2021-11-18 Leeward Exh C (Items 1 & 2)

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couple of people say that I’m a developer, which really might be a little bit of a stretch. We bought this property in a fairly distressing situation or distressful situation. I bought my first home in Waimea in a place called Puu Nani in 1973. One of the testifiers earlier said that I’m not in or of the community, and I just want to take this opportunity to say that this is my home. It has been my home for over 50 years, and I’m thoroughly involved and interested in the welfare of the community. The situation around our purchase of this property is that I was friends with the previous owner who was a family by the name of Ishihara. The Ishihara family grew celery, daikon, won bok, lettuce those types of farm vegetables. Mr. Ishihara was a friend of mine. I was also friends with his neighbors the Wakiyama’s Genso and Kenya, the Oye family, some of the Kuwano’s, quite a few of the farmers there were friends of mine. I was an ambitious young man that time. I was able and willing to help them with their vegetable crops, some of the farmers I helped were in loved with me though, but the majority of them were there in the Pu‘ukapu area. When Tamao Ishihara died, we all knew him as Tom. When Tom died, excuse me, when Tom died, he left the farm to his family and Tom’s wife and their children tried to farm the land for a few years and it wasn’t for them. Somehow, they got hooked up to a man of questionable integrity who came out of Hilo and this man signed an agreement of sale with the Ishihara’s promising to pay them each year for the purchase of their 20-acre farm. By doing that he essentially became the deeded landowner. The Ishihara’s obviously had a lien on the property, but this gentleman this person subdivided 5 acres off of the 20-acre farm and sold the 5-acre parcels and pocketed the money. And never paid the Ishihara’s for the 5 acres. He also became over the years severely delinquent in his regular payments to the Ishihara family and remember this is a family who was a subsistence farmer in Waimea in the 1970’s. So, there wasn’t a lot of money to go around at that time. In addition to selling, I think illegally certainly immorally selling the 5 acres this person allowed during the widening of the Māmalahoa Highway. He allowed truckers, contractors I don’t know who all else to dump thousands of tons of waste material from the demolition of the Māmalahoa widening onto the Ishihara property. I did not know that when I purchased the property, but nonetheless I bought the property out of distress directly from the Ishihara family. They were in jeopardy of losing everything that they had at that time. I arranged for a note from the bank, I bought the land at a fair market price, no negotiations, all cash to the Ishihara family got them out of that problem and I think most of them still live in Waimea and are prosperous there. That left me with a piece of property of 15 acres that I knew very little about what happened after Tom died. So visually all a person could see was elephant grass or cane grass that was probably 8 to 12 feet tall. You could not see anything else on the ground but this tall grass. So, when I decided to explore what we had bought after a couple of years. We realized that this dumping had occurred so, by hand and by myself and with friends, I cleaned up over 20,000 tons of concrete, pipe, asphalt, you name it telephone poles, all of this garbage that was dumped on Tom’s property that I now own. So, I just took exception of this person that said this guy’s is an opportunist and he’s not in or of Waimea. I take offense to that because I spent almost a year on weekends Saturdays and Sundays cleaning up that property. 4 EXHIBIT C