2004-04-23 TOCEAN - Laserfiche WebLink

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FUJIKAWA:I have a question for the Director. GALDONES:Commissioner Fujikawa. FUJIKAWA:I have a question with the Director. I was at one time sitting on the Kailua Village Design Commission and also as a Planning Commissioner I had, did a site visit for the Outback Steak House. I brought to the attention of the Council as to when are they going to revise the, varying the size of the sign. Are they going to change it? YUEN:The last activity on the Sign Code that I’m aware of was that Council Member Tyler was working on the Sign Code, he had a draft, he submitted it to the Planning Department, we made some comments. The draft was confusing. And to tell you the truth the existing Sign Code is kind of confusing. It makes my head hurt when I try to analyze it, frankly. One of our suggestions was that, and you’ll see this, was the pictures of the types of size and what’s allowed be incorporated because pictures are much more useful than words in this case. There hasn’t been anything back on this and there hasn’t been any activity on it for quite some time. That was the last of it. FUJIKAWA:Yeah, because the 9 inch, like I brought it up at one time, I can’t see it from the road. And I was told that the sign, the ordinance was 30 years old. Is that true? YUEN:The Kailua Village Sign Code was done in the early 70’s and it is a Sign Code that’s meant for a little village where the, that’s oriented toward pedestrian shoppers where people walk on the sidewalk and are in a shopping experience where the shops are right up to the street. And where you see the variances, what has happened, of course, over time is that the actual way the village is developed is quite a bit different than what was envisioned in the early seventies. And so some of the commercial developments, it seems the types of signs that you’re allowed to have don’t seem to fit the kinds of buildings that you have. Then a further thing happened which was that the Sign Code got applied to the industrial area and to buildings outside the central part, the Alii Drive portion of Kailua Village. And I think that really needs to be changed. The Kailua Village Sign Code is not the right sign code for an industrial area like the Kona Industrial area. FUJIKAWA:I live in Kona and that’s my district. But I’d much rather see that the County help the people like this with their signage and really get rid of all these banners. We’ve got more banners than you can shake a stick at. YUEN:We’ve done a number of enforcement activities; and when we do enforcement we’ve targeted what we think are the worst sign violations, which are the banners, the sign board, the sandwich boards, the things out on the streets, and that’s what we’ve really gone after. But the Sign Code does need to be fixed. If you’re going to have a strict Sign Code, make it for the area where it makes sense and then loosen it up for the areas that it doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, I think all of us have been 4