2005-04-22 TPlanning Director4-22

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matter of having value added to the product. Its hard to compete on strictly a commodity basis with millions of agricultural products in Hawaii. We have a big visitor industry. Many visitors are interested in a little more than going to the pool anddrinking Maitais or sitting by the beach. Some of them are very interested in seeing our flower farms, our coffee farms and the like. Theres been a bit of a gray area on the regulatory side. Clearly you can a roadside stand and sell things. We know that there are ongoing operations that have a more formal kind of tourism focus. At the same time, there are definite community concerns, or neighborhood concerns about wide open agricultural tourism. So what this does is it sets some parameters for agricultural tourism that would be allowed as a matter or right. The farmer would still have to come in for Plan Approval which is an administrative matter and get Plan Approval to establish the agricultural tourism operation. There are some conditions connected with the Plan Approval. One of the key conditions is off streetloadingsothattheywouldhavetohaveanarea,iftheyhadbusestheywouldhavetohave an area to pull off of the highway and get back on safely. We would check this at Plan Approval. The bright line has to deal with- the ordinance has a limit of 40,000 visitors annually that would be allowed under simple Plan Approval, anything bigger than that would need a Special Permit. The Farm Bureau is saying they would be happy with a lower number and I think depending of the outcome of todays hearing we may- when we take this to the County Council, or at the end of the hearing today, we may recommend a lower than that. Im thinking something in the order of 20,000 people a year works out to about 50 people a day on the average. The other thing is that theres a size limit to how much space that you can have in agricultural tourism operation. This would- and then to be clear this would not allow special event type activities without a special permit. You couldnt have weddings, catered parties, things like that, without having a special permit. What you could have would be tours, sales, walk throughs, that kind of activity without a special permit. If you went above the size limits then you would have to come in and apply for a special permit. GALDONES:Commissioners any questions of the Director? Commissioner Springer SPRINGER:Im looking at the correspondence that was just circulated from Mr. Conant and on page 2 he questions whether the Section B1 requiring a minimum of $10,000 verifiable gross sales is the best approach to take. He suggests that instead the Federal Tax Schedule F should be accepted and I wonder if the Planning Director has any comments on that. YUEN:I think its a legitimate comment. We could accept some level of investment in planting crops where the people might- you might not having bearing crop yet but you can prove that youve invested x amount of-. I really must sit here and think of an amendment that would do something like that. What we didnt want to do, but what the reason for this- for having some basic dollar cut off is that we wanted to make sure that Agricultural Tourism is really an accessory to a commercial farm operation rather than something thats set up as an agricultural tourism operation where a tourism operation in the Ag district that doesnt really have any farming component to it. So, thats the purpose of it and it could be met by some verifiable investment and farming. SPRINGER:Thank you. 2 EXHIBIT E