2005-02-18 TDEUTSCH - Laserfiche WebLink

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GALDONES:Mr. Yuen. YUEN:Could I just add to that? In the new General Plan we did refer to and include those Council resolutions from the mid-1990s that call for a retaining forest cover in connection with rezoning the mauka areas in Kaloko. It’s a- the Council resolutions really have a couple of parts to them. One was discouraging rezoning in mauka areas of Kona above certain elevations but then making an exception for Kaloko mauka if you have this forest cover to it. So, what I’d like to do also is include- that should be, if this is, if this gets a favorable recommendation of the Council we should include that in our report to the Council and mention that, that this is, in fact, consistent with the- these conditions are consistent with the new General Plan. GALDONES:Thank you. Commissioners, any questions of Mr. Mooers? Commissioner Graham? GRAHAM:I think this question might better be put just to the Planning Director but I wanted to ask when Mr. Mooers is here in case there’s any discussion he’d like to contribute on it. We do have a letter, which is our Exhibit D from the Police Department, that talks about concurrency and the traffic on the highway there; and the Police Department is saying essentially that the development should follow the County’s policy on concurrency and that they’re concerned about the traffic to Mamalahoa Highway is going bumper to bumper in the morning and afternoon hours, that’s our Exhibit D. You know personally my sense is that is, you know, would be somewhat fair at this point if these small rezonings to change the…(inaudible) in this area and all, but it does feel like I don’t like to let this, contrary to the Police Department which has a lot of truth to it and so…(inaudible). So I was wondering if the Planning Director would like to make any comment. YUEN:Well, a couple of points on this, one is that there’s site specific issues for Kaloko, just the design of the intersection particularly. The strategy for solving that is- has been to collect these fair share assessments into a fund. I believe the fund is now a little over 300,000 and there is a- one of the assessments they were supposed to do some kind of design for improvement. I don’t know what the end result is going to be with that. The incremental addition of a few more lots is not going to greatly affect the situation at the intersection there. As far as the overall situation on Mamalahoa, one- again, scale is really important in all of these decisions. Just the scale of having a few lots or even if you take- even if you were to take the trend in Kaloko and say that all of Ag-20 lots in Kaloko go to 10 acres and for the lower elevations, the few remaining lots that have not be rezoned from Ag-20 to Ag-3 to Ag-5 get rezoned you’re not going to see- you’re going to see- you’re not going to see a large number of additional lots up there, nothing that really effects the- has any significant effect on the amount of traffic. The other thing is- as far as administration policy on concurrency, when we discuss this and when it resulted in the veto of the Clifto’s rezoning that was specific-, we specifically said that we were exempting a residential. If you- actually if you applied concurrency to residential in Kailua-Kona you’re going to do something counter-productive, which is cut off the future supply of additional homes in the area, at least through rezoning. So we were very cautious about saying that- we look at residential as part of the traffic solution and not necessarily part of the traffic problem. 4