COM 0762.019 2004-2006 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Honorable Stacy Higa, Chair and Members of the County Council Hawaii County Council Page 3 April 27, 2006 Please note that although the planning director can waive certain information being shown on a preliminary plat, the developer must actually perform all of the actual requirements, which are covered by other sections, such as drainage, sec. 23-37 and 23- 92, minimum lot size, sec. 23-33(a) and (b), sewage disposal, sec. 23-33(b), and 23-85(a) and (b), streets, sec. 23-34, 23-86, and 23-87, and that these actually must be built according to approved plans, sec. 23-79 and 23-80. Besides it being reasonable to allow the Planning Director to waive certain informational requirements in the future, it is crucial to have this provision because of subdivisions already being processed in the Planning Department. Many of them-probably numbering in the hundreds--do not have one or more of the "informational" requirements that the Leslie decision said were mandatory. If we were to fully implement the Leslie decision, we would, at least for subdivisions not having tentative approval, have to (1) re- examine each preliminary plat for all of the technical requirements, and (2) reject them and send them back to the subdivider when something was missing. This is literally months of work. Besides tying up Planning Department staff for months, this will cause months of delays to people who have applied for subdivisions. If this would truly result in better subdivisions we could understand doing it. But almost invariably, the failing is not something that will actually change the way the subdivision is done. For example, we would have to return a preliminary plat to be redone if the subdivider had not included "zoning on adjacent tracts." In past practice, we would not reject a preliminary plat on these grounds because we have the information about zoning readily available to our planners and the public here in the Planning Department. We do not think that the Leslie case will necessarily lead to the invalidation of other subdivisions that have been give tentative approval but have not yet received final approval. We believe that there are legal arguments that can be made in defense of those subdivisions, but the present situation creates a possible avenue of legal attack against hundreds of subdivisions that are in that stage. Again, the legal challenge could be made on technical grounds that do not affect the merits of the subdivision at all. The subdivision could be challenged on the grounds that the initial application did not contain a description of "improvements to be made by the developer" even if, in fact, all of the improvements had to be done according to full county standards. This is exactly what happened in the Leslie case itself. The case did not actually change how the lots were laid out, or where the roads were built, or how water was supplied to the lots, or how drainage was handled. It just forced the developer to submit a revised application.