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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2008-05-08 TPUNAcdp PLANNING COMMISSION COUNTY OF HAWAI‘I MINUTES/HEARING TRANSCRIPT MAY 8, 2008 A regularly advertised hearing on the PUNA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PLAN was called to order at 6:02 p.m. in the Cafetorium of the Keaau Middle School, 16-0565 Pahoa Road, Keaau, Hawaii, with Chairman Rodney Watanabe presiding. PRESENT: Rodney Watanabe ABSENT & EXCUSED: C. Kimo Alameda Lani Bowman Takashi Domingo Andrew Iwashita Alvin Rho Shelly Ogata Rene’ Siracusa Rell Woodward Ivan Torigoe, Deputy Corporation Counsel Christopher Yuen, Planning Director Norman Hayashi, Staff Planner Jeff Darrow, Staff Planner Larry Brown, Staff Planner And approximately 49 people from the public in attendance PUNA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PLAN Review of the draft Puna Community Development Plan submitted by the Puna Community Development Plan Steering Committee and its Consultant, PlanPacific, Inc. The Chair introduced the Commissioners and staff to Members of the public. WATANABE: The single agenda item for this particular meeting is the first Planning Commission review of the Puna Community Development Plan. Maybe what we can do is sort of outline how we plan to proceed with this presentation. We were planning to have Mr. Larry Brown, Mr. John Whalen who’s the principal consultant, and Jon Olson who is the chair of the Steering Committee provide their presentation of their draft Puna Community Development Plan. And then we’ll allow the Commissioners to query these individuals as to anything they might have, any questions. But we also realize that there are number of people from the public who would like to testify and we don’t want to keep you waiting so we’ll probably you know, just briefly touch on the query; and the Commissioners will have an opportunity after public testimony to further query the presenters. With that I believe I have Mr. Larry Brown and John Whalen here. Is Mr. Olson available? Oh, you may have a seat also then. I believe we’re going to start off with Mr. Brown. 1 BROWN: Thank you. Chairman Watanabe and Commissioners, I want to thank you on behalf of the Puna community for bringing this hearing to Puna. And tonight with us we have here John Whalen the planning consultant for the Puna CDP, he is the principal with PlanPacific Incorporated; Mr. Jon Olson, chairman of the Puna CPD Steering Committee; Steering Committee Member Kim Tavares. We also have Barbara Lively with the Steering Committee; Stephanie Bath with the Steering Committee; Mr. Greg Braun, he is the Vice-Chair of the Steering Committee. We’re also honored to have here tonight Mr. Ken Melrose with the Kona CDP Steering Committee. Ken, thank you. We also have Council Member Emily Naeole representing the fifth district in Puna. I hope I haven’t left anyone out. Oh, Representative Fay Hanohano. Thank you very much for attending. If I could direct your attention to the screen, the Puna CDP basically we’ve kind of divided it up into four phases. The first one being the Preliminary Phase, which ran from basically June of 2005 to June 2006, included hiring a consultant, holding kick-off community meetings, soliciting and appointing the steering committee members, and conducting agency interviews and plan materials. The Outreach Phase, which was the next part, we held over 130 small group meetings throughout the Puna community mostly in home-type settings. And this generated participation by over 1,062 individual participants who generated over 3,300 different comments. We convened, the first steering committee meetings during this period held two public workshops on issues and opportunities. And we held an open house with display booths to bring members of the community into contact with different agencies, landowners, developers, etc. in the Puna district. We formed working groups and focused on the ten major topic areas that basically followed the elements of the General Plan. The next phase was the Planned Development Phase. Working groups submitted their reports to the Steering Committee for review and comment by the Planning Consultant, Mr. Whalen. Consultant reviews and comments and working group reports were conducted during this phase. Consultant prepared theme-based working papers which were the predecessor to the actual CDP document itself. The consultant also prepared preliminary CDP proposals. And the Steering Committee reviewed and modified these proposals. This ran from basically January of 2007 to December of 2007. And the final phase is the Plan Approval Phase which began in January and brings to where we are here today. The Steering Committee reviewed the consultant’s predrafts on the CDP; and this actually was submitted to the County at the very end of December, so that review began in early January. The consultant submitted revised drafts of the CPD over the next month and a half or two, and the Planning Director met with the Steering Committee to work out some issues of concern that the Planning Department sought with the CDP with the Steering Committee. And the Steering Committee approved the draft CDP that we’re here to address tonight in early March of this year. And so here we are at the Planning Commission’s first public hearing. And with that I would like to have John Whalen present some of the ideas or the content of the CDP. 2 WHALEN: Thank you, Commissioners. I’m going to be very brief in my comments so it’s just an overview of the contents of the CDP. One of the things the Steering Committee made clear is that it wanted a CDP that was really based on the community input, public participation. So we anchored the actual framework of the CDP to the comments that were made during the small group meetings and the working groups. We compiled all the small group meetings comments and identified some of the top issues. And there are basically three themes in the CPD, Malama Ika Aina, managing growth and transportation. Each of those correspond to the three top clusters of issues identified in the small group meetings. First thing Malama Ika Aina which includes the historic and cultural and scenic resources, native forests and geological features, addresses aquifers, coastal waters and storm water in the shoreline area of Puna. This map summarizes some of the ideas that are in this theme of Malama Ika Aina. Some of the key actions in this section are the recommendations to form special design attractions for the towns, the older towns in Pahoa and Volcano, in particular Keaau; the creation of a bio-sphere reserve buffer zone, which is in the Volcano area, to protect, provide some protection of the native forest in areas where the native forest surrounding that community is relatively intact. There are also proposals for making changes to the grading, the County’s Grading Ordinance, to protect those areas of the native forest outside the biosphere reserve buffer zone, and not only the forest but the archaeological features. It proposes stricter waste water disposal standards, particularly over aquifers and in coastal area, and proposes special controls in the shoreline areas, particular where there is subsidence along the coast. The next theme is Managing Growth. And this addresses the land use pattern, particularly the unique situation, not completely unique because Kau has this also, are these nonconforming subdivisions, the 50,000 lots that were created during a 17-year period, about one quarter of which are presently developed and occupied but certainly hold the potential for a lot, for additional growth. Managing growth also includes policies and actions related to agricultural and economic development. Puna is a major agricultural area and there are policies proposed to increase that potential. It looks at social services and housing for Puna’s population, public safety and sanitation, parks and recreation, and then energy sustainability. This is one of the reasons why this plan is important, because the growth in certain sections of these subdivisions has been phenomenal, particularly in recent years. And this aerial photo of Hawaiian Paradise Park opened a lot of people’s eyes to really what’s happening in this district. This kind of growth presents special challenges, particularly because the infrastructure is substandard and there are no services in many of these subdivisions. So among the key actions proposed in managing growth is development of village centers of varying sizes throughout the Puna district where these services can be provided, so that people don’t have to travel as far to promote agriculture and green jobs in the Puna District, so people might not have to commute as much to Hilo for work and beyond to Kona even; to locate community services and housing in these village centers, a variety of housings that’s not available presently at Puna, particularly senior housing assisted living; and then to 3 expand and diversify the park system because many of the subdivisions didn’t make provisions for parks and yet there’s a growing population in them. The final theme was transportation; and this really was the top issue identified in the smaller group meetings. And under this theme is traffic demand management, which means ways to reduce the need to commute or to have single occupancy commuting by using van pools and mass transit, and also telecommuting as an option for people who work remotely. Mass transit, the roadway network, which is presently disconnected in many places in Puna, the highways for which there are just a few principal highways that carry most of the traffic, and they’re dangerous in many places. And then finally nonmotorized travel and scenic byways, nonmotorized being both walking and bicycling primarily, and horseback riding. The key actions in the transportation thing, under this transportation theme include emphasizing those transportation demand measures, increasing highway safety and emphasizing that over the efficiency of travel on the highways. Improving the network connectivity, that means that the roads there now disconnected would provide continuous routes so that people don’t have to make circuitous travel routes. And then a very strong point is to improve mass transit services through a hub and spoke system in Puna, in the Puna district to encourage people to use that mode of travel. And then finally although a very big issue is the alternate routes, particular the PMAR or the Puna Makai Alternate Route that you’ve probably heard about for many years. But, anyway, that’s also designated on this plan. A route for that or an alignment for that has been proposed, although the specific alignment would have to be determined through the environmental impact statement process to look at alternative routes. The final section of the plan deals with implementation, and this is the area that many people may be confused with the regulatory part of the plan that is actually guidelines. It consists of guidelines for, suggested guidelines for the biosphere reserve buffer zone and the grading controls that would be adopted later by ordinance. There are also guidelines for the formation and location of village centers, using the floating zone concept. There are maps for these various village centers. And as I’ve mentioned earlier there are various sizes and types. And then finally there is an implementation table that lists the organizations, mostly agencies but sometimes nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, responsible for carrying out the actions, and also timeframe for carrying out each of the actions, and then an estimate of the cost for the major infrastructure improvements that are suggested in the Plan. And that’s the end of the presentation. It just covers the surface. WATANABE: Okay. Well, thank you, Mr. Whalen. Let me, see, Mr. Olson, would you like to add anything to this? OLSON: Yes, good evening and thank you for having this meeting out in Puna where residents can get to it. This has been a two-year long process for the community and for the Steering Committee; and I can tell you that while we’ve held a lot of many meetings and the hours have been long, it really has been a good process 4 because we’ve involved so many people. As you’ve heard earlier, you know, we’ve had over 3,000 inputs on the very first round of the small group meetings. At the first meeting of the Steering Committee, the one thing that we came to unanimous agreement on, and very quickly, was that our function was to carry the mail for the community, that we would honor the inputs of the community and that we would honor the work of the working groups, which actually really did the trench work. And our function would be to sort that out, prioritize it, get numbers. You can wish for things that you can’t afford, you can wish for things that are not practical in terms of a doable timeframe, keeping in mind that this document has a life span of about seven years and this process will start again. So that was the thing that we reached agreement and consensus on almost immediately, and we set out to do that. And beyond that I’m not going to, I know there are a lot people here that want to give testimony and I’m very interested in hearing that testimony, hearing what they think about what we’ve done. WATANABE: Thank you. Mr. Yuen would you care to maybe enlighten us on how the process goes from here before we entertain questions? YUEN: Yes, thanks. And just, I also welcome everybody that has come here to the meeting. Sometimes folks are not sure what happens with the plan and what happens next. The plan only comes into effect if it’s adopted by ordinance of the County Council. The role of the Planning Commission here is to give a recommendation to the County Council, similar to a rezoning action. So the Planning Commission, we’re recommending that although this is a Puna plan it has an island-wide effect that the Planning Commission, we’ve set aside this meeting solely for the plan. We’re planning to put it on the agenda on a West side meeting and we will bring it back to a meeting on this side of the island for a vote by the Planning Commission on a recommendation to the Council. The Planning Commission can recommend approval, denial, modifications. The Planning Commission cannot actually implement any changes. That’s up to the County Council. If the County Council wishes to amend the plan that has been submitted to them by the Steering Committee it can do so; but it first must get, if the Council makes an amendment then before they finalize the amendment by a final vote, it has to seek the comments of both the Steering Committee and the Planning Commission before it takes a final vote on the plan, including, if it includes any amendments. So that’s what happens to this next. WATANABE: Thank you. With that I think I’ll open it up briefly to questions from the Commissioners. Yes, Ms. Siracusa. SIRACUSA: Yes. Several of the letters that we have received in our file make reference to the manner, questioning the manner in which Steering Committee Members were chosen. And I would actually have liked for the sake of clarity and openness to put that issue out on the table right up front and ask -- I guess it’s the Director, or would it be someone else to address that question -- so that we can all be clear about what the answer is to that, what the process was. 5 BROWN: I’ll try to answer that question. The Planning Department created a committee of citizens of Puna that were known to have been active in community affairs in Puna and were thought to have been of high reputation to act as a review committee to screen and rank the applicants that had submitted applications to be on the Steering Committee. And the results of those applications or those rankings and evaluations were then submitted to the Mayor for selection and appointment. WATANABE: Any follow-up to that? Do you have any follow-up to that? That’s good? SIRACUSA: No, that was clear. WATANABE: Okay. I see no other questions right at this moment. I have a follow-up question to that though. In one of our letters Shipman indicated that they were not a part of this process, although I guess they did indicate that they were allowed to provide some input, and they are a significant landowner. So I’m wondering how is it that we can see it’s a community development plan and leave out a major landowner? BROWN: My understanding is that there were two applicants that had ties to W.H. Shipman Limited. I wasn’t engaged with the process at the time, but my understanding is that those applicants were not ranked as highly by the review committee. And my understanding is, I’ve had to try to look at the old records and talked to people who were engaged at that the time, and the primary one is no longer even with the Department. But basically what floated to the surface seemed to be a preference to make sure that we had representation from the geographic areas of Puna because it is such a big district; and the issues in Volcano, and Keaau, and Pahoa and Kalapana and Kapoho, etc., we needed to make sure that we had representations from all of these subdivisions. And that’s what I can tell you on that right now. