2010-04-01 TMOOERS - Laserfiche WebLink

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that what we have going on and have had going on both before and after the cease and desist order that was issued last summer is a flea market, or a swap market, or basically Craig’s List in a building. This is the opportunity for people to sell t-shirts made in China, CDs, trinkets, all kinds of stuff. Now the Andersons have told me that they’re still working on how to screen the people that come in to sell their products. But how do you do that? If you start allowing all manner of products, other than produce and agriculturally related products, tell me what is the difference between this and Kmart? The building is almost the same. It’s a huge steel building. It’s a massive building, 42,000 square feet. If you put a floor in it and you put walls on it, it looks like Kmart. When you go to Kmart you have parking, off-street parking, on the property for hundreds of cars. He has got parking for 300 cars, based on his own website. He’s advertising parking for 300 cars. He is advertising human capacity in this building of between 800 and 1,000. If you look at his literature he says 800 but if you look in his sheaf of contracts and insurance waivers, you’re okay until you see 1,000. Then you have a problem if you’re renting the arena. The question is whether or not, and it is just different than Kmart, I’ll grant you, in that it will only be open on the weekends. But in terms of what’s happened, what’s happening in that arena, what has been happening historically and what they want to do, it really is a large retail commercial operation. At least in Kmart the people that are selling are employees of the owner of the building and they’re under some control. Here you’re going to have local residents who are not employees of the owners of the building, who are coming in on a concession-type basis and selling whatever they want. There’s going to be thousands of people in and out of that building, probably the numbers wouldn’t be much different than what would happen at Kmart on a weekend if you had a 42,000-square foot Kmart building. And this is in Ag zoned land; and not only in Ag zoned land it’s the most remote part of this part of the island, if you look at it compared to where the urban cores are. I think, I distributed an aerial map which you should all have in your packets. It shows where this particular property is in relation to Honokaa and Waimea. It looks like this; and there’s a circle on it. And if you look at Waimea on the left, Honokaa on the right, and Kukuihaele above it, it’s sort of equal distance between those clusters. Reading the past testimony of the Commissioners and applicants here, there was an application in January I believe of this year for a healing center of some kind in Kukuihaele, and there was a lot discussion about whether this was an appropriate place for it. And the testimony focused on how far it was from the “urban core of Honokaa.” If you really are concerned about citing commercial activities, especially large visitor traffic commercial activities in appropriate places, this would be the last place you’d want to put it. If it were right next to Honokaa, maybe you could argue that it was consistent with your philosophy of having these things near the urban core. But I would submit that this is not an appropriate and reasonable place for this particular activity. Second point I wanted to make is that the landowner’s track record is not encouraging. If you put language in this permit that is loose, we fear that there will be difficulties with enforcement. The landowner was cited by the Department of Transportation for putting in an access driveway without prior permission. A liquor inspector is the one that blew the whistle on the reggae concert. You have in your applicant’s packet a photograph advertising a reggae concert last summer. That reggae concert was not held. Why not? Because one of the liquor inspectors said, wait a minute, what’s going on, and they were told not to hold a reggae concert. There was a cease and desist order from the prior planning director to stop doing this. Had they stopped? No, they’re continuing to do it. It has been going on now on the weekends, and they’re booking special events. You heard Mr. Anderson say that there were bookings as far as next October. If you look at their website, this is a well-polished large website advertising all manner of commercial activities in the special events categories, parties and weddings. In their application they make the point that this is primarily for 501(C)(3) charities and other charities; and we had a long discussion about this in my office. There are ways, if that’s what they really want to do, there are ways to restrict that use; and we would support that.I spent 20 years as the executive 8 EXHIBIT D