Nakoa Pabre's father was a busboy at Kona Inn. He met his wife there too. So when the restaurant's lease and contents finally sold this spring after two years sitting unsold on the market, it wasn't an outside hotel chain or a mainland investment group that stepped in. It was Pabre, a Kona-born restaurateur who already owned Umekes Fish Market Bar & Grill, buying back a piece of the town he grew up in.
That one transaction tells you more about downtown Kailua-Kona this year than any parking statistic does. This is not a town in one linear decline or one clean recovery. It is two different downtowns occupying the same half mile of Ali'i Drive at the same time. One is a corridor of paid parking lots and empty storefronts that residents have been sounding the alarm about at county council meetings all year. The other is a set of local institutions, a legacy restaurant changing hands, a weekly food truck gathering, a monthly art stroll, that kept running through all of it and, in a few cases, came out stronger.
If you live here, you have probably felt both halves without naming them separately. Here is what actually happened this year, and why the split matters for how you plan a Friday night or a Saturday errand.
The Corridor Feeling the Squeeze
The paid parking problem in Historic Kailua Village did not start in 2026, but this was the year it became impossible to ignore. Rates at privately operated lots along Ali'i Drive run from $9 to $21 an hour, and the lots, mostly managed by Diamond Parking and a digital platform called Parklinq, use QR-code payment with little to no posted pricing at the entrance, according to reporting from Big Island Now.
For lease signs have become a fixture at Kona Inn Shopping Center. Destiny Hoskins, who works in a boutique there, told Civil Beat she has watched shoppers cut visits short, leaving mid-errand to beat the clock on a parking meter before another hour of charges kicks in. Her assessment of what paid parking did to the block was blunt: "They turned parking into a business and ruined the community as a result."
It is not only shoppers absorbing the cost. Papa Kona's head chef, Kyle Kealiʻiheleua, pays $250 a month just to park near his own kitchen. Employees whose employers don't cover that cost have started parking in other companies' lots or showing up late because they couldn't find a free spot, according to the same Civil Beat reporting.
But the corridor's decline is not the whole story, and the county council's own record makes that clear. Kailua-Kona resident Noelle Lindenmann testified before the council in March that she has watched the same lots empty out over the past few years, along with the crowds that used to fill them:
"I used to have trouble finding a parking spot, and now I never do."
She told the council she used to wait 20 minutes for a table at Gecko Girls and 30 minutes at Foster's Kitchen. That wait, according to Big Island Now's coverage of the hearing, is gone now too.
A Council Member's Slow Wins
Kona Councilwoman Rebecca Villegas has spent most of 2026 trying to do something about it, and the trail of bills she has pushed through the county council reads like a case study in how local government actually moves.
| Bill | What it would do | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Bill 132 | Cap paid lots at $2 per hour for the first 24 hours, guarantee three free hours, and set a $30 daily maximum | Died in committee in mid-May 2026 after operators warned it could expose the county to lawsuits |
| Bill 162 | Require every paid lot to post its rates, fees, hours and towing contact at the entrance | Passed unanimously in July 2026 |
| Bill 154 | Ban new commercial paid parking lots across Hawai'i Island, with existing lots grandfathered in | Deferred by the Windward Planning Commission in early July 2026 for further research |
The rate cap was always going to be the hardest lift. Diamond Parking's Kona city manager, Jasmine Crusat, argued to the council that "government-mandated pricing does not lower costs. It drives business out, reduces services and ultimately harms the community." Parklinq CEO Tyler Saenz made a related case to the council, arguing that before lots were managed, the same cars sat for most of a workday, leaving no room for the customers those businesses actually needed, an inconvenient reminder that free-for-all parking had its own failures.
Villegas got outvoted on the price cap but not on transparency. The posted-rate ordinance she introduced after Bill 132 stalled passed the full council without a single no vote. She called it "a small step in the right direction," one meant to let drivers see the price before they pull in rather than after. For anyone parking on Ali'i Drive this month, that means the guessing game at the meter is, at minimum, supposed to be over.
The Restaurant Bet Nobody Expected
While the parking fight played out at the council level, a different kind of vote happened at the property level. Kona Inn Restaurant and its neighbor, Kona Canoe Club, had been listed for sale since 2024, first at $3 million and then, after a year with no buyer, at $1.5 million as of March 2025, Big Island Now reported. That is a 50 percent price cut on a pair of nearly century-old waterfront leases in the heart of the district everyone was calling struggling.
Nobody from outside the island bought it. The buyer was a newly formed Island Restaurant Group, backed by the owners of Jackie Rey's, Harbor House and Umekes, with Pabre as executive chairman. His plan for Kona Inn, which opened in 1928 as part of the first luxury hotel on the Big Island, was to keep what already worked. "We have all the same employees in both locations," he said, describing the changes as updating the menu and fixing the awning rather than reinventing the place. The restaurant has since reopened with a refreshed menu, including a seafood stack and Kona-cut prime rib, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Kona Canoe Club, once a sports bar owned by former L.A. Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, is being reimagined as a small-plates spot serving Polynesian-inspired tapas. Pabre's stated goal for the whole group was not expansion for its own sake. He wanted, in his words, to build something people "feel proud to be part of, whether they work with us, partner with us, or walk through our doors." That is a local operator putting real money behind the bet that this stretch of coastline still has customers worth cooking for.
The Nights That Never Slowed Down
Two weekly and monthly rhythms kept the corridor's pulse going even as storefronts emptied around them.
Food Truck Friday almost didn't survive last year. It had operated out of the Target parking lot for two years before the retailer discontinued the event in mid-2025 over property damage caused by unsupervised teenagers, organizer Catie Anderson told Big Island Now. Mayor Kimo Alameda's administration stepped in with a temporary permit at Old Kona Airport Beach Park, and Anderson made the stakes plain: "It has not only become a staple in our community, but it has also provided jobs for over 20 families on the Big Island." Regular vendors during that stretch included:
- Big Island Provisions
- Califas Mexican Food
- FOB's Polynesian Cuisine
- Hāmākua Creations
- Jillann's Caribbean Fusion
- Lock Jaw Lemon Peel
- Oyatsu-Sushi
- Piroshky
Wherever the trucks are parked on any given Friday these days, the event Anderson started small has grown into what she called, by last year's count, the biggest weekly gathering in Kona.
Kokua Kailua Village Stroll never needed rescuing. The monthly art walk, organized by the Kailua Village Business Improvement District, has kept its published 2026 calendar without interruption, including a King Kamehameha Weekend edition on June 7 and its next date on August 16. It is a low-key anchor, local musicians spread along the vendor line, artisans setting up on Ali'i Drive itself, but it is proof that some parts of downtown never stopped drawing a crowd.
What This Means for Your Week
If you are trying to figure out where the real friction is right now, the parking corridor along Ali'i Drive between the shopping centers is still the tightest squeeze, and Bill 162's posted rates should at least remove the surprise-fee problem starting this year. If you want the version of downtown that is thriving, look past the meters: a Friday night at the food truck gathering, the monthly village stroll, or a table at a newly reopened Kona Inn, now run by someone whose family history there predates most of the storefronts currently sitting empty next door.
Kailua-Kona is not one story this year. It is two, running side by side, and the difference between them comes down to who showed up when the price of showing up got harder.
Lovette Llantos works this same stretch of coastline every week, watching which storefronts fill and which stay dark, and which local names keep betting on the village's next chapter. If you are weighing what any of this means for your own place in Kailua-Kona, reach out to Lovette Llantos and Get Your Free Home Valuation.
