For nearly 40 years, a few dozen University of Hawai'i marine researchers have operated out of a nondescript three-story building that has one of the most incredible up-close ocean views anywhere in Honolulu.

And for at least a decade, visions of redeveloping the prime piece of Kaka'ako makai overlooking Point Panic and Kewalo Harbor have swirled around the research facility known as the Kewalo Marine Laboratory.

Recently, UH officials reached an agreement in principal to vacate the lab in five years to make way for redevelopment of the state-owned site.

Unlike previous development proposals for the property that included an aquarium or a restaurant, the roughly 1-acre site isn't expected to become a commercial attraction.

Instead, the land is envisioned to become an extension of Kaka'ako Waterfront Park.

But also unlike previous proposals that would have built new facilities for Kewalo Marine Lab, the researchers likely will be dispersed to existing UH facilities on the Manoa campus or possibly Coconut Island in Kane'ohe or the Waikiki Aquarium.

Mark Martindale, director of the Kewalo lab, said the relocation options UH leaders have suggested are poor choices that will limit or degrade research performed at the lab, and possibly reduce the ability to obtain federal research grants and attract talented visiting scientists who seek an urban marine lab connected to the ocean.

"It would certainly constrain and change the kinds of research I could do," said Martindale, a cellular and developmental biologist who came to the Kewalo lab a decade ago after teaching medical school at the University of Chicago.

The lab, built in 1972 largely with a $1 million National Science Foundation grant, employs about 45, including four principal investigators, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students, visiting university scientists and support staff.

Lab offices have spectacular views, but the asset that makes the research facility valuable for scientists is a system of pumps and pipes that circulate seawater in the building to sustain ocean organisms being studied.

Research at the lab has included studying reproductive biology of mass-spawning corals, conservation biology of tropical marine ecosystems and evolution of segmentation, and resulted in work published on the cover of scientific journals Genesis, Science and Nature among others.

In the April 10 issue of Nature, lab researchers led an international team of scientists to determine evolutionary connections of marine animals in different parts of the world that identified new relationships between animal groups.

The lab is primarily funded by grants from outside UH that last year totaled about $5 million.

Lab staff say the building is overcrowded and needs major renovation, but that investment in the physical facility has been restricted because of the lab's uncertain future in recent years.

Though the university has a lease for the state-owned site running to 2030, other interests have long envisioned reusing the prime ocean-view property.

UH was granted a lease for 30 acres in Kaka'ako makai in the 1960s to develop a marine-science center, but much of the land went unused.

TAKING BACK LAND

Over time, most of the land leased to UH was taken back by the Hawai'i Community Development Authority, a state agency created in 1976 to bolster redevelopment of public and private land in Kaka'ako where major infrastructure like sewers and sidewalks were missing from the largely industrial area.

In the late 1990s, a vision by then-Gov. Ben Cayetano called for developing a world-class aquarium in Kaka'ako makai, a plan that led Mike Hadfield, the Kewalo Marine Lab's director at the time, to publicly express concern about the lab's potential destruction.

However, in 2002 developer Kajima Urban Development announced plans to build a $200 million aquarium at Point Panic that included new and expanded facilities for the Kewalo lab.

Hadfield projected that the proposed lab expansion would at least double what was then $9 million in annual grant money flowing to the lab.

"It would have been world-class," said Robert Richmond, a principal investigator at the lab who said architects on the Kajima team drew up detailed plans for new lab space and interviewed researchers about preferred layout of fixtures down to the electrical sockets. "We were literally drooling."

After two years of planning and negotiations between the developer and the HCDA, the two sides terminated a preliminary development agreement in 2004 after other developers floated competing proposals for the land.

Another idea around the same time was to relocate the Kewalo lab facilities into a planned UH biotechnology park that also would include a new John A. Burns School of Medicine and Cancer Research Center of Hawai'i.

The medical school was built with state money and opened in 2005, but the second phase for the Cancer Research Center and UH's Pacific Biomedical Research Center, which includes the Kewalo lab, was delayed after plans to raise $150 million in private donations fizzled under then-UH President Evan Dobelle.

A modified plan for the Cancer Research Center calls for a private developer to finance the $200-million-plus project and lease it to UH, but the Kewalo lab was left out of the plan because it would have added significantly to the cost.

"It was prohibitively expensive," said Gary Ostrander, vice chancellor for research at UH.

Ostrander said the cost to provide space in the Cancer Research Center facility for an expanded Kewalo lab was about $31.5 million, which he said UH can't afford given competing demands for capital improvement spending throughout the university system.

QUESTIONABLE FUTURE

For a while, it seemed that the Kewalo lab might remain in its overcrowded and aging facility. A bid by local developer Alexander & Baldwin Inc. to develop 36 acres around Kewalo Harbor including the lab site was tentatively approved by the HCDA in 2005, but was dropped after public opposition and a near-unanimous vote by the Legislature in 2006 on a bill to prohibit residential use on the Kaka'ako Peninsula.

But HCDA has pushed to get the land back, and made that objective part of negotiations to lease UH five acres for the planned Cancer Research Center next to the medical school.

Anthony Ching, HCDA executive director, said public sentiment expressed during discussions of A&B's plan illustrated that many residents feel passionately about providing more of the Kaka'ako waterfront for general public use.

"It has huge potential," he said of the lab site, "but we're not entertaining development. It's the water's edge, and we're intending it to be for public use."

Expanding Kaka'ako Waterfront Park is what HCDA officials expect will be the recommended use of the Kewalo lab property by a public advisory panel studying redevelopment opportunities for HCDA land.

Lab director Martindale, however, worries that the public doesn't recognize that the research facility is producing valuable work. Martindale added that lab researchers aren't against moving from Point Panic as long as a replacement facility with a Honolulu seawater connection can be provided.

Ostrander said UH recognizes the important work being done at the lab. But he said money isn't available to build a new facility, and the HCDA has tied taking back the lab site with leasing the university land for the Cancer Research Center.

Ostrander said the tentative lease termination deal gives the university five years to determine how Kewalo lab research can best be accommodated. "It's a priority for us for them to continue doing their research," he said. "What we do is largely going to be dependent on what the needs of the researchers are."

To Martindale though, such uncertainty is unacceptable and is eroding morale and opportunities for project grant funding. "We're doing a lot of outstanding things here," he said. "We would like to be in the vision of UH."