2019-08-01 Hearing Transcript - Admin Matters #2

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the appropriate zoning for the area, so just keep it in place, and when somebody is ready to go forward on that, they just come in and refresh the conditions. AU: I have a comment. The Planning Commissions don't see everything. The County Council doesn't see everything. The people that see everything are the Directors, the Director and staff. So, I'm very interested to see what staff has—what kind of comments staff has, and I haven't heard anything about what staff has to say. DARROW: Anyway, if youDirector, do you want to speak to that? What you would like to see? YEE: I'm not sure that was Commissioner Au's point. I think his point was as staff, you know, what do you see at your level and want to push out, and you know me, I'm open to staff having their own opinions and from their experience sharing, but I would also say, a lot of this, if not most of it has been embedded with their experience. So, you know, I don't think there's anything being thrown out right now as ideas that Jeff and his staff haven't vetted as something that they are generally supported of. I want to make one comment before we move on. You know, we want to keep this moving with forward momentum. That's important. I will say we're kind of hitting the third alarm bell on fire in our Department because of vacation rental processing and the new Energov permitting system. We are totally slammed. I am having to redirect many, many staff from other areas to process. We just got hit yesterday with another like 140 of hours of testing the software for every division, and to a certain extent, Jeff's division is probably one of the least affected in terms of having staff totally involved in both areas, but he's going to have to have some involved because there are processes within Planning Division, Planning Commission Division that needs to vet out the software processes. And, so, Jeff, I just leave it to you that if there has to be push back on some of the timeline to provide information, you know, certainly come back to the Commission and explain that. But, it is all hands on deck on two major areas elsewhere right now so we need to kind of balance the workload a little bit. DARROW: Thank you. Back to Commissioner Au's question. As I mentioned earlier, some of the testimony that I heard going through the Leeward Planning Commission? It gets heated, you know, and it's passionate, and sometimes I think it's a misunderstanding, you know. And, I think it is hard to fight that when you're talking to a crowd and everybody is going "arrrrh" you know, they're not agreeing with what you're saying but realistically, we're trying to come up with a solution to be able to keep these projects moving forward and not just sit in limbo and to be able to effectively deal with time extensions. It sounds like some people want a consequence that's extreme, like kill the project or revert the zoning or make `em pay money or go to jail. I don't know what it is. It's extreme. And, that's not the situation here. These are, again, a lot of these projects, I mean, I had mentioned at the Leeward, and I'll probably mention here, the administrative time extension requests that come in to the Director, a majority of time are based on the overall impact to the economy. The economy EXHIBIT D 14