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<br /> KUROKAWA: It's going to be a long one.
<br /> ALAMEDA: All right.
<br /> IWASHITA: Mr. Chair?
<br /> ALAMEDA: Commissioner Iwashita.
<br /> IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mainly because the Kona meeting agenda is so full
<br /> and I hopefully won't want to say anything in the Kona meeting, I want to make a record now, I
<br /> guess, of my bigger picture view about this particular proposal. And that is that I really
<br /> appreciate, you know, the concern and the intent to reduce the auto dependency in our
<br /> community; and I think that's something that we all, well, I would hope that we all would
<br /> support doing. You know, every time I read the paper and we see little tweaking of things like
<br /> this, right, my concern is that that's all it is and that it's, you know, trying to tweak, trying to do
<br /> little things that may or may not, you know, help towards getting away from auto dependency.
<br /> And, really, what I think is needed which I've said before is that the County should spend 2, 3, 4
<br /> million dollars, whatever it takes in the next couple of years, and do the community development
<br /> planning in an, I would say, effective way. And my view of that is to do it in a way not by, what
<br /> it is, Council districts or those kind of gross kind of, in my mind, not real appropriate planning
<br /> kind of areas, that it should be as small as, done on the smallest scale as possible; and then that
<br /> way the community would Like my friend Junior De Luz here in the audience, he and his
<br /> fellow business people in the Kanoelehua area, they all ought to get together with houselots
<br /> people and figure out what that area should look like, on that kind of a scale. And I think that it
<br /> can be done if we structure it properly. And that really would be, if it's done all at one time
<br /> island-wide everybody knows that we're all doing this at one time on a large island-wide basis
<br /> but in a smaller context that the community development plan will be as effectively done as
<br /> possible. So that, and if in fact I mean there are people out there I know that are going to say,
<br /> hey, I want a freeway, I want to be able to drive, you know, no speed limit to go to Kona in an
<br /> hour kind of a situation. But all of those different concerns can be raised and But it really
<br /> needs to be done on that, to me, at that kind of a level, in that kind of a format in order for this
<br /> County, this island, to effectively deal with, you know, getting away from auto dependency or
<br /> being actually, to put it positively, you know, to establish an effective public transit system down
<br /> the road, you know, planning for half a million, seven-hundred thousand, a million people living
<br /> on this island, you know, 30, 40, 50 years from now. So the concerns are legitimate. I just think
<br /> that, you know, trying to do it on a piece-meal basis really just takes away from the big picture;
<br /> and in the end to me we're going to just end up like Honolulu, no matter what we do. Because
<br /> they had all the same concerns and they got what they got.
<br /> ALAMEDA: Thank you, Commissioner Iwashita. Commissioner Domingo?
<br /> DOMINGO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just received the administration's input and
<br /> recommendations and I'm glad that it's going to be continued to the next meeting, of which I'm
<br /> pretty sure I'll not be able to attend. But, you know, my concern is what I see here is the
<br /> Legislative body slowly trying to arrest the functions of the administrative body. And, you
<br /> know, for instance reviewing zoning applications beyond "x" number of lots and all that. And
<br /> what we see is trying to intermix the functions of the legislative and the administrative branches.
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