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. WALTER: May I make a clarifying comment on that? WATANABE: We are going to entertain public testimony after the querying, and it’s coming up shortly. I assume you are with Shipman, am I correct? WALTER: Yes. But I would like to clarify what really happened on that. WATANABE: You’ll have an opportunity to respond when we take testimony. And I have to swear you in, etc., so let’s -. OLSON: If I could weigh in on that, too. WATANABE: Yes. 6 OLSON: We formed, in the process we formed working groups on each element along the lines of what the General Plan looks like. In other words, there was a transportation element, there was a recreational element. Each one of the elements in the General Plan format had a working group. Those working groups were totally public. That was totally done by the community. They got very little support from the County. Each one of the steering committee members acted as a liaison to each one of those groups. So we kept informed of what they were doing, the direction they were going and tried to provide liaisons back to the County. So if any individual or any group wanted to weigh in on any one of the topics, they were more than welcome to do that. The email dialogue was there for all to see. It was a very transparent process. So there are people who joined the process and had left the process, but no one was excluded. WATANABE: Thank you. Well, Fellow Commissioners, do we have any further questions for the presenters? Mr. Iwashita? IWASHITA: Thank you. I want to thank all of you for all the work you’ve done and the impressive report that we have and the plan presented. I guess my comment right now is, you know, I am of the belief that the more community involvement we have in our planning process the better it is, and that the results should be better than Oahu, should be better than Maui. Okay? Cause I, my humble opinion is it never worked over there, you know. And we have all the same General Plan laws, we have all the same subdivision laws, we have all the same building code requirements that Oahu has, we have the same planning commission process, we have the same county council approval process; and it doesn’t work. It didn’t work in the last 50 years on Oahu, it didn’t work in the last 40 years on Maui; and if we keep going down this road it’s not going to work over here. And we have much more aina to mess up over here than they have over there. Okay? So I want to thank you for all your hard work. In my view this is a half a step. You talked about seven years, I don’t think so, you know, unless the community, all of you and more of us, consistently stays involved in this process; and one of my reservations about this plan is that it doesn’t provide for that. It really doesn’t. It says basically Planning Department make sure it works. For most of it, right? And I really think there needs to be, and I’ll get to it later, but my question for now is part of my concern is the real diverse area that this plan covers. Because in my mind it wouldn’t make sense to make it, to have Steering Committees for like Keaau, for the Volcano area, for Paradise Park, Orchidland, Hawaiian Acres, Fern Acres; maybe even that’s too big an area. But, you know, we have these sections, you know, of this district that have really specific kinds of issues to address. And in the case of Paradise Park, Orchid Land, Hawaiian Acres and Fern Acres, thousands and thousands and thousands of buildable lots, right, that people I think in those areas should have an opportunity, right, to come out on a regular basis and address the real substantial infrastructure problems that they have to address in the next several decades.And it’s going to have an impact on the rest of the island, right? So, I mean, I don’t know if you have a comment on that, or you, you know, as far as the process. But, you know, those three particular areas I think really in my mind would justify having steering committees with authority, you know, to have on an on-going basis to address the CDPs for those areas. 7 OLSON: I don’t disagree with you. Puna is larger than any of the islands in the island chain. I mean, you know, and our diversity is reflective of that large size. We have the most diverse population and, culturally, ethnically, economically, I -. If the process would have allowed it, we would have done it that way, cause we discussed it. But the resources that it would take to do that the County doesn’t have; and as I understand it it would require changes to State Law because this is, these are mandated by district. So we’re stuck with what we have. IWASHITA: Well, the implementing law for having community development plans is in, what is it, Chapter 10 of the General Plan which says there shall be community development plans developed; and it doesn’t specify those areas. How those areas get determined as far as I’m concerned is up to the Mayor in the end, and the Council if the Mayor doesn’t do it, to, you know, how that’s implemented. And cost is a factor, right? OLSON: You get the money we’ll do it. You’ll get no arguments from the community on that. You get the money we’ll do it. IWASHITA: Well, my intention in bringing this up at this time is to get, you know, your comments; and I appreciate your frankness about, you know, agreeing with me. Thanks. BROWN: If I might add -. WATANABE: Okay, Mr. Woodward. Oh, excuse me I’m sorry. Mr. Brown. BROWN: I just wanted to add on to what Jon said. And that is that we, it’s true that the Puna Community Development Plan doesn’t address who’s going to implement as far as, or how the community will participate in the implementation. But we do have an ordinance -- I’m not exactly sure where it is, but it’s being introduced by Council Chair Pete Hoffman -- that will create implementation committees that are manned by community members and appointed similar to Steering Committee Members. And they will have a lot to say about what gets implemented, how it gets implemented and coordinating with the various County Agencies, primarily through the Planning Department. And we do expect that to pass; and that will be the vehicle through which the community can participate in implementation. And to address another concern that you mentioned, you’ll notice that in the Puna Community Development Plan, there are a lot of actions that are recommended that require follow-up actions that will be done at the more localized level. In other words when it comes time to decide the location and size and scope, etc., of a village center in a particular subdivision, it’s the residents of that subdivision or that immediate surrounding area that will engage in another process where they’ll have input and a voice on how that comes about. The PMAR project, for example, will be greatly engaged with the residents of Hawaiian Paradise Park to help define the size and scope of any road that may or may not eventually connect up to the subdivision or go through it, whatever the case might be. 8 WATANABE: Okay. Mr. Woodward? WOODWARD: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Firstly I’d like to thank the Steering Committee and the community in general for the tremendous amount of work they’ve done. I know this has been a big pain in the whatever, but you got it done. And now there may be a little tweaking around the edges. With regard to the question of the Steering Committee, the Steering Committee has to be appointed by the Mayor and approved by the Council, so it’s not an arbitrary decision. The other point I’d like to make is Kau is bigger than Puna. You talk about how big Puna is, Kau is bigger. But I kind of like being there in Puna because you actually have water that falls from the sky and you have real dirt; and we have to truck both in. WATANABE: Go ahead, Ms. Bowman. BOWMAN: Can I just ask for a point of clarification, just so I’m sure. When the Steering Committee, the same process was used for all the CDPs in Kona and North Kohala, having a panel of local people review and then going to the Mayor? Just to clarify -. YUEN: Yes. BOWMAN: Thank you. WOODWARD: Mr. Chairman? WATANABE: Yes. WOODWARD: Actually because we are getting ready soon to do our Kau Community Development Plan I’ve researched the County Statutes, and the only requirement is at the point when the Steering Committee is appointed. The process that precedes that is not mandated by law, and so it can be varied. What generally happens is you start out with a large group of small meetings, which they did 130 plus, and then you go try whittle over those several thousand ideas down by a small group of large meetings, and then it goes to the Steering Committee who further whittles it down, and then they eventually put out the final product. But as far as the actual process there’s nothing in the County Code up until the appointment of the steering committee that tells you how you have to do it. WATANABE: Do we have any other questions for the presenters at this time? Then we’d like to thank you for your time, the expertise; and I’d like to, you may be seated then. Now then we’ll start entertaining public testimony.As a reminder if you wish to testify you do need to sign up, I believe there are sheets out there, and present it to the staff. I’m going to proceed in the order that I received these. So, you know, if you signed up first you’ll have an opportunity to speak first. So let me see, we have four microphones, five microphones. So maybe I can call five people up at a time. Before I 9 begin calling you up though there are a number of people that do want to testify. This is the second Commission meeting for today for us, we did meet earlier today. So we’d appreciate it if you’d be concise, try contain your testimony to say, let’s say, three minutes, yeah. Let’s try not to be overly repetitive, meaning I expect that there are some of you that have the same feeling as the previous testifier, and let’s try to move this process along. So let’s begin by calling the first five people who signed up. Mr. David Fukumoto, Ms. Gladys Nakamura, Sara Togashi, Tom Witten and David Arakawa. Would those five individuals please come up. Gladys Nakamura, would you come up please, you signed up to testify. And Sara Togashi, do we have Sara Togashi here? Is she here? NAKAMURA: I wasn’t planning to testify at all. WATANABE: Oh. You weren’t planning to testify? NAKAMURA: No. WATANABE: You signed up so that’s why I called you. You don’t want to testify? NAKAMURA: No. That wasn’t my intent. WATANABE: Oh, okay, so that would be Gladys. NAKAMURA: Cause I just found out about this last minute cause I was away, yeah. WATANABE: Okay. Do you know if Sara Togashi wanted to testify? NAKAMURA: Sara? WATANABE: Sara, do you wish to testify? TOGASHI: No. WATANABE: No? NAKAMURA: No, I guess not. WATANABE: Okay, then I have two others. Let’s start, I’ll start with David. Okay, Ekekela Aiona and Gerald Yamada. Hello, can I have Ekekela Aiona, I believe that’s Mr., would you come up, and Gerald Yamada. PUBLIC: Ekekela couldn’t make it. WATANABE: He couldn’t make it. 10 PUBLIC: She. WATANABE: Oh, it’s she. Bill Walter then. Oh, Gladys, you said you’re not going to testify right? NAKAMURA: But can I sit along here? ARAKAWA: She like sit next to me. WATANABE: Oh, oh, okay. NAKAMURA: I can’t hear too well in the back. ARAKAWA: I don’t think, it’s cause -. WATANABE: No, no, that’s fine, that’s fine. Why don’t we stop there and then we’ll get this straightened out. WOODWARD: We don’t bite so if you guys want to come tell us what you want, let us know. WATANABE: Okay, would you all raise your right hand, please, so I can swear you in. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth now before the Planning Commission? TESTIFIERS: I do. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. Would you like to start, sir, and would you please state your name and address for the record before you proceed with your testimony. WITTEN: Yes, Tom Witten with PBR Hawaii, 1001 Bishop Street, Honolulu, Hawaii, Suite 650. WATANABE: Okay, you may begin. WITTEN: Good evening, Chairman and Commissioners. I’m Tom Witten, a land planner with PBR Hawaii that has assisted W.H. Shipman in formulating a community-based conceptual master plan for Keaau. As some community leaders may testify tonight, W.H. Shipman engaged the Keaau community in 2006 along with our firm to formulate an updated master plan for Keaau Town. Recognizing the emphasis the recently adopted General Plan of 2005 placed on Keaau, the planning effort focused on how the vision of the General Plan could be realized and creating a master plan for Keaau Town that was consistent with the General Plan. 11 A group of Keaau residents and community leaders were invited to Join W.H. Shipman and the planning consultant team in a planning process that involved a series of meetings over a 4-month period. After establishing a vision, formulating alternative concepts, and refining these concepts, the effort resulted in the Keaau Town Conceptual Master Plan. This community-based planning effort identified how Keaau Town could grow to achieve the regional town center envisioned for the Puna region. At the gateway to Puna, this plan illustrated the potential to redevelop “Old Town” Keaau and plan for the “New Town”, with all the needed community services and employment centers for the Puna District. With the phased development of the W.H. Shipman Industrial Park underway and the first phase of zoning in place for the Gateway Center plan for a regional commercial center, demographic and market projections were prepared to ensure the planning provided for the long-term needs of the region. We’re here with the Draft Puna CDP. And having reviewed the current draft of the Puna CDP, there are several shortcomings of the process and resultant plan that I feel should be addressed: The first would be the General Plan Consistency. Under the General Plan of 2005 Keaau was targeted or identified as the Regional Town Center for the region. The current draft of the CDP does not clearly address the vision of the General Plan to focus on regional services in Keaau. Although not intended to be a specific limiting criteria, as John Whalen had pointed out, the General Use and Design Criteria (specifically Table 5-1) for a Regional Town Center are significantly underestimated. With a current population of approximately 40,000 and estimated by some projections to double that population in the next 15 to 20 years, the regional town center planned for Keaau would need to be significantly larger to serve the Puna district. As provided for in the 2005 General Plan, Keaau town is the logical location to master plan for the regions urban land uses and “New Downtown”. What is described and illustrated in the Puna CDP for Keaau Regional Town Center should be clearly characterized as only the initial phase of the regional town center. Local commercial and community services should be planned in the Pahoa and Paradise Park communities. But to achieve the type of employment and community services from the Puna district, there should be a much stronger emphasis on planning for an economically viable regional town center in Keaau. The second point that was brought up a little bit earlier was the Land Owner Participation in the Planning Process. As a significant stakeholder as W.H. Shipman is in the Puna district, I do not understand the Planning Department’s logic to not include a representative from W.H. Shipman on the Puna CDP Steering Committee. In my over 30 years of community planning experience in Hawaii, this is the first time I have seen such a significant stakeholder, along with other Keaau community leaders, not included as an integral part of formulating a community development plan. None of the Keaau community leaders that assisted in the formulation of the community-based Keaau Town Conceptual Master Plan were selected to serve on the Steering Committee. 