COM 0042.020 2004-2006 - Laserfiche WebLink

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HonorableLCningrad EiarionoCf, Chair and Members of the Committee on Planning HAWAII COUNTY COUNCIL Page 2 June 14, 2004 Director and reviewed by the Planning Commission before the Council can take final action to pass a new General Plan. This review process will itself take some time-- months, probably--and so I wanted to comment on Draft 2 as soon as possible, and remain in close consultation with the Council, because if the Council wants to make significant changes to amendments after the next round of Planning Director and Planning Commission review, this will create the need for yet another period of review and comment by the Director and Commission. Therefore, the Council should try to thoroughly work out issues with the General Plan as much as possible before voting to send a new draft back to the Planning Director and Commission for review, so that this can be the final stage before enactment. The Council has not yet considered or voted on Draft 2, nor has it voted on Draft 1. The comments in this letter are somewhat preliminary because Draft 2 is a major revision of the Draft 1 draft, and has been publicly available only since June 8, but I wanted to make some comments before the June 14 and 15 Council workshops. Draft 2 is obviously the product of a tremendous amount of work and deserves careful study. 1 Reorganization Draft 2 is a major reorganization. The text consists primarily of the "objectives" (a renaming of the "goals" in the current General Plan), "policies", and "standards". The descriptive text (such things as descriptions of the water systems or flood history of various districts) would be moved to a "County Profile", which would be printed separately, and not adopted by ordinance. The text portion of Draft 2, if adopted in its present form, would consist of about 50 pages, versus about 300 pages in Draft 1. The current (1989) General Plan is organized like Draft 2, but the other descriptive material was also enacted by ordinance, as the "General Plan Support DocumenP', and bound together with the goals and policies, resulting in a bulky document similar in size to Draft 1. Moving the descriptive material to a separate document is the on]y feasible way to significantly reduce the bulk of the General Plan. This is a good reorganization, and the descriptive material, while useful and important, does not have to he enacted as law, unlike the various policies and maps. As I will discuss in more detail later though, dropping the "courses oCaction" deletes many of the more specific policy recommendations.