in residential neighborhoods." The rest of that article is behind a paywall. The City's public materials still describe the fee as a concept under consideration, not an adopted policy.
Sand has also said the plan can change. In April 2026, she told Hawaiʻi Public Radio that its concepts were not "set in stone" and were meant to preserve the garden for future generations.
What Has Not Been Published Yet
As of October 12, 2026, the City says the final master plan is expected in fall 2026 and will be posted on its long-range planning page. Several details that matter to anyone who drives up Luluku Road have not been made public:
- A fee amount. No dollar figure has appeared in City materials or in the 2026 news coverage.
- A resident exemption. None has been confirmed for the 2026 proposal. In KHON's 2022 coverage, Babbitt described a "small fee" for visitors and reservations to keep attendance at a safe level, with local residents staying free. That was an earlier discussion, not part of the current plan.
- Where the new entrance goes. The plan says only that it would be farther from nearby homes.
- Parking, shuttles or reservations. The posted plan description doesn't include any of them.
The garden's official page still lists admission as free.
The Garden's Week as It Runs This Fall
The week is now organized around a few fixed times. According to the City's Hoʻomaluhia page, updated in late September 2026:
- Daily hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The last vehicle can enter at 3:30 p.m., and everyone has to be out by 4.
- Wednesday at 5 p.m., catch-and-release fishing reservations open for sessions two weeks out.
- Wednesday and Saturday are fishing days on the shoreline of Loko Waimaluhia, the garden's 32-acre lake, with sessions from 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. The program is free.
- Thursday the garden is closed, along with Christmas Day and New Year's Day.
- Friday at 5 p.m., online camping reservations open for weekends two weeks out. A permit costs $32 per campsite for Friday through Monday and covers up to 10 people. The campgrounds are Kahua Kuou, Kahua Lehua and Kahua Nui Makai.
The same page says the fishing site can close for weather, maintenance, safety, security or public health reasons. That warning carries weight after this year. In March 2026, Kona low storms sent water through the garden. On April 28, Hawaiʻi Public Radio reported that parts of the garden were still closed for cleanup, with debris on the lake shore and damaged paths blocked off. Sand told HPR that the path from the education center to the fishing bridge was being repaved, and she estimated three to four weeks before the day-use and fishing areas reopened. The City's September page lists regular fishing sessions and campsite reservations. We did not find a notice confirming that every storm-affected area has reopened, so the garden's page is the best place to check before a lake day.
Where the Neighborhood Board Fits
The master plan has come up repeatedly at the Kāneʻohe Neighborhood Board. When planning began in November 2025, board member and lifelong Kāneʻohe resident Donald Sakamoto told Hawaii News Now he wanted the garden to "grow and endure." In the same report, landscape architect Tary Arteburn said there was "sometimes too much traffic in various locations" and not enough staff to manage it.
Their concerns line up with the near-final plan, which keeps the garden growing while moving its entrance away from the homes next to it. Once the final document is posted, the details still missing above should become public: the fee amount, any resident exemption and the new gate location.
At Hokua Hawaii Realty, we follow decisions like this one because a gate location or a weekly closure changes daily life on a Windward street. If you own a home near Luluku Road or elsewhere in Kāneʻohe and want to talk through how the final Hoʻomaluhia plan could affect your street, request a free home valuation and we'll go over it with you.