12 The community planning efforts strive to engage the community in the planning for the future, but the actual participation of the broader community always falls short. The planning professionals do their best to inform and guide the process but if you do not start with a good representation of the key stakeholders, the regional plan will lack the realities of what can be economically achieved and not represent the desires of the broader community. I hope this Commission can recognize the shortcomings of the draft Puna CDP and request that these concerns be addressed in a revised draft before forwarding any recommendations to the County Council. Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Fellow Commissioners, do we have -? Yes, Ms. Siracusa. SIRACUSA: Thank you, Mr. Witten. I was following along on your written testimony here. I noticed that you’re with a Honolulu firm, so I could not possibly consider you community as far as Puna goes. Naturally you having worked with Shipman your focus seems to be rather Keaaucentric. I’d like to point out that the people along the coast have to travel anywhere between, oh, 11 up to 15 miles just to get to Pahoa and another 11 miles to Keaau. Therefore, having a regional town center in Keaau may be fine for the central subdivisions and the people heading to like Mt. View, Kurtistown, going up in that direction. But for the coastal Puna, the Puna Makai area, Keaau would not be viable at all. And so while Keaau might be viable for some of the communities, it would not be the big “be all/end all,” I do not think, that would serve our entire Puna community. Thank you. WATANABE: Any further questions for this testifier? Seeing none, then you may be seated. Thank you for your testimony. And it is also, I would remind you, a draft. Let’s see, I believe the next person is Mr. David Arakawa. Would you -. ARAKAWA: Hi. Dave Arakawa. WATANABE: Yeah, name and address please. ARAKAWA: Okay, thanks. WATANABE: Thanks. ARAKAWA: Dave Arakawa, Land Use Research Foundation of Hawaii, 700 Bishop Street, Suite 1928. Good evening, Chair Watanabe and Members of the Planning Commission. My name is Dave Arakawa. I’m the Executive Director of the Land Use Research Foundation of Hawaii, a private, non-profit research and trade association whose members include major Hawaii landowners, developers and a utility company. We do have as members, W.H. Shipman and KSPE. I was born and raised in Waipahu, which is not Puna but it was the last plantation town on Oahu. It was the last plantation 13 to close on Oahu; and I was deeply involved in the Waipahu community planning process. So although I’m not from Puna, we do come with some expertise in that area and background in that area. LURF appreciates the opportunity to provide our comments to the Puna Community Development Plan. And at the outset we’d like to commend the consultant, PlanPacific, and the Steering Committee Members, the community members, and the Planning Department for their efforts relating to the Puna CDP. However, we respectfully request that the Planning Commission either defer action or make a negative recommendation to the Council on the Puna CDP, not because it’s a bad document but to allow the Puna community, key stakeholders, and the Puna CDP Steering Committee more time to review critical additional data and issues. I’ve listed seven issues and I’ll go through them as quickly as I can. No. 1, the Puna CDP should include crucial information, data and professional input on key issues such as population growth, economics and marketing. We understand that that key data was not provided to the Steering Committee, nor considered by them. Thus, the Puna CDP does not reflect the future growth of Puna and its relevance to the future of the County of Hawaii. I was frankly shocked to see the statistics that the Puna area is expected, their population is expected to be bigger, huger than both North Hilo and South Hilo, huger than North Hilo and South Hilo put together; and that’s Puna. And the planning that’s reflected or, I guess, the proposals reflected in the Puna CDP surely do not support that type of statistics. And as raised by Commissioner Iwashita, this is especially, especially essential for purposes of planning infrastructure and raising the funds to fund the infrastructure for this area. Secondly and most importantly, this plan is inconsistent with the Hawaii County General Plan. The Hawaii County General Plan 2005 states “Expanded commercial services to the needs of population growth in the Puna District shall be encouraged in Keaau.” Instead, the plan calls for all these small regional shopping centers and commercial areas. And, again, not from here, not from Puna but all across the United States and Hawaii, you have to build a critical mass. You have to have a critical mass of people in areas before these shopping centers, I guess stores into move these shopping centers. So these shopping center sites may remain dormant or unused for quite a long time. With respect to the next issue, inconsistency with other existing and concurrent community planning efforts, the Puna CDP is not consistent with other existing and concurrent community planning efforts, such as the Keaau Town Conceptual Master Plan, the Hawaiian Paradise Park Master Plan and the Volcano 2020 Master Plan. We believe that the Puna CDP should take its time, go back and review those plans, and address the existing and concurrent community planning efforts. Fourth, the Puna CDP should be revised to allow more flexibility. The Community Development Plans provide a vision for the future, and thus should be flexible enough to address future changes and needs. I talked about the huge population increase that’s expected for the Puna area. However, the Puna CDP in Table 5-1 and accompanying maps include very restrictive and inflexible requirements for retail and commercial areas to service the needs of such an expanded community. They call for commercial areas of 14 only 10 to 30 acres. That is smaller, 10 to 30 acres is smaller than what DOE considers for a high school. DOE requires 50 acres for a public high school right now. And the shopping centers you guys are calling for are going to be smaller than a high school. Anyway, fifth issue, major stakeholders should be added to the Steering Committee, and their input should be sought.You know, I know it has been talked about before. I wasn’t involved in the process. But if the selection criteria were used we’d like to see it. I would like to make, and I’ll write a letter, a 92F information request for the selection criteria, the selection score sheets and how the selections were done. We feel that it’s very, very questionable on how major landowners were excluded from the process. I’m sure there are others than can testify as to that issue. So we’ll be making that request. Number six, the Puna CDP should include a more detailed analysis of the issue of Important Agricultural Lands and the related incentives, and the new legislation passed on May 1, 2008, and also include any County efforts to establish laws, regulations and incentives to support the agricultural industry in Puna. Seven, incentives, private-public partnerships and the synergy between government, landowners, and community and land uses should be addressed. We believe that creative and meaningful incentives and private-public partnerships can encourage the successful implementation of the Puna CDP. Thus, we respectfully recommend that the County, Steering Committee, community and key stakeholders obtain more information on, and seriously discuss, the potential forms and types of incentives and public-private partnerships prior to adopting this Puna CDP. Again, just in closing, I’m not from here, I’m not from Puna, I’m not from the Big Island. But observing this process two things stick out, and I think you folks might hear it again and again. No. 1, what’s with the selection process for that Steering Committee? Why were no major landowners on it? I cannot say it’s fishy but it sure is very questionable. So I think that’s something that we really need to look into. The second issue is more of a legal issue; and that is the consistency with the Hawaii County General Plan. The General Plan talks about, and the General Plan is law, talks about the fact that the implementation of the, I guess, the works proposed in the community development plan must be consistent with the General Plan. That’s the law. This community development plan is not consistent with the General Plan. And, lastly, outside observer, outside observer observing this process, it seems like there’s a huge, huge rush to get this done before December. I don’t understand necessarily why, but it seems like everything that is being done in this process and recent law that was passed earlier this week is meant to tie the hands of people like the Planning Commission, not give you folks adequate time to review or enough time that you would need to review the plan and just rush things through before December. So I question what the rush is. I think there are a lot information out there that needs to be considered to make Puna the type of place that the residents want to live in. So, Mrs. Nakamura, is that okay? 15 NAKAMURA: Yeah. ARAKAWA: Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. Fellow Commissioners, do we have any -? Yes, Ms. Siracusa. SIRACUSA: I noticed in your, let’s see which bullet it is, it’s the third bullet, you say that it’s not consistent with the Volcano 2020 master plan. And yet we had a support letter from the Volcano Community Association, so I’m having a little problem with that. ARAKAWA: It depends on the person who wrote the letter, right? We can go through, I can send you something -. SIRACUSA: Well, they’re here so they’ll speak for themselves when the time comes. ARAKAWA: Okay. SIRACUSA: And I raise that question so that when they come up to speak that they will make sure to address it. You seem to be suggesting that you think that we should expand the process, not rush to complete, although eighteen months they’ve been at it. Do you think that’s a rush? The time extension, the County Council passed, as I’m sure you know, a moratorium on upzoning for the community’s districts that are in the process of doing community development plans, so that the plans would have a chance to take effect before and it would make it a lot easier for the Commission to know what the guidelines are going to be. However, you seem to be interested in extending the period by allowing the Steering Committee to continue convening and bringing more people, more stakeholders on board and everything. However, the way those County decisions were worded was that there is either a drop-dead date or the, and Director Yuen can correct me if I’m wrong, but there was either a drop-dead date or the plan becomes law. And it seems to me like it would be in the interest of some people to have us pass the drop-dead date so that the upzoning moratorium dies and then a whole lot of parcels would come up for upzoning and we could increase the density dramatically of the Puna district without necessarily adding concurrency in terms of infrastructure. Would you like to respond to that? ARAKAWA: You know, I’m not familiar with the specifics of that but increased density we’re finding across the nation is a good thing because it prevents urban sprawl. Increased density in certain areas next to shopping centers, next to transit stations allow people to walk to school, walk to work, walk to their place of business. So increased density is not a bad thing, you mentioned. So perhaps those plans that are on the books are good for sustainability. Perhaps those plans are good for, I’m not familiar with all those things. But hearing you talking, it seems like you think that all of these plans that 16 are being held under the moratorium are bad, bad plans. I don’t know if that’s true or not, you know. You said that if it’s delayed any longer you would allow those plans and people to upzone and increase density. So I’m not sure that increased density or those plans are bad. And on the second issue of, you know, passing a plan, hurry up and pass a plan, it’s my own personal feeling, I would rather take my time and pass something good that’s for the good of the community, than to pass something bad just because something is going to expire and you want to beat the clock on some other issue, you know, or you want to beat the clock on the moratorium -. The moratorium shouldn’t control, you should say there’s this moratorium -. Well, it’s my own personal feeling, you shouldn’t say there’s this moratorium out there so therefore let’s hurry up and pass this bad plan. So, I don’t know, that’s just me. But everybody has their own point of view. WATANABE: Thank you. Mr. Woodward? WOODWARD: I just have a comment. We’ve heard from two speakers, both of them from Honolulu, that have large property holdings and are interested in developing. I’m not sure that that’s really what the community wants. I’m not saying that you don’t have any valid points because I think some of the points you made are probably valid. And this process is not perfect, none of us are perfect. But, you know, the first two speakers we have here live in Honolulu and they are large landowners and they’re developers, and that casts a little bit of a shadow on the way I look at this whole scenario. ARAKAWA: Well, I think if anybody looks at the papers that we’ve prepared these are sound planning principals. You could live in Maui, you live in Oahu, you could live on the Big Island, you could live on Kauai, you could live in Sacramento, California and all of these would be true. But, you know, we’re coming here because we do have issues that we think are important. We do believe that the plans could be improved and, you know, that’s our position. I cannot help if you don’t believe what we say because we’re from Honolulu. I cannot help if that’s how you feel. But, you know, we believe