COM 0042.020 2004-2006 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Honorable Leningrad Elarionotf Chair and Members of the Committee on Planning HAWAII COUNTY COUNCIL Page 4 lone 14, 200a Draft 2 would also reject I-8, which designated coastal ]ands between Honuapo and Ninole Cove as Conservation. Draft 2 also reduces the proposed H-1 "Conservation" area (Keopuka-Kealakekua Bay) by deleting the state land State land at Kaawaloa (around the Captain Cook Monument) and the Captain Cook Ranch lands, above the cliff at Kealakekua Bay. The County General Plan should recognize the significance of these areas by putting them in Conservation. "Important Agricultural Lands" Draft 2 eliminates the "Important Agricultural Lands" LUPAG designation in Draft 1, and returns to the former "Intensive" and "Extensive" agricultural categories. Draft 2 also takes out some of the specific policy statements that were meant to protect important agricultural land from being converted to non-agricultural uses, such as "Important agricultural lands shall not be rezoned to pazcels too small to support economically viable ~ fanning units", and "Discourage speculative residential development on agricultural land." (p. 350.) The present General Plan and Draft 2, while describing "Intensive" agricultural land as areas more suited to crops, do not give clear policies for how such ]ands should be treated in rezoning and other land use decisions versus the "Extensive" agricultural lands. This island has 1.2 million acres in the State Land Use Agricultural district, ranging in quality from recent lava flows to highly-productive farmlands. The idea behind designating important agricultural land is to identify areas deserving of protection as a base for commercial agriculture. The County land use system, and particularly the General Plan, should contain policies to discourage the conversion of prime agricultural land to residential estates, because this fragments farm land into units too small to support commercial farms, and the potential of creating these residential estates tends to drive up land prices so that farming is uneconomical. The "Report" for Draft 2 explains the deletion of "Important Agricultural Lands" by noting that the State Constitution requires the "State" to identify important ag lands, implying that this is not a county function. In 1978, the voters of the state enacted a constitutional amendment requiring the state to identify important ag lands. The ftrst step is that the State Legislature must enact a ]aw specifying the standards and criteria for this process, but in 25 years, the Legislature has never passed a bill taking this ftrst step.