2007-04-05 TAOAO - Laserfiche WebLink

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SONG: Mr. Chairman, I’m going to let Ms. Van De Car handle this primarily; and I’ll just interject when necessary. And this is Dr. Takase sitting next to me and he is president of the Board of the Association. GRAHAM: All right. Thank you, Ms. Song. Ms. Van De Car before we have you up here, we were really pretty much addressing the specific issue of whether we were going to continue the hearing today or not; and we’ve already handled that. So I think this is an opportunity if you want to speak to the merits of your application you could do that before the Commission. VAN DE CAR: All right. I’d like to start by saying that I appreciate all the comments that were made today, especially the comments that were made by Ms. Reis’s daughter and by Ms. Chinen. It’s always, always difficult when a neighborhood is undergoing change. And I have gone through that myself. None of the current Planning Commissioners were members back when I was contesting on my street, you know, things that were happening that were changing. And it’s not easy. And you buy land and the commercial areas move up and keep moving; and what has happened on this area is that, as she pointed out it’s absolutely right, I mean, she lives next door to a commercial building now. And there’s a commercial building across the street, there’s a jail across the street, there’s a whole line of, it’s a medical services area now, where 15 years ago it was not a medical services area. So I mean the land has been changing. So I appreciate how they feel. And I think that Dr. Takase and the Association want to be very good neighbors to them. And that’s why they set up the meeting and invited them all to come, so that they could talk about ways to try to address those concerns, ways to try to ameliorate those concerns and what might be done, like what Ms. Sircuasa said about, you know, could you put the landscaping in first before you put it to be a parking lot. And none of those people attended the meeting. They just didn’t come. So it’s hard to address their concerns when they don’t come and they don’t engage in the dialogue and when the dialogue is just here. And I know Ms. Siracusa you were little offended I think by the attitude; and I think that emotions start to run high. But what I want us to do and what I’d like to have the applicant do is stick to what the issues are and try to look at what the applicant can do to best address the concerns of the neighborhood. What they’ve offered in their application is to offer the landscaping to hide or ameliorate the difficulties for the neighbors. They’ve offered to close off the access on Punahele Street to make sure that there is no traffic that goes onto Punahele Street. And that will make the employees have to drive through the other adjacent parking lot, down through Puuhonu and out onto Komohana Street so that cars are going to be routed well away. What we’re talking about is 20 parking spaces, so 20 people who drive into work in the morning, park their cars, and then 20 people who drive in the evening and leave. And that’s the entire traffic addition that’s going to be there. They’re not going to allow any customer parking there. It’s going to be empty on weekends, it’s going to be empty at night. If there’s landscaping and fencing up, we’re not going to have people coming in and having access at night to do things that were upsetting and certainly offensive. So I think that the applicant is trying. There was a concern that there was a violation before, that the people were parking here before. I think there was an honest disagreement in legal interpretations of whether or not you could park cars on a lot in a residential area. I know that the Planning Department’s position was no. The EXHIBIT C 15