if you show this document or Tom Witten’s document to any planner anywhere in the United States they would say that these are sound planning principals. WOODWARD: Well, we appreciate your testimony, and like I say I think some of the points you made were very valid. And as I said before, the process is not perfect. It will never be made perfect. But I just wanted that on the record that, you know, we haven’t yet heard from the people in the community here; and we’ll see what they have to say. WATANABE: Ms. Bowman. BOWMAN: I think I’m going to date myself. But I worked on the, you know, I’m from Kohala, on the North Kohala Community Development Plan. And what we did in the seventies, and it happened to be PBR Hawaii was, were the planners. And I know 17 as a community member that we needed the professional planning expertise, so that’s just my comments with, yes, and they were from Honolulu also. My other comment is that, yes, we maybe got a letter from the Volcano Community Association, but again relating back to development plans the demographics are changing, I’m sure there as in Kohala. And oftentimes people who comment or write letters may not be the people who worked on the other master plan. So I think we need to take those as two separate entities, not to say that because the Volcano Association now wrote a letter that it is indicative of the master plan. And I just want to comment that I’ve worked, I’m not on the Steering Committee for this North Kohala Plan but I have worked on the others, so I take the comments that have been made seriously. And I thank you and I thank the community too for all the work that they’ve done. Thank you. WATANABE: Do we have any further questions? Okay, yes, Mr. Iwashita. IWASHITA: Mr. Arakawa, you made a comment about the inconsistency of the CDP with the General Plan and I guess -. Would you disagree with me when I say that the General Plan can be amended so that if the community really wanted changes to the General Plan so that what the local communities wanted, either be it Keaau or Volcano or Pahoa or Paradise Park, that the General Plan in the end could be amended so that it would conform to what the community thought would be best for its community? ARAKAWA: I agree 100 percent with your statement, Mr. Iwashita. But, what I’m saying here is that the County Planning Department and the Council should have, I mean, this place is going to be bigger than all of Hilo and so they should have, excuse the expression, the cojones do what they were elected to do, to do what they are appointed to do. To be the Planning Department -. Okay? One, it’s very important to listen to the community. I was involved in Waipahu and so we want our plantation town. While it’s very important to listen to that, some people with the expertise have to step up and say, you know, that’s all fine and good but for the good of the island, wherever it is, whichever island it is, we think that the population is going to go out to Puna, you know. Or they can change it, they can say all the population stays in Hilo. But -. IWASHITA: Okay, I -. You know, just one follow-up, Mr. Chair. And basically would you agree with me that the Council on Maui and the Council on Oahu, did just that, they stepped up to the plate and they made the decisions and they got what they got, right? ARAKAWA: Yes. IWASHITA: All right. And, you know, I’ll reiterate my comments before – I don’t think we want the same thing. And so, the Council does have the ultimate authority to make decisions under the Charter. My suggestion to you is that, you know, there needs to be a better process for the Council to make those decisions; and in my mind getting the people out like this is the direction to go. When you go to a Council meeting 18 and they do a zoning change and three guys show up to testify, and maybe about a zoning change, you get what you get on Oahu, -. ARAKAWA: Exactly. IWASHITA: You get what you get on Maui. That’s how it happens. The community development plan in my mind if implemented correctly with lots of community involvement is a different process that gives us, each individual community, not the Planning Commission, not the Council, right -? Because left to their own devices all best interests taken into consideration you get Oahu, you get Kapolei, you get Hawaii Kai, you get Mililani, you get H-1, you get H-2, you get H-3, all with good intentions, all lousy results. And on Maui you get Kihei, wow, you get Kihei, you get Wailea, you get Kaanapali -. ARAKAWA: No I, Mr. Chair? WATANABE: Okay, Mr. Iwashita -. IWASHITA: Okay so -. WATANABE: I might have to limit you to the three minutes. IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair, I appreciate your indulgence. ARAKAWA: Mr. Chair, I have just one comment. I agree 100 percent with Mr. Iwashita. And once we in Waipahu and the Leeward area get the power we are going to put the prison and the rubbish dump in Waikiki, and Kahala, and Kaimuki, and in Kaneohe, and Kailua. IWASHITA: You bring up a good point. I think every community on this island, every community on this island should be addressing when there are 250,000 people living in the Puna district where is the prison going to be. ARAKAWA: But somebody has got to -. IWASHITA: This plan doesn’t talk about it. You bring up a very good point. Same thing, same thing with the West side, okay, all of those things -. But those decisions need to be, those concerns need to be addressed and it’s a long-term thing. We don’t have to do it right now. WATANABE: Mr. Iwashita, there are a number of other people that want to be heard also. IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. 19 YUEN: I just wanted to make a suggestion to the Commission that there are about 25 members of the public who have signed up to testify and it’s important that we hear from all those people. We’ve spent about 45 minutes with the first two testifiers. If the Commission engages in extended debate with each of the testifiers I’m afraid we won’t be able to hear many of these good people tonight, so that’s my suggestion. IWASHITA: Thank you. I think I’m gong to be more agreeable with the other testifiers. WATANABE: Well, okay. I trust that we’re done with that testifier. Mr. Yamada, name and address please before you begin your testimony. YAMADA: Gerald Yamada, 16-212 Melekahiwa Place in Keaau, Hawaii. You guys know me already, you know, I was born and raised here in Hilo, all 43 years. I don’t know the last speaker and I can’t speak as well as he could. But I just went through this recently and just so you know I did try to do a development on Orchidland Drive, it didn’t get through. But I thought it was a good win-win situation. We worked with the community, we had paid back for the roads. We had a bunch of, we were going to donate a traffic signal, Rene’ knows me, too. But I just kind of skimmed through this at the last moment. I don’t have a speech. I was just concerned with a couple of items. You know, I wanted to say that I thought that some of the items in here take away people’s property rights. You know, I’ll go through those items first, like amend the Grubbing and Grading Ordinance to prevent pin-to-pin lot clearing, you know, that’s one. And, you know, there’s a lot of native forests and things like that, which is good, too. But there are also other areas where, you know, people work hard to buy a lot, and not everybody wants trees or coqui frogs near their homes. Inappropriate County zoning can get adjusted in order to maintain and create the quality of life. Again, you know, if we’re going to work hard to buy a piece of property with a zoning to try and do something to get ahead, you know, we want to maintain that right. You know, we’d hate to work that hard and have it taken away by the County. Limit the size of agricultural dwellings to discourage excessive lot clearings and speculative building practices, well, that’s good. But I have a lot of friends that are farmers and some of them have big families, and they keep on adding a bedroom and a bedroom and a bedroom and the house keeps on getting bigger. And, I mean, will this restrict them? I’m not sure. Where possible reduce density and buildout within the district by various means including selective rezoning, you know, again, it takes away property rights. One of the big concerns I had where a lot of my classmates, a lot of our friends that grew up in Hilo, they have no place to go because they don’t have, they need to find affordable properties so they move out to Puna; and then to find jobs they’re driving over to Waikoloa working at the hotels, working at Kona. Not everybody but a good portion of them are driving across the island, you know. And then when I see the village centers, I mean, I think they’re small. I think they’re small. When you look at the vast amount of preapproved lots in the Puna area, I mean, it’s huge. It’s bigger than, you know, you just said it’s double the size of Hilo; and these are already approved lots. A lot of the subdivisions in Hilo, you know, we do subdivision 20 work, it costs a lot of money now to put them up. Not too many people can afford them. They’re going to move to Puna. They’re going to buy pre-existing lots and build their homes because that’s where they can afford it. I think it would be nice if the village centers were larger, you know, not just because we do building or developing but because I think they’re going to need it later on. It’s going to have to be large. And one of the problems that we’re going to see is a lot of these centers are plopped in the middle of a bunch of lots with different owners. And how you get each of these owners to sell their property to do this development or make this project come together is going to be tough, you know, you might get a few of them. But then the next guy will see it as his property is worth a lot of money because of what’s going on around him, and I think it probably won’t happen; and it’ll be sad because it will prevent all these developments that will bring jobs to this community and keep the guys within the community. I’ve got to say that I was also on that community board that W.H. Shipman had put together. They brought in a bunch of community leaders and did a planning for the land that they own. And one of the good things that I thought about was that Shipman had already owned this property. They own a big enough chunk to do what they wanted to do with their land versus a bunch of different lot owners that are going to end up arguing over a different development. And there was a lot of planning, a lot of thinking, a lot of, it was a fair process, I thought, that went into this. And I thought it was a good chance to bring in businesses, to bring in the type of walking community that would have been nice for the area and also provide surrounding housing that would keep a lot of our local people on this island. For me it’s sad because I look at my kids, and they’re getting older and they’re not going to be able to find good paying jobs by the time they graduate college and come back to Hawaii. They’re going to end up moving to the mainland, and I’m going to have to move to the mainland to be by my grandkids. And it’s sad because we see a lot of the local people are moving over to Vegas, Oregon, all over the place to get jobs. A lot of retirees are moving in here to retire. And, you know, if you ask a lot of the local guys, they don’t come to these meetings but I’m pretty sure they’re for this development. They want the jobs, they want things nearby and they want to be able to raise their families here. In closing, I just want to say, you know, I hope you guys consider these things before passing this or recommending your approval. Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. I’m almost afraid to ask. Do we have any questions for Mr. Yamada? Do we move on? Thank you, Mr. Yamada. By the way, I do remember that incident with the subdivision. Mr. Fukumoto, name and address, please and then you may provide your testimony. FUKUMOTO: Good evening. I’m David Fukujmoto. I’m the president of Fuku Bonsai in Kurtistown. I moved here in 1973. I formed the first certified export nursery; and the certified export nursery now is a thriving industry that a few years ago had a larger gross income than Puna Sugar ever did. And so I’m very, very proud of being the father of a major new export industry. Right now we are working on an aquaculture industry that will also be exported. And I think that if you’ve been to Kurtistown lately 21 you’ll realize that Kurtistown is probably the fastest growing community as far as the business district is concerned. We now have a 7-Eleven that just opened up, we have a self-service pump, and believe it or not Kurtistown even has a traffic light. And we’re expanding, and we want to expand more, and we want to create jobs for the community. I submitted six pages of written arguments regarding what I consider a very, very bad road plan. And I tried to address the situation that the Puna Community Development Plan in my mind is a major complex legislation. And complex legislation should really be scrutinized in every single aspect. And for a complex litigation or legislation to simply go through the process that it did I think is very unwise because there’s a huge amount of unintended consequences. I tried real hard, I worked real hard on this plan as you can see from my submittal. But I felt that it really didn’t nail it on the head, and I worked and worked. And if you’ll give a little time I’ll try to explain what I mean. I’ve been a part of traffic planning for many, many years. I worked with Governor John Burns in the 1960s when he was involved in designing the Queen K Highway. And in understanding the economics and the velocity of Queen K Highway I learned that it has a tremendous economic role to play. Now that’s really why I’ve gotten involved in the Puna Community Development Plan. First of all, I was a member of the 1989 State of Hawaii Long Range Transportation Plan. And in that plan I was probably the harshest critic of the Department of Trans because I felt that they very, very badly manipulated the process to a point where the consultant pretty much knew what he wanted to give us. He let us put a lot of public input and piece by piece he got rid our input; and it ended up with the final plan pretty much what they started with. And I thought it was very cynical and I was very, very upset. And so I got involved with the Puna Regional Circulation Plan which was ended in 2005 with the professional consultant that was responsible for coming up with the final plan; and I think that the person did a great job. I know that not everybody was happy but I felt that type of plan is far superior to what we have today. The Community Development plan should be a master plan created by the Puna Community. But it isn’t. The Hawaii County Planning Department who designed and managed the process -. WATANABE: Mr. Fukumoto, I don’t want to cut you short. I’m perfectly willing to let you proceed a little further, but if you’re going to read your written testimony that was provided to us then -. FUKUMOTO: No, this is a condensed version. WATANABE: Well, okay, let’s be mindful of the time then, please. FUKUMOTO: Yes. WATANABE: Cause I still have to be mindful of everyone else’s -. FUKUMOTO: I understand. 