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venture to say that the seven-member commission, the nine Council members that we have, are
<br /> in a better position to understand what the land use and community's needs are. If you take it up
<br /> to the Land Use Commission hypothetically, you go to the Land Use Commission, you have this
<br /> beautiful TOD plan, and for some strange reason, the Land Use Commission denies it, what do
<br /> you do? You can't even move. And they are like, bottom line is that I think that I would rather
<br /> have this body, the County Council, make important land use community-related decisions at
<br /> this level.
<br /> So bottom—you know, this is my conclusion, and I'll shut upI think here you have now, here
<br /> you have the applicants, you know, Mr. Cook is like 80-plus years, and, you know,they don't
<br /> have too long to be able to do like another 15-year time extension or whatever. And you have
<br /> like Spring Capital, you know, very strong partner,to come in and to be able to kind of finish up,
<br /> you know, to do a project that will do, that will provide much commercial services to an area,
<br /> provide much needed affordable housing, not only in terms of for-sale but rental, rental housing,
<br /> and they'll be providing much needed road connectivity—everybody talks about the traffic and
<br /> all that, you need to have connectivitya new road coming in, traffic lights at the Puapua`a
<br /> intersection, and they want to do this all in an area that the CDP clearly calls for and everybody
<br /> acknowledges as a TOD area. There are actually two paths to achieve these: One is the path that
<br /> the Department is recommending, that you deny this, force the developer to go to the State Land
<br /> Use Commission, spend all that amount of money, and not knowing what your outcome is going
<br /> to go; and the other option is take the path that we are recommending right now, it's a path that
<br /> you can make a decision right here, it's less costly, less time consuming, and you are reserving
<br /> the decision, you know, at this level here.
<br /> Now, I, because the staff did not provide a proposed recommendation, I did pass out proposed
<br /> recommendation for both the Puaa and the Suffolk one generally along, but, you know, along the
<br /> line of what I just represented, stated. However, what I did do was I used the recommendation
<br /> that the planning director back in 2005 did to justify the initial rezoning and made a few tweaks
<br /> to that,particularly, the tweaks relating to the Community Development Plan.
<br /> So I'm lost for wordsI guess at this point in time, you know, Madam Chair and Members
<br /> of the Commission, if there are questions that you want to direct of me or Mr. Cook or
<br /> Mr. Van Bergen, please do feel free to do so.
<br /> CARR SMITH: Thank you very much. Ken, could you tell us a bit about Spring Capital,
<br /> please?
<br /> VAN BERGEN: Sure. So prior to coming to work for the County—am I on? Prior to coming
<br /> to work for the County in 2009, I was the development manager at Maryl Group, and Spring was
<br /> one of our partners. So I've known this Group for over 15 years. They've been actively
<br /> developing in Hawaii for about 20. Currently, they are developing the storage units on Kamanu
<br /> Street above Costco. That's one of their local projects. They were, like a lot of people, hurt
<br /> pretty bad in 2008, you know, pretty leveraged up some of the resort developments, but they
<br /> chose to stay in Hawaii and keep investing, and are currently doing so and looking for other
<br /> projects. And so when this opportunity came to them, they were excited about it because it's
<br /> kind of right up what they do. I believe you guys were given kind of a syllabus of our projects
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