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WOODWARD: Okay, thank you. Now, Mr. Tucker.
<br /> TUCKER: Thank you, Commissioners. The CDP, the Puna Community Development Plan, and
<br /> the amendment process, now this has been a path I've been on since 2006 when we were invited
<br /> by Mayor Kim and the Planning Department to participate in the Community Development Plan.
<br /> And as Jon said there has been a lot of time and effort. I don't really need to go back and rehash
<br /> every moment. But I would like to pick up the thread a little bit at Council in 2008. Now at the
<br /> time that the CDP, the Puna CDP, was going to Council, we had four days notice as a
<br /> community, as community participants, that there were 21 amendments coming to the CDP from
<br /> the Director's office. Now we were not at that time not particularly enamored with the fact that
<br /> we had, you know, four days in which to try and digest 21 amendments, I believe it was. Well,
<br /> my numbers may be not, maybe it was 19, but I remember 21. And at that point we had to take
<br /> an approach that, listen, if this is just going to get bogged down for months on end with
<br /> amendments that were not even given the dignity of time to review, then we were going to take a
<br /> stance to pass it now and amend it later. Now we said that at the time because we knew that
<br /> some reasonable amendments would be appropriate to the document. It was a long and difficult
<br /> and cumbersome path trying to get the CDP together. We did it on time, we did it on schedule,
<br /> we did it on budget. And we brought it to the Council, and suddenly there were 21 amendments.
<br /> Well, that morning that there were 21 amendments being presented by Chris Yuen, by the end of
<br /> the day we were at 56 amendments. Now the additional amendments we had zero time to
<br /> appreciate, zero time to understand. Now we're grateful that the Council at the time decided to
<br /> listen to us, passed the CDP, and there was a promise made both emotionally and publicly - pass
<br /> it now, amend it later. Now we did not expect that it was going to be more than a year before the
<br /> amendments were going to come back, you know, up as an issue. And Friends of Puna's Future
<br /> in December of '08, just a couple of months after the Council passed it, we went out into the
<br /> community, we formed a committee of 28 individuals new to the process which spent nothing
<br /> but the next five months studying 56 amendments. We gave it a long and thoughtful
<br /> consideration. We were expecting in the spring of 2009 that the amendments were going to be
<br /> coming back to Council. It didn't. It took several months for an action committee to be
<br /> appointed. It took several months for a planning director to be appointed. And that was not of
<br /> our creation, that was not of our, you know -. We were prepared and ready early in '09, you
<br /> know, for an amendment process to take place.
<br /> Now we can flash forward a little bit into December 18` of 20 -, 2009 when with no public
<br /> notice an agenda item was filed with Council right at the holidays for a one bill, Bill 194, to
<br /> amend the Puna CDP. Now it took us several or ten days to even realize this had been put on the
<br /> agenda over the holidays. And when we finally got a copy of it and got to look at it, we found
<br /> that this one bill, Bill 194, contained approximately 83 amendments now. So we went from 21
<br /> amendments, to 56 amendments, now we're up to 83 amendments. And instead of really going
<br /> back into the community, which Chris Yuen never went to the community to talk about his 21
<br /> amendments and the rest of the Council never really came to the community to talk about
<br /> amendments -. We had to start asking ourselves what is this plan? Is this a community plan or is
<br /> this a community plan subject to the veto of the largest landowner in the district? Now I'm
<br /> really not trying to be mean, I'm not trying to be angry. I'm really trying to be simple and blunt
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