22 WATANABE: Okay, thank you. FUKUMOTO: And so I tried real hard. You’ll notice that I gave you six pages and I revised it, and my total is less than one. WATANABE: Okay. FUKUMOTO: The Planning Department really designed this plan and they managed it; and the professional consultant was primarily an advisor. And, really, the crux of this whole thing is that it was done by the Steering Committee. Because no matter how much input you get from thousands and thousands of people in the end a half a dozen people or so put this thing together. It had a few individuals but it did not include large landowners or business leaders. The last time the community made a significant input was in February of 2007 when we handed in all of our reports. And this tonight is one of a few opportunities that we have to comment on that final plan. I think that there’s a need for this to be a master plan for the community and that there should be an adequate basic road system. You know, there’s only single road from Hilo to Keaau, a single road from Keaau to Pahoa, a single road from Keaau to Volcano. If any of those roads are blocked, this community is in very deep trouble. And so basic infrastructure of a large district like Puna requires that we have alternate roads in every opportunity. And when I looked at the PC, the Community Development Plan, there’s no alternative, any amount of alternate roads. I think we need to have a full alignment so that we know where the road is going to go so we can begin acquiring it, because it’s going to be a very, very contentious issue.I think that this plan lacks an economic development plan. You know, if we’re the fastest growing industry in the state and we’re going to have a larger population than Hilo, you have to understand that Puna only has 587 acres, total, of commercial/industrial land. And in comparison Puna (sic) has 3,277 acres. They’ve got almost six times as much as us and our population is going to be larger. And that’s why we have a traffic problem, because all of the Puna are heading toward Hilo to go to work, for their services, and for shopping. And so it seems to me, like the previous testifier said that the shopping areas are small, I’m saying that they’re grossly small and we need larger -. WATANABE: Okay, Mr. Fukumoto, earlier I did indicate that, you know, if the testimony is going to be kind of repetitive, yeah, please refrain from that; and the reason I’m trying to do that is not because I necessarily agree or disagree with your position but I also need to be fair with everyone else. Because as time starts running short then other people will start telling me, yeah, but you allowed so and so more time. So let me ask, I think I know where you’re headed, and I think the rest of the Commissioners know where you’re headed. Let me ask you to wrap up, okay, in all fairness to everyone. FUKUMOTO: I think that the major problem with Puna Community Development Plan is that it tried to establish policy; and it tries to establish a policy that I think is very, very unwise economically. We have a huge number of private subdivisions in Puna, and this Puna Community Development Plan runs the Puna Makai Alternate Road right through Paradise Park. Puna Makai Alternate Road is going to be an alternative to 23 Highway 130, the Keaau-Pahoa Road, which is now scheduled to be a 4-lane highway. I cannot imagine how you can say that the equivalent of the Puna, the Pahoa Road going through Hawaiian Paradise Park is not going to be an impact. There’s going to be a tremendous impact. And to say that it’s going to be unpaved and it’s going to be a gated road, you know, that’s kind of shibai and misleading. And so I say that we need a fair and clear Hawaii County eminent domain condemnation policy. If we’re going to put the road through let’s put it through in a manner that’s very, very straight forward that will provide us with the easement width that we are going to require. And I’ll leave it at that and I’ll leave you my summary because I think it will be -. WATANABE: Thank you. I appreciate it. And, again, I’m just trying to be fair to everyone, okay? Do we have any questions for this testifier, Mr. Fukumoto? Look, why don’t we take five. We had our first set of testifiers. In the meantime I would request that the other people who are going to testify consider how they can reduce or shorten their testimony. Okay? Thank you. RECESSED The Chair called a short recess at 7:37 p.m. RECONVENED The meeting reconvened at 7:47 p.m. WATANABE: Will the Planning Commission meeting now come back into order. Before we begin, I hope you’ve all figured out how you can shorten your testimony; and I do apologize, we did run much longer. We now have a timer, okay. And to be fair, to be fair because we did run a little longer on the initial testifiers, yeah, we’ll provide you with five minutes. I believe at this point I have something like 17 testifiers signed up. We’ll provide you with five minutes, please contain yourself to five. At four minutes we will provide you with a wrap-up warning. Okay? And then, again, you know, to keep this orderly, please, let’s not be overly repetitive. And so with that, if we can agree on that, let me call up Bill Walter, Rob Tucker, Paul Campbell, Pamela Sullivan, and Jeffrey Mermel. So we have five, okay, all five of you. Okay, before I swear you in, again, let me repeat what I mentioned to Mr. Fukumoto, okay? If you’ve already provided written testimony please don’t read the whole thing to us, okay? Please. Would you all raise your right hand please so I can swear you in. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth now before the planning Commission? TESTIFIERS: I do. WATANABE: Okay. And shall we start with you, sir, I need your name and address; and then you may begin your testimony, and like I said contain it to five. WALTER: I’m Bill Walter. Hello? I’m Bill Walter I live in Keaau. I’m president of W.H. Shipman Limited. I’d like to start by just clarifying something. In 2006 I had two conversations. One was in the summer, and I had talked to this gentleman, someone who reports to the Mayor, and we had talked about the CDP; and that was fine. And when I talked to him again on Friday, or on Monday, he said to me, “Bill, I felt guilty all weekend, I should have told you this then but I’ll tell you this now. 24 We held a meeting to discuss specifically whether Shipman should be allowed on the Steering Committee or not. I voted against.” About two months later I was in Mr. Yuen’s office and there was then a vacancy on the Steering Committee; and I said, “Chris, you know, I think it would help if Shipman were on the Steering Committee, I think we have something to add.” Chris looked me in the eye and said, “Bill, we talked about that, we decided it would be a conflict of interest, we’re not going to add you to the Steering Committee.” So when the question comes up on how the Steering Committee was selected and whether or not Shipman should be on it and how that all happened, I think it’s important that you realize that good, bad and different, that’s why we say we were specifically voted off of it or the vote was taken not to put us on it. It’s not heresay, it’s based on two gentlemen who were intimately involved in that situation. Now I’d like to start, you all have my written testimony. I’m not going to go over it. I just want to summarize something. When this CDP started I think those of us who live in Puna were excited about it, including us. We thought this was great. Let’s get the community together, this place is exploding, it’s growing like crazy. We need to make sure that as a group we sit down together and talk about what Puna should be and what Puna needs. And, you know, I liken it to the eight blind men whose job it is to describe an elephant and each one of them is touching a different part of the elephant. The guy touching the trunk describes it in one way, the one at the tail another way, he notes a little smell, I might add, there are the legs and so on. Individually these guys can’t describe an elephant worth anything. Three of them together, four of them together can’t really describe an elephant. If you put all eight together you’ve got a description of an elephant, same is true of communities. If we all get together we can share our perspectives; and it’s really about perspectives at the end of the day. We need to have those perspectives. I went through in my letter and looked at a number of groups who were not on the steering committee but were a vital part of Puna who have been for generations or have special information that we would all and should all take into account when something like this is put together. We need to respect each other; and that’s what I remembered most about growing up here on this island in East Hawaii. I remember how we respected each other regardless of race, regardless of economic situation, regardless of any number of beliefs; but we respected each other. We were taught that. And yet when this process started we were disappointed to see that rather than including people saying who do we need and making sure they were included, it started off by excluding people who shouldn’t be there. And I think that’s a real disappointment; and I think it’s a real problem for this plan because those viewpoints and those perspectives just could not be shared. I gave you a long list of different sorts of groups who weren’t there. The other thing that happened to me, let’s say you want to build a house, you call an architect and say, hey, I want to build a house. What’s that, what’s that? WATANABE: That was your four minutes. I’m sorry, four minutes, you’ve got a minute to wrap up. WALTER: Suffice it to say that he couldn’t build you a good house if he didn’t know how many people you had, how many male and females, what your interests 25 were and so on. Neither can you build a good community plan, especially in a community that is growing this rapidly if you don’t know how many people there are going to be. How much shopping do they need? No one wants to build more. We want to be darn careful about where it is and what it looks like. But if you don’t even know how much you need how are you going to build a good plan? How many jobs do you need? The crying shame in Puna identified by the participants at the beginning was we need a stable job base. It doesn’t exist in Puna. How many jobs do we need to create for Puna? That wasn’t addressed, it wasn’t given to the Steering Committee to address. They couldn’t know that. So how can they create a plan and make sure that people can have jobs? That was the greatest concern of our citizens group at Shipman; and that is, hey, my children couldn’t move back, my grandchildren couldn’t move back, my friends couldn’t move back, there are no jobs. They couldn’t do that without that information. Can I have another minute? WATANABE: Final comments? WALTER: Yeah, final comments, the problem with agriculture here, and I guess I’ll skip over those, it’s all in my letter. But I hear people and I heard Chris tonight, maybe heard him wrong, but I hear people who are on the Steering Committee being advised don’t worry about the plan, there has got to be errors, but we’ll correct them through the implementation committee of whatever. The plan is to make this ordinance, to make it law. It has the force of law when it’s put in place. I don’t take that lightly. I take that seriously. We all need to take it seriously. The people who will be hurt by this are not people like me. We can take this, we’ll be just fine. But there are all these families at the lower end of the economic scale who are not going to have jobs. Someone who has to wait 10 or 15 years who just graduated from high school, their life is greatly destroyed by the fact that they couldn’t work near home, they couldn’t shop near home. These are the people who are hurt. It’s not people like us. WATANABE: Thank you. Thank you for confining yourself, too. Yes, Mr. Woodward. WOODWARD: Let me just ask, do you have specific recommendations how this Community Development plan -? I saw your document that you presented to us and it just says reject it, essentially. Do you have specific recommendations how it should be changed? WALTER: I do. And if you’ll look in here there are some tables and some maps that I think need to be deleted. But I have to tell you my bigger concern, Mr. Woodward, is that when I give you changes like that, those are from my perspective. What about the perspective of the families down in Opihikao who have lived here forever or the people who grew up in the plantation camps? My problem with giving a lot of recommendations is we never heard from them, they’re not reflected. I can tell you what you need to do to fix it for me, and I think will make it much better. But I don’t know what makes it better for them. 26 WOODWARD: Well, that’s really what we’re here for, is to get public testimony. And as a member of the public and representing the significant business concern, I think it would be helpful if you would submit in writing, cause we’re not going to vote on this tonight. This is not going to come up to a vote until next month. But if you come up with specific recommendations, not just vote it down, then we’ll certainly consider that. WALTER: I’ll be happy to do that. Let me point out that in my third bullet point I note a couple of items that really need to be taken out, and I do so at my fourth also. And I think taking those things out will be very helpful, and I do in my fifth. The first two as I say when I’m talking about lack of involvement then it’s hard for me to say, huh, but it’s okay if you do this for me. If you want more I’ll be happy to -. WOODWARD: Well, we do appreciate your testimony. And like I say I think what would be most helpful to us would just be a brief statement of what changes you’d like to see. WALTER: Yes, sir. I’ll be happy to do that. WOODWARD: Because that we can consider and we will certainly look at it. WATER: Thank you. I will do that. WATANABE: Do we have any further questions? Thank you. You may be seated. I’m not familiar with your name. TUCKER: My name is Rob -. WATANABE: Tucker? TUCKER: Tucker. WATANABE: Yes. Would you state your name and address, please, and -. TUCKER: Rob Tucker, Pahoa Village. I have submitted, I’m president of Friends of Puna’s Future, a nonprofit advocacy group here in the Puna district. I had submitted a page and a half of testimony in writing last week, which you should have had the opportunity for. I’m not going to read it again on the stand. I was also the coordinator for the land use working group on the CDP and was involved in most of the gross management, and village center, and biosphere areas of the reports. We are here to testify in general support of the CDP plan. We realize that there will always be misgivings about points here and points there. But we do make two recommendations for improvements, one of which concerns the implementation or the opportunity for implementation of the Grading Ordinances as they could be redesigned; and that there is a call within the CDP for the creation of a role of County ecologist and there’s talk rather vaguely about mapping the forest. And so we’re 27 making a specific recommendation that we would like to see in the implementation table a schedule for launching/mapping the forest lands, if they apply, and not have that become a vague nonstarted, noncompleted, you know, wishy washy reason for the grubbing issues to not be addressed for two, or three, or four, or five years, which could happen very easily. So we recommend that there be implementation, and the implementation table addresses that. Secondly, and most importantly perhaps in a lot of ways is we’re very appreciative of the village center concept of design which came out of one of our working groups as an alternative to sprawl, as an alternative to Honolulu-type development or Maui, and to keep Puna a rural development or rural agricultural district. Our village centers are key to handle our growth in an intelligent manner. And working on the village