2004-01-16 Western United Life - Laserfiche WebLink

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map for the area that tells us, and judging from past history, we know where the major problems are as far as the floodways. On handling the road situation, that's why we have this condition of making this Ponahawai Street mauka-makai road between Komohana and Mohouli so that you don't have a development that just dumps more traffic onto the existing road network but also makes a contribution to making the traffic flow better. The scale of the commercial is large, but I'm willing to let that be a market situation rather than trying to put another square footage limitation here. It would -, just because of the existing road network and the population network, it isn't likely that this would be an area that would have a strong attraction for people outside of the area where it's convenient to drive to. As far as the big picture, one of the problems that we have in the Big Island now is that the affordable housing, in particular, is so far from job centers, you have a great deal of commuting. If you don't open up housing opportunities in town where the bulk of the jobs are, then people will continue to move out to the Puna subdivisions where there are plenty of available housing opportunities and then commute in to go to the university or to work in town or to go shopping. And the long term result of that is that we will be, we and the State will be backed into spending a great deal of money someday improving the highways when the snarl and congestion inevitably come. So -, and I'm just expanding on the thoughts that I think are in the recommendation, the Staff recommendation, as far as the underlying reasons for basically going along and making a recommendation for approval of this project. FUJIKAWA:Does that help answer some of your concerns? Go ahead, Graham. GRAHAM:Just a little more input along the same lines. I certainly have some positive feelings in some of the directions that the Planning Director just put forth about, you know, not running to more sprawl, issues like that. However, I still am concerned about the unease that Commissioner McCall spoke of. In my particular case, maybe other Commissioners are in a different spot, but this material has Planning Director recommendations from A to Z and from AA to PP, so that's a lot. I didn't get this material until Wednesday afternoon, and this is Friday. And Wednesday afternoon there was a power failure, so I was reading by candlelight Wednesday evening. And then yesterday I had to do my regular work, so before I went to bed last night, I read some more, but I cannot feel like I'm really on top of this to the degree I'd like to be. So even without the testimony that we got today suggesting that we hold on, it is our duty to vote on this thing, even if we're not the final approving body. And presumably our attention to the public testimony and the Planning Director's recommendations does refine this somewhat before it goes to the Council. So I don't feel like just voting yes or no without a sense of confidence of what I'm doing, and I also don't feel like sort of abdicating the Planning Commission's role to sort of chew and refine what we hear from the public and the Planning Director. 30