COM 0939.025 2004-2006 - Laserfiche WebLink

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JNfY Or ~4~ Harry Kim Christopher J. Yuen Mayor Director - - iT! O's •1~p-!~ Roy R. Takemoto Deputy Director (911unf of ('701tt£unit PLANNING DEPARTMENT 25 Aupuni street, Room 109 • Hilo, Hawaii 96720-4252 (808) 961-8288 • Fax (808) 961-8742 April 27, 2001 Lincoln Ashida, Esq. Corporation Counsel Office of the Corporation Counsel 101 Aupuni Street Hilo, HI 96720 Dear Mr. Ashida: SUBJECT: PLAN INTERPRETATION The County Council has requested that Corporation Counsel issue an opinion about the scope of the Planning Director's discretion to make "map interpretations" that particular parcels are within specific categories on the Land Use Pattern Allocation Guide (LUPAG) maps in the General Plan. This is in connection with a specific rezoning request-the property on the Panaewa corner of Puainako and Kanoelehua, across Puainako from Blockbuster, but it is something that is of great general significance. For that reason I wanted to share my thoughts before your office issued an opinion. The difficulty is that the LUPAG maps were, in most cases, only meant to show the general locations of particular uses. I have been told by Norman Hayashi, who worked on the original 1971 GP, that the maps were not meant to be precisely scaled. For example, the maps may show an industrial area that corresponds to an existing location, like a mill site, but if you were to try to scale the map location from fixed points, like a street intersection or the shoreline, you would not necessarily arrive at the actual existing location. The Planning Department simply did not try to make the maps have this kind of accuracy, in part because it did not intend that they be used with this degree of precision. The 1989 maps are on a scale of one-inch equals two miles, so a sixteenth of an inch is about 650 feet. This may be very significant in dealing with a particular property if one attempts to precisely scale off the map. In many cases, the designations are inherently imprecise. For example, there is often a 1 band of "Low Density" or "Urban Expansion" surrounding existing towns. This signifies