center working group, we knew that there were limitations of what we could achieve as we identified the areas around the district that could be benefited by village centers. But we also knew that being broadly gathered residents of the full district that further work was going to be needed. We think that the CDP should include a program of going out to each identified village center and getting that local input on a local basis in Opihikao, getting that local input in Keaau and keeping somebody like me who would be happy to talk about Pahoa Village. But I shouldn’t be involved in Volcano Village, I shouldn’t be involved in Paradise Park. We need to get more community input and we need to have these village centers fleshed out. Now one of the biggest problems we faced for a number of years here in the Puna district is our citizens have been starved for zoning. We have an average of 2.87 acres of commercial zoning for every thousand people where there is 10.11 or 10.87 acres in the district island wide. We are starved for zoning. So people have to get creative in what agricultural means. And in doing so the County has been encouraging them to break the law, and they have been forced to do that to survive. Now within this often referenced map of 5-1 in the CDP which was prepared by PlanPacific, these maps were not prepared by the community. And if you look at them and if the Council were to look at them and tried to accept them as something as a community input, that’s not what that map represents, those maps and charts represent. I have a working group report here for village centers, and when it comes to, well, Shipman in Keaau for example, it’s not limited to 30 acres. We say greater than 30 acres. So there’s outside input coming in to put a tone to the village center design concepts that weren’t intended by the working group. Now within the village of Pahoa Village which I will prepare to use as an example cause I live there, we would like to see opportunities for business parks out there, we would like to see a commercial zone where if we have investors wanting to come into our town and build affordable housing or apartments, that they know where they can go and they don’t have to search for it. I have no understanding or concept of this floating zone talk. It’s not a word that ever occurred in our working groups. It has appeared in this final draft about floating zones. Maybe somebody could explain it to me to where I would be perfectly thrilled and happy about it. But at two years into the process and I don’t know what it is. And I’ll conclude there. WATANABE: Thank you. Yes, Ms. Siracusa. 28 SIRACUSA: We have had over the last several years quite a few applications for special permits from people who wanted light industrial types of uses; and they have been given special permits with a limited life, usually five years. They back up to Highway rd 130 but they access from, I guess it’s 33 in Paradise Park. And when you drive along Highway 130 you see all these big, you know, steel buildings but they don’t, you know, debouch onto the highway. Some of them now are starting to come up for their, asking for renewals, extensions, and they’re claiming that the reason they want to continue there is because there is no available light industrial zoning within a reasonable radius from their present location. As you know we have seen, you know, applications for self- storage units on Highway 130 and that sort of thing. I had been hoping all along during this process that the Land Use Committee which you chaired would be suggesting some areas where light industrial zoning would be available in the Pahoa area. My personal thought was that a likely location would be somewhere around the water pumping station and the transfer station, away from houses basically and land that’s, no native forests, you know, like alien invasive species on it, so no great loss, but yet close enough to Pahoa. And yet when I look at the map for Pahoa Regional Town Center on Page 5-9 and I look at the color coding, purple would be industrial zone but there’s no purple on the map. And could you explain to me how come we, and I know you recognized that we needed some light industrial zoning. Could you explain to me how come none got onto the map here. TUCKER: That map is not a product of the Puna Community Development Plan, except by way of PlanPacific. It, basically, by my examination represents Pahoa Village as it exists today without any thought to how it might exist some day in the future. And that’s one of the reasons I think that with the date specific the Planning Department, which I really appreciate the Planning Department’s work in this process over the couple of years -. And we know it’s not perfect, but we feel that strongly that we have another year’s worth of work to do in this district, specifically on the Village Center areas and that that work should specifically be focused not district wide but on each locality. WATANABE: Okay, I got it. TUCKER: If I made that point, you got it. WATANABE: Right. TUCKER: Okay. WATANABE: Okay. Okay, do we have any further, yes, Mr. Yuen. YUEN: I’m not trying to delay things but there is a point that has been said a couple of times that I don’t think is correct in terms of what the plan calls for. The plan identifies both Keaau and Pahoa as regional centers rather than village centers and does 29 not have an acreage limit on the commercial areas for either Keaau or Pahoa. The 10- to 30-acre limit is for a village center, not a regional center. TUCKER: Would you like me to comment to that or is that a statement? YUEN: That’s a statement. TUCKER: Okay. If I could comment – the limitation is - . WATANABE: I’m sorry. With the rules that we run with, you know, we don’t backtrack. And, again, this is a draft and we did ask from you some input so I think you had an opportunity there. Mr. Iwashita? IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Tucker, my interest is in your last statement about needing more time to flesh out the commercial areas in the individual areas, Volcano, Keaau, Pahoa, Paradise Park, so forth. And, you know, I guess my sense is that, but I’m concerned about the process. I’m inclined to, you know, say okay, sounds like a good idea to me. But how do you envision this happening with, just continuing with the present Steering Committee and have like subcommittees that work in each area? Is that -? TUCKER: Well, if I was to envision it, I would suggest that the Council could consider a CDP that would include a mandate to the Planning Department with a budget to proceed with a series of steering committees, smaller steering committees, new steering committees focused within each district as has been mentioned by others earlier. IWASHITA: Can I, Mr. Chair, with your indulgence? WATANABE: Yes. IWASHITA: Can I, I would like to ask the first testifier what your thoughts are on just that point. WATANABE: Okay, pertaining to that. WALTER: I think that would be wise. Each village has its own personality and needs and I think that would be useful. IWASHITA: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. Do we have any further questions for Mr. Tucker? No. Okay, thank you. Jeff -. CAMPBELL: Paul Campbell. WATANABE: Paul Campbell, I’m sorry. 30 CAMPBELL: Paul Campbell representing Sierra Club Moku Loa Group. I live in Leilani Estates. And I’d like to start by thanking all of those who served on the working groups and the Steering Committee for all this hard work. It is truly a ground-up approach which the Sierra Club appreciates. I’d like to address a couple things about the plan. We, too, support it in general. It does have some flaws and it needs to be fleshed out here and there, but it’s a good blueprint. I’d like to address the forest preservation issue first, having to do with also grubbing and grading. First I want to say that the PCDP as you see it now does not include the native forest protection ordinance that the working group originally proposed which had incentives and penalties and process by which illegal grading and grubbing could be stopped. We would like to see, this is about protection of the endangered species. It’s also about sense of place. We hear about property rights to develop. What about the property rights to sustain the forest for the endangered species? We’re the endangered species capital of the world here and they need continuity of forests. Sustainability also has to do with that, our watersheds and just the general cohesiveness of the forest. First we need mapping. Now the devil is in the details and the details are in the implementation on this one. It was left very vague and it’s not focused enough. We would like to see the swift appointment of the ecologist by the County, prioritization of the mapping by creating an accelerated timeline for the mapping to be completed and concluded. As for the Village Center process, I agree with Mr. Tucker. He has done some good thinking on this. Devil is still in the details. Fleshing out the village centers for each place, that’s an excellent area. That will take time. So we also would support the implementation of language that extends this process for another year to allow the formation of these groups to take up the task of deciding what they want their community to look like in 2050. This was done by the residents of each village center and not outside consultants, of course. We agree that they’re necessarily vague in many places but this plan is a good working plan; and we need to have detailed implementation in these two areas as well as timelines, firm timelines. And, in closing, I would like to say that I understand that the Planning Commission is our last opportunity to revise this plan before it goes to Council.We’re asking you to implement these two suggestions that Mr. Tucker has suggested and we support that. And thank you for being here tonight. Mahalo. WATANABE: Thank you. Mr. Woodward? WOODWARD: Actually this is not your last opportunity, we make a recommendation to the Council and they can amend our recommendation. So this hearing, we will vote on a version of the CDP next month; and we could choose to approve it, reject it, amend it, send it with an amended recommendation. The Council still has the opportunity at any time to amend it. CAMPBELL: Okay. 31 WOODWARD: So this is not the last hearing, just for your information. CAMPBELL: Thank you for that. WATANABE: Do we have any further questions? Okay, thank you. IWASHITA: Mr. Chair? WATANABE: Yes, yes. Mr. Campbell, Mr. Campbell? Mr. Campbell, I believe Mr. Iwashita has a question for you. So -. IWASHITA: The concerns that you raised about implementing those areas of the plan that you just addressed, do you think that those could be part of the continuing committees that, or steering committee that Mr. Tucker spoke about? CAMPBELL: I think so. What would be good is to get some fresh blood in there. These people have worked hard, and I think they would like a break. IWASHITA: Yeah, certainly. Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Okay, Pamela Sullivan, state your name and address, please. SULLIVAN: Pamela Sullivan, Hawaiian Shores, Pahoa. WATANABE: You may begin. SULLIVAN: I represent Foster Kern who is developing a 28-acre commercial development in Keaau on Highway 130 at the corner of Milo Street. You already have my submitted written testimony so I won’t read through this letter. There was also an attachment to that in which we noted here specific parts of the plan that we feel Ulupono Center fits in nicely with. What we are a little bit confused about is why our commercial development had not been included on the map here for a village center in Keaau. The first phase of the plan, of the actual development, is 12 acres, sorry, I think that’s 11 acres, 12 lots; and that’s already zoned as MCX. The remaining 17 acres, the second phase of the plan, has not started development yet; and that is still in the zoning of Ag-3. But if you look on the map that was submitted for the Keaau Regional Town Center, our property actually falls just makai of Highway 130 which is excluded from that. So, again, I guess I probably should have talked to Rob Tucker on this and his working group. It appears that they weren’t even responsible for that either. So I guess I would ask PlanPacific why we weren’t included in there. And we respectfully request that the Planning Commission recommend to the County Council that they amend the current plan to include the 28 acres of the Ulupono Center in the Keaau Town Center boundaries. And you could, like I say I’m not going to go through and read that whole letter. But the services that will get 32 going into there, and we just got, I’m waiting actually, I heard by email from the County that, at least the Engineering Division, that our construction has been approved. So we’re moving forward with that. There is already a CU Hawaii there on the corner and a large major retailer has just bought the adjacent two largest lots in the development. So we are set to, you know, I mean, we’re already going to be a commercial center there. I think it would be prudent to include us as within these boundaries that are being set up in the plan. Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Do we have any questions for Ms. Sullivan? Thank you. You may be seated. And we have Jeffrey Mermel. Did I pronounce that correctly? MERMEL: Yes, thank you. WATANABE: Okay. State your name and address and you may begin your testimony. MERMEL: My name is Jeffrey Mermel and I’m president of the Volcano Community Association. I’ve lived in Volcano since 1976 and happily married with two children now, born in Hilo and raised in Volcano. I speak tonight on behalf of the Board of Directors of the Volcano Community Association. And this testimony actually comes from the community that so cares about planning its future that we actually formed a long-range planning committee back in 1985. We proceeded to create a Volcano long- range plan. This is it here. Many of the people behind me were actively part of that plan. They’re not newcomers. They’ve lived here 30, 40, 50 years to create this plan for Volcano. And we feel the Puna CDP is in line with our vision for the greater Volcano Community. Therefore, we are testifying in favor of the plan of the community long- range plan and the community development plan. Many of our 350 plus members have been deeply involved in the planning process of this CDP, from the small group meetings to the working group meetings and on upward. We held a Volcano Community meeting as recently as Tuesday of this week and we recommitted ourselves to work with the County towards both the adoption and the implementation of this important CDP. While there are many important issues effectively addressed in the plan, there are three areas of particular importance to the greater Volcano community: 1)Excessive clearing of forest canopy caused by a high number of lots being developed. We support those measures that downzone certain sections of Puna to stabilize the number of lots in Puna and thus reduce density. 2)We support the creation of a Biosphere Reserve Buffer Zone for the greater Volcano area, as outlined in the Implementation Section of this Plan. You know, if it can happen in 529 areas in 105 countries around the planet, it can happen here. 3)We support the creation of Village/Town Centers, in particular the Volcano Community Village Center in two locations, one of course in the historic core of Volcano and the other center between Royal Hawaiian Estates and Ohia Estates. 