2003-03-07 THOKUKANO1 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

th I'm sorry, the March 4 response to that, this week's response -. YUEN:Yeah. TSUKAZAKI:Contains a statement from our side indicating we do not believe that that left hand storage lane is warranted. YUEN:Yes, I see that. As far as the Department's comments on the traffic improvements, we'll wait to the end of public testimony to give that. I do want to comment on why we would oppose a change to G, the f improvements within the flood zones. Chapter 27 is the flood co Hawai`i County. It applies not just at the, it applies to properties that are already zoned. It applies at the building permit stage, it applies at the subdivision stage. It's taken from a national law. It's basically a copy of a standard national law that the County has to put in place in order to qualify for flood insurance. It's tied in with, there's a national, and state approach to this. The law itself is written to apply to communities that, where there's already zoning in place, and in other words, it applies to lots that are already zoned residential or already zoned commercial. And so the approach taken by the federal government is that you restrict, you don't prohibit building on the lots. You simply, you require that the lots be, that if construction occurs on the property, that it be built up from the floodway, like on stilts, for example, with breakaway construction allowed. So our, if you take Chapter 27, if you were in an existing commercial zone, have -, we have commercial zones that are in floodways. What it does then is say that new construction has to be built up. The reason for the federal government taking this approach, one of the reasons, is that you're dealing with properties that already had land use entitlements, they already -, they're zoned to do certain things. And then you get into these constitutional taking issues, if you then pass a law that says you can't build in the floodway anymore -. As a matter of philosophy, though, if we're talking about taking a piece of property that has one zoning and moving to a zoning that allows greater construction, greater use, our approach is that, to not allow construction in the floodway. Rather than rezone this property and allow them to build commercial buildings in the floodway -, that it could be elevated above the floodway is better. Because you have the control at the zoning stage to restrict construction within the flood zones as a tradeoff for allowing greater development outside the flood zones. So that's the reason for taking this approach and not just simply saying that we should follow Chapter 27 and allow anything that can be built pursuant to Chapter 27 to be put in the floodway. SPRINGER:Mr. Tsukazaki. 15