COM 0281.005 2016-2018 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

4 ' 274 LAND AND POWER IN HAWAII • 8 /Hawaii:Subdividing Lava Fields 275 In 1975,after the subdividing boom had come and gone,97.5%of all lots principally the efforts of then-County Planning Director Suefuji in rewrit- in Puna in subdivisions of 100 or more lots were still vacant. By the end of ing the county subdivision ordinance that choked off the creation of new 1983,a quarter-century after the start of the boom,no more than about 5% speculative developments. of lots held residences.43 The new ordinance shifted approval of subdivisions away from the So whatever the Big Island boom was about, it really was not about actu- County Planning and Traffic Commission to the Planning Director.Where ally providing homes. it had been a simple matter for the Commission to grant variances from the It was not even about developing subdivisions fully. After all those years, road paving requirements, it was now made mandatory for the director to many subdivisions still did not have adequate roads and functioning utilities. require paving, and it was made very difficult for the commission to over- 1 Perhaps,in an ironic sense,it was best that the subdivisions never did fill ride him.Where water lines had not been required if a subdivision was more up beyond radically low levels, because what would have happened if they than 1,500 feet from a county line, now water lines were mandatory wher- became even so much as 25% full in, say, 30 years? What would the costs ever the subdivision might be. The director enforced this provision, and have been to the county and the state governments to provide normal.public here again variances were made extremely difficult. The new ordinance services to these home owners, living so far from existing population cen- also forced subdivisions to conform to county zoning and the county general ters and not even close to each other? plan.If county land use maps did not show a certain area for residential use, So appalling was this fiscal prospect that consultants to the Land Use then a residential-type subdivision there would be disallowed. Commission wrote in 1963 that"when the provision and maintenance of Suefuji's ordinance was eventually adopted by the County Board of Su- public facilities and services are requested and demanded by property own- pervisors in December 1966.48 ers in these subdivisions . . . both the solvency of the investment and the The era of ever-expanding Big Island speculative subdivisions,with sub- government are threatened."94 standard roads,without water or electricity,below a volcano,in the middle This view was supported by University of Hawaii Land Study Bureau of a lava field,without houses,had come to an end. researchers,who wrote two years later:"The people of the county can only hope that these and subsequent developments in the area do not have suf- ficient construction activity to necessitate the provision of normal urban services,for the costs of their installation and operation would be a fantastic burden for the county to assume."45 In the mid-1980s,those boom-time subdivisions were a kind of spectacle In the late 1960s Big Island Planning Director Raymond Suefuji said the Big Island possessed, along with active volcanic craters, snowcapped that it would actually be cheaper for the County to buy up all those scores of volcanic peaks, papaya trees growing in lava,and the simple vastness of the thousands of vacant lots to forestall any more house-building than it would island compared to the rest of the state. If they wanted to, tourists on their be to face the financial disaster of having to service a significant percentage way from Hilo to Volcano National Park could wander along rutted roads of them some day.46 laid out in perfect grid patterns regardless of the landscape, looking at di- lapidated street signs in semi-wilderness, aware of the strangeness of being * * * in a lava field,and seeing,every once in a great while,a house. The few tourists who actually did venture into a Puna subdivision,particu- larly those farthest from the county seat of Hilo, might also encounter some- For nine years, 1958-1966, Hawaii County routinely approved specula- thing else: a close,sometimes hostile scrutiny from people living there. tive subdivisions. And development of subdivisions approved during that Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing into the 1980s, many Big period continued into the 1970s.Reform was a long,hard-fought process.It Island speculative subdivisions came to have as their major economic use took a rising tide of alarm over how to finance services if people should ever something no one could have foreseen at the time of their creation: the come in large numbers to live on their lots; a threat from the County Plan- criminal activity of growing marijuana. ning Commission to void a large subdivision because the developer for Marijuana being an illegal crop,its total value never turned up in the state's years had refused to meet his road-building schedule; weeds growing in economic data book. Still, by all sorts of accounts,it had come to be very big many roads because maintenance arrangements did not function; embar- I business in Puna and other districts of the Big Island,as in the state at large. rassment over sales injunctions issued in California; and a federal land Most estimates of the early 1980s ranked marijuana as the Islands'third larg- fraud prosecution involving the owners of one Big Island project.97 It was est revenue producer,behind only tourism and military spending—but as big