33 We are pleased that the plan mentions Volcano Village as a strong candidate for a possible Special Design District. This plan is good for all of Puna, Upper and Lower. And we wish to partner with government and any other entities to make this plan a reality. We respectfully hope this Planning Commission sends a favorable recommendation to the County Council for adoption by ordinance of this plan. And we thank you for your kind attention. And I’m saying this on behalf of the Board Members Mililani Hughes, Dan Taylor, Pat Halpern, Ter De Puy, Bob Belcher, Hank Banquer, Erin Gallagher and Nona Wilson. Mahalo. WATANABE: Thank you. Do we have any questions? Ms. Bowman. BOWMAN: I just have a quick question, and I have to admit I haven’t read the Volcano 2020 Plan. I assume your Volcano Long Range Plan is different than the Volcano 2020? MERMEL: It s one and the same thing. BOWMAN: It is, okay, it is the same plan. Okay, thank you. MERMEL: You’re welcome. Thank you. And it has been updated. We look at it as a living document and every year when we have a community association -. Let me back up. The Volcano Community Association is not a road association. It’s volunteers who choose to join for over 30 years; and many of the current board of directors are long-time residents, some of them are malahini but, you know, that’s what reflects a changing community. So our own plan has been changed, updated. Many of the things have already been implemented. We think the Puna CDP is perfectly in line with our plan. We can live with it. Thank you very much. WATANABE: Any follow-up? BOWMAN: Just a quick comment. I have seen your community at work in your Mongolian dinners and you seem to be very involved, so thank you. MERMEL: Mahalo. WATANABE: Mr. Iwashita? IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To continue on my theme with everybody, would your association support the continued committee work that Mr. Tucker suggested so your community would be directly involved in the specific implementation of the village concept and so forth? MERMEL: Naturally we would like to be involved in the implementation of our particular village center. I don’t believe this plan should be delayed waiting for more of those stuff that should be as implementation. We support the concepts. We believe 34 that the details of those plans should be worked out at the village level after the plan is adopted by ordinance. IWASHITA: So you would not oppose having an amendment to the CDP that includes the, specifying that those committees be set up? MERMEL: Speaking personally in trying to envision what the Board would say, probably not. We would like to see the wording but -. IWASHITA: And then as an aside I’m a train enthusiast and I had a conversation a couple of years ago with the head ranger of the national park who informed me at that time that they’re not going to make another parking stall in the national park, okay, and that his vision of the future of the park at that time was basically, you know, obviously a physical limitation of vehicular access so they would have mini- buses and so forth running around taking people around. Has your community considered having a train station stop so that these buses could pick up tourists and take them into the park? MERMEL: That discussion has not happened yet but I do know personally that the current superintendent of the park is quite concerned about the impact of vehicles within the park. How it’s solved, we hope to be part of that process. IWASHITA: I think that might impact your village. MERMEL: It would impact our village. We are always in communication with the National Park. WATANABE: Let’s -. IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank. WATANABE: Okay. As a reminder, let’s not try to resolve every issue tonight. Okay. IWASHITA: Okay, I said it was an aside. WATANABE: Okay. I’d like to thank those five testifiers for cooperating with us. We do have a number of others who would like to testify. So let me call up Andrea Rosanoff. PUBLIC: She’s gone home. WATANABE: She has gone home? Did I hear right? PUBLIC: Yes. 35 WATANABE: Okay. Is Mary Hyslop, is Mary here? HYSLOP: Yes. WATANABE: Yes, would you come up, please. David Goodman, John Luchau, Diane, I’m not sure if this is Wave or Ware, I’m not sure if it’s an “r” or a “v”, and Jeff Melrose. Did I call too many? No, I believe that’s right. That would round it out to five, yeah. Okay, maybe you all can move down one so you each have a microphone. RANNE: My name was not called but can we go together and share our time, 2 1/2 minutes each? WATANABE: Well, I guess, yeah, okay. Okay, fine. Shall I begin with you. WOODWARD: You’ve got to swear them in first. WATANABE: Oh, I didn’t swear anyone in. Would you all raise your right hand, please. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth now before the Planning Commission? TESTIFIERS: I do. WATANABE: Thank you. And I guess I’ll, you want to start? State your name and address, please. HYSLOP: Aloha, I’m Mary Hyslop. I live in Hawaiian Paradise Park and I work in Pahoa. We submitted testimony. Nadia and I are here from the social services working group. We’re one of the smaller groups. At one of the large meetings when people broke up into different groups, I was the only one that went into the social services part of it. And so to recruit help I went to the Puna Roundtable and asked different social service providers to help me with the social service part cause more people were interested in roads, or sustainability, or jobs, than they were in social services. So together our committee was Vicki Linter, myself, Ke‘ala Lee Loy, Elizabeth Salfen, Lucille Chung and Nadia. We went through the 3,000 remarks that had been submitted by the small groups, batched them into themes and sorted out the four major themes; and then from there we went to the social service providers in East Hawaii. We sent them all surveys asking them what they saw as needs in the community, what kinds of services that they provided in Puna, what kind of services that they thought they could provide in Puna if they did not already.We’re very happy with the way the plan is written. Most of everything that came out of that committee wound up in the plan. The one thing that we did submit testimony about was the fire station. We would like to see the fire station in Pahoa not necessarily be used for a senior activity building but to be used for one-stop shop that could be open many more hours providing many more services to many more people. And I’m going to turn that over to Nadia now. WATANABE: Okay, would you state your name and address. 36 RANNE: Nadia Ranne, Leilani Estates. And, again, just wanting to clarify what we submitted with the working group for social services, making sure that what, the intent is to have that fire station that will soon be vacated serve the best purpose and respond to the needs of the community. And so the larger group that we spoke to representing the community would like to create a one-stop center very similar to what is in Hilo already, the Big Island Workplace Connection, where a lot of the social service entities are represented in one place and our population can go to the one place and get the linkages and the referrals and the services that they need. When we very quickly thought up of this concept, we did a quick poll and already we have 14 people at the table in its infancy saying that they’re ready, willing and able to represent their agencies there and support our community. So we feel confident that if we’re able to make this a reality we will be able to get even more involvement. And the difference is the one in Hilo folks are mandated to participate, and this is all agencies voluntarily coming to the table saying we want to help the Pahoa and Puna communities and we will be there if we can make this happen. We wanted to point out that in our initial report we had used an example of the Pahoa Fire Station as the senior center, that was based on one person’s comment that attended one meeting. But using it as the one-stop center really represents the large group of people that were involved in this process. So we kind of misrepresented our intent by what we submitted on the report; and we’re here to clarify that and make sure that folks understand that the true intent is a one-step center. WATANABE: Thank you. Yes, Ms. Siracusa. SIRACUSA: Okay. I just want to make it sort of clear to the other Commissioners that the Pahoa fire station that’s there right now soon will be moving into its new location. That was one of the -. WATANABE: Right. We approved that. SIRACUSA: Yes, we approved that. And so then the question became well what happens with the old one. And so as you see from the Neighborhood Place of Puna’s testimony they’re suggesting a one-stop center. We also have, however, two letters from Pat Engelhard, the Director of Parks and Recreation, and she does not like that idea, shall I say. And have you had a chance to see her letter? HYSLOP: No. SIRACUSA: Well, basically she’s saying that there is already a senior center at the community center, and with the certified kitchen they do the nutrition program there, and she doesn’t feel that there is a need to have those kinds of services where the fire station is now. I wish you had seen this, it really had it. Maybe you could come out the next time we come this side again. But I was wondering if you would care to respond to the points that Ms. Englehard made about that, that the fire station would not be appropriate? 37 HYSLOP: Well, it would be a duplication of services if the kitchen already exists and a space for activities already exists. And while I think we’re all too small, why we have round table and stuff is to avoid duplication of services. That’s just too much money, and we can’t afford that kind of thing. RANNE: So we agree. HYSLOP: Yep. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. Ms. Bowman. BOWMAN: I just have a quick comment. I want to commend you on your work, because, you know, if you look at the growth of your area and where people have to work -. I live in Kohala and we have a lot of latch-key kids. And I think, you know, in your plan -- and forgive me I’m not familiar with your areas -- if you can maybe have a lot of after school programs. I think the social service aspect I know you’ve gotten some negative publicity. I’m also a foster parent so I commend you. And I think this is a very important part of your plan not to be overlooked, maybe areas of these new commercial areas where children can have somewhere to go to. So thank you. HYSLOP: Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Seeing there are no other questions, you may be seated. Thank you. I believe this is David Goodman. GOODMAN: Yes. My name is David Goodman, I’m from Ohia Estates. And I am associated with the Volcano Health Cooperative; and we’re a group trying to get better access to health services in the Volcano area. And as such we are going, we had really short notice of this meeting so there will be more formal testimonies submitted before the other meetings. But it was felt one of us should come here and make you aware of our concern that there is not really addressed in the plan the need for local primary health care in Puna. The only item in here is the development of a full-scale 24- hour medical facility, just basically a full service hospital and nothing for just, at best it would be a service hospital. But what is not there on the more local level, at the village center level, basically a clinic type where you could go for basic checkups, flu shots, things of that nature. I know we feel that an item like that should be added to the plans saying that multiple clinic level facilities offering these services should be located at various spots in the Puna area, in addition to the centrally-located facility giving more specific advance services. WATANABE: And do I understand you properly that you plan to submit that in writing. GOODMAN: There would be a more formal one, yes. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. Do we have, yes, Ms. Siracusa. 38 SIRACUSA: Yeah, I’m having a little trouble hearing because of the echo in here. Could you say clearly what community you’re thinking of or coming from? GOODMAN: I’m coming from Volcano. SIRACUSA: Volcano, okay, all right. Thank you. WATANABE: Is that it? SIRACUSA: Yes. WATANABE: Thank you, Mr. Goodman. John Luchau. LUCHAU: Luchau, L-u-c-h-a-u. I’m John Luchau, I live in Hawaiian th Paradise Park at 15-1845 26 Avenue and I’ve been there about 17 years now. We started, and I’m talking about, I’m speaking as an individual. But as a group back in ’93 we started the Hawaiian Paradise Park Community Master Plan. That was quite a long time ago. So when people say things like rushing it through, that’s 15 years for us. I don’t think that’s a rush. So, anyway, I read through word by word the CDP. It’s absolutely consistent with the vision that we had back in ’93 for Hawaiian Paradise Park. It mentions in the current CDP transfer of development rights. And I understand that when we submitted that idea to the Planning Commission long ago that our resolution would not be effective because of transfer of development rights; and I don’t know what the current Planning Board is considering now. So that’s one inconsistency, but the rest of it is 100 percent. We had a revision to the 1997 Plan in 2006 and it was consistent with the 1997 Plan; and it has basically remained the same since that time. The Plan that we implemented was adopted by resolution; and it was adopted by resolution instead of law because that was what we were advised to do in order to get it effected. We spent four years on it. We did 16 presentations on it throughout the community, to the Planning Commission, to the Council; and I did 13 of those. The other few were done by more previous members of the board. The village centers that we outlined in ’93 were consistent with the properties owned by the Watamull Corporation and the community in itself, and are limited to 40 acres. We would love to have larger ones but at this time that would mean acquiring personal properties which we don’t really want to do. So I think it’s really great. I was a participant of the Parks and Recs of this current CDP and I really appreciate all the work that the Steering Committee went through. I think they did a wonderful job. I love the way it’s worded. I don’t agree with some of the points that former speakers were negative of the plan because I think there are a lot of the things that are in the plan that they didn’t see and maybe they were thinking differently from what was said. So, at any rate, I would like to see it adopted. I would like to see it adopted as quickly as possible. I don’t think it’s a rush to have 15 years in the wait. So please do that. 39 WATANABE: Thank you. We have any -? Yes, Mr. Iwashita. IWASHITA: Thank you for testifying. Does your plan have a provision for school or schools in Paradise Park when it’s fully developed? LUCHAU: Yes, yes. Our original plan had it and now there is for the CDP as well. There is already one charter school in Paradise Park and we -. IWASHITA: You have a public, other regular -? LUCHAU: Right, we offered to give the State DOE 40 acres up on 26th Avenue originally but they opted to go with the Shipman property at the Keaau th Elementary School. And we also had set aside on 5 Avenue, there are two side by side 20-acre properties that the community had offered to the State DOE. And in the Puna Community Development Plan I believe there are couple also identified but -. IWASHITA: Potential school sites? LUCHAU: Yes. IWASHITA: Okay, I’ll look for that. LUCHAU: Okay. IWASHITA: Thanks. WATANABE: Looks like there are no other questions. Thank you for your testimony. And, please, name -. WARE: It’s Diane Ware. And I’ve lived in greater Volcano for the past 18 years. I was a participant on the Natural Resource Working Group and I’m also a Sierra Club Member and very grateful for the opportunity given to citizens to participate in this process. And I appreciate all the work and dedication that has gone into it in giving value to the citizen’s desire here in Puna to ensure a sustainable future and to preserve our quality of life. And some of the points I wanted to make have already been covered by Jeffrey Mermel and Paul Campbell, Rob Tucker. So I would like to focus on the formulation of the Malama I Ka ‘Aina forest protection section which I do support the plan in general and that section in its goals, objections and actions. And when we worked on this section we tried to stay true to the General Plan’s section on natural resources which No. 1, one goal, was protecting and conserving natural resources from undue exploitation, encroachment and damage. And the other thing we tried to focus on was the citizen’s input in the small working groups; and then it came down from Steering Committee and the consultant that the No. 1 theme and goal for, out of those groups was to produce a strategy to minimize clear cutting on lots and to address grading and grubbing. And this was not an easy thing for us to do. And we knew there would be 40 resistance but our goals, objectives and actions pretty much came out in the plan. I have concerns and am anxious about whether the implementation section, 5.2.1 as it is now, will accomplish the goals, objectives and actions outlined in the plan under Malama I Ka ‘Aina. And one of the concerns is regarding this vague area of mapping the forest which we did want to have done. But I’d like you to consider what the consultant had in his working paper which said, “In order to protect resources before they are lost it is often necessary to act on incomplete data.” And without a timeline here if you think about 10 years down the line how much forest will we have left, what will be the sense of place for Puna which now is very much so its natural resources including the forest? And I think a lot of us moved there because of that, and it is important to our future sustainability and a link to the past cultural heritage. So I’d like to recommend that you look at that implementation section and make it more clearer, and to honor the plan as it is regarding downzoning. Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Do we have any questions? It does not seem like it. Thank you for your testimony. You may be seated. Mr. Melrose. MELROSE: Thank you. My name is Jeff Melrose. I live in Hilo. I’m a land use planning consultant. I’m here on my own behalf today. For the last couple of, since the planning process began, the community planning process began, I tried to keep my hand on and watched the evolution of the plans in all four communities that they’re operating in. And I want to spend my little bit of minute here focusing on the broader question of community planning and where we’re headed with this process. Having been to different steering committees for all four and read portions of all four of those plans today, it’s a daunting challenge to try and figure out where do you set the bar, where do you set the bar on documents that are supposed to for the next ten years not only reflect the ones of community but become implementable, usable, practical documents. Long after we finish our much, you know, much worthy appreciation for the work that the community put into this process we will in fact have a document on the table; and that document on the table will be the tool that the next Planning Director picks up and has to make sense of, the next planning staff person who shows up in the office and has to read it, understand and advise community at the desk, the next Commissioners, and the next Council people. So how do, how do you set that bar? And I don’t have the answer to that but I have a couple of thoughts. One is that the plan really needs to be clear about what is an ordinance and what is a great idea; and they’re different. Because there are pieces of this plan that really should become part of law and the other needs to be a reflection of an on- going wish and want that people needs to keep working at. But it’s not a law and it shouldn’t tie us in that way. So I think the Council particularly is going to see that issue, what are they really passing here because in each of the plans there are a 90 to 100 great suggestions and you can’t do them all. Two, is it clear enough, and when you read it do you understand it enough to be able to explain it to somebody else? Cause if you don’t, nobody else will. So the next set of it, if it’s not at that level I just encourage you to step back a minute and ask for it to be that way. I have no specific pieces of the Puna Plan, that’s not what I’m aiming at. I’m aiming at if it doesn’t make use sense to you, it won’t 41 make sense to the people who fill your shoes the next time. It also has to help the County set priorities. If they’re not providing you the priorities so they’re clear, they’re specific, that you can say this is first and this is second, then maybe we ought to work harder at the process to make sure they can. Because that’s what the plans are supposed to do and that’s why we spent three hundred or more thousand dollars on each of these communities to get that kind of answer. So each one of these plans will come at this a little bit different. And I want to make one just suggestion to you and, that is I know you have a timeframe that has been set and handed to you for each of these plans. If you take them linearly, if you take them one at a time, all you will know is as you pass the first one what the first one has to offer. And if you wait and watch a couple of them in the sense of learning a little bit about how they are different, you’ll actually establish and be much clearer about where the bar can be for community planning. And I think specifically you’ll see as you look at the Kona plan that’s next on your agenda a substantially deeper and clearer document than what you have in the Puna Plan, and that may be for a variety of reasons. But I encourage you to look at it and to listen and get familiar with it, and use that as another mirror in your own determination of the other different plans that are going to come to you. So if you just do it linearly you will just assume one set of knowledge and accept it. I encourage you to set the bar and to set it high. As a practitioner I’m going to be sitting here for the next 10 or 15 years of my professional life working off of these documents, hoping that they’re clear and we can work in a clear setting. So, please, if you don’t get them right, work on them till you do. Thanks. WATANABE: Thank you. Do we have any further questions? Mr. Iwashita? Mr. Iwashita? IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Now my impression is that your final suggestion to me is that we should, well, you know, it’s taking that you said the Kona one in your opinion is deeper or sets a higher bar, to use your words, that perhaps we should look at that and then not really take action on this one so that the people in Puna can look at that example and say, well, maybe we should go to that level. MELROSE: Well, I think what I’m saying is that if you get to the Kona one and you look through it you’ll look back at the Puna one and say, sheesh, I wished we’d done this here. IWASHITA: Sorry? MELROSE: I wished we’d structure the recommendation this way or that the way -. I think there are pieces of that plan that gets down deep enough that you will look back at it and then say, gosh, we could have done this here, too. And that’s, and I would like you to consider looking a little deeper at those things. You may decide that this is just fine the way it is. But I think it is an on-coming opportunity for you and if you take them linearly that’s all you’ll have to work with each time. So -. 42 IWASHITA: So if you want to comment, that’s fine. But my impression of what you’re saying is that, it has always been my perspective that the plans should be done simultaneously and that, you know -. Cause if we do it sequentially there’s no way to avoid different standards, and so that is my personal view. And then I thank you for your professional input on that. Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Ms. Bowman, did you have any questions? BOWMAN: No. WATANABE: No. Okay, thank you, Mr. Melrose. Okay, we’re heading down the home stretch. Let’s see, Kim Tavares, Jillian Maro -. MAROHNIC: Marohnic. WATANABE: I don’t want to do any further injustice, Patrick Conant, Stephanie Bath. Stephanie, is Stephanie here? BATH: Yes. WATANABE: And Robert Williams. Okay, very good. Would you all raise your right hand, please, so I can swear you in. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth now before the Planning Commission? TESTIFIERS: I do. WATANABE: Thank you. Shall we start at that end and work our way down. Please, name and address before your testimony. TAVARES: My name is Kim Tavares, PO Box 33, Volcano. I want to start off by saying thank you all for being here tonight to listen to all our testimony, to thank the whole Planning Department and everybody who was involved in this plan. I was a member, I am a member of this Puna Steering Committee. I worked with the natural resources working group, the culture and history resources working group, and the land use working group and also agriculture. Those are the important things to me that I think, you know, I needed to put my time into. So my testimony tonight is in favor of the plan. Obviously I voted for it at the Steering Committee meeting and I feel, you know, a great attachment to many of the things in here. So my testimony tonight is going to address the issues that Chris brought up and his comments related to the plan and our goals for those things. So No. 1, the Planning Director’s argument that it is okay to approve subdivisions and more cesspools around Maku’u based on, I said obsolete in my testimony, State Department of Health regulations, doesn’t adequately justify the risk of contaminating a fresh water source that we don’t know a whole lot about right now, especially if we’re 43 going to be needing more water in the future; and I believe that we need more water now. So I think the big thing there is to do more research. In fact, overall I think with most of this plan, as it was pointed out, it doesn’t have a whole lot of detail in it, a lot of the details are in the working group reports and a lot of the details still need to be fleshed out. And so that’s what I believe. You know, this is a living document. It’s going to evolve, it’s going to mature as we continue to move forward and carry out the implementation. So one of the big things is that we do need to conduct more research, environmental assessments and what not in a lot of different areas. The second issue the Planning Director brought up was with relation to grubbing and grading. A lot of people brought that up, and it is a scary issue for a lot of people. You know people really, really feel that we have -. You know, I don’t know if it’s a God- given right to destroy the land and the natural resources that we depend on, but in fact the law lets us do that. Maybe the plan isn’t in compliance with a lot of the General Plan, we weren’t trying to be in compliance with the General Plan. We were trying to fix the General Plan through the Puna CDP, which is not the right avenue. But it was our only option to let the County know immediately what needed to happen, what was happening right now, and how we think it could get fixed. So grubbing and grading is an issue that needs to be looked at some more. We need to find a way to make everybody happy. We can’t destroy the forest for the various bulleted reasons I put on my paper. The third issue was about downzoning; and that one again is another touchy subject for a lot of people. Because that means that, you know, my plan to subdivide and sell out, you know, portions and live on a little corner of it in the future is not going to work because I’m not going to be able to subdivide, or even if I wanted to, you know, subdivide and give it away to the children and what not. It’s really unfortunate. That is kind of a tough one to go through. But we’re on a small island, we don’t have a whole lot of space. This picture here shows you a portion of Puna that has the lava flow. The lava flows, you know, the recent lava flow is covering a lot of our land. It’s taking over a lot of the forest native bird habitat, and the subdivisions cover most of the rest. The big hole in the middle, Puna forest, is going to stay Puna forest, hopefully, with everybody involved; but that’s not enough to sustain everything that we need, to hold our water, to, you know, to prevent storm water runoff and all of those things. So downzoning needs to happen so that we don’t have higher density. I mean the people, we can’t encourage more people and more people and more people to come here. It’s not hard to get people to come to this island. We don’t have to try to do that. They’re going to come anyway. We’ve got parcels, we’ve got probably 80 percent of the parcels in Puna that aren’t occupied yet. We don’t need more subdivisions. And the final one is just a correction. So unless you have any questions, that’s pretty much my point tonight. WATANABE: Do I hear any questions? No. Well, thank you for your testimony. If you’ll be reseated. TAVARES: Thank you. WATANABE: Jillian? 44 MAROHNIC: My name is Jillian Marohnic and I live in Volcano Village. I was a participant in the natural resource working part of the plan. And I want to talk about the grading and grubbing recommendations of the plan and how these changed between th the final release and the previous draft that was on the 28 of February. So currently as you know there’s no protection for native forest within the grading and grubbing ordinance. And what we were trying to do in the natural resources working group is to prevent the pin-to-pin clearing, which the original recommendations were. That’s for lots on two acres or less in size. We would just preserve that little perimeter buffer. And then for lots larger than two acres we would require a site plan that would have that perimeter buffer but also stands of major trees. So when Chris Yuen read this th proposal in the 28 of February meeting he commented that as written those recommendations would multiply the number of grading and grubbing permits ten fold, create an enormous administrative enforcement problem and drive people to act illegally. But my question to you is if people acted illegally after we implemented those recommendations, what would we lose? Because the worst that we could expect is what we already have. So, on the other hand if they abided by those recommendations we would stand to gain a lot, we would preserve a lot more forest. So on Chris Yuen’s objections, our recommendations were modified so that they now read when reliable mapping is available we will establish the protected areas. So when we, when reliable mapping is available calls to mind the song “Sonny’s been waiting….” So we could lose a lot of forest during that wait. So my recommendation is implement the original recommendations that we said for the grading and grubbing and then when the mapping comes through then you can implement it as Chris Yuen recommended, but you don’t make us wait and lose the forest in the meantime. WATANABE: Thank you. Do we have any questions? Yes, Ms. Siracusa. SIRACUSA: In your written testimony right at the very bottom is a little parenthetical phrase in green and I don’t understand it at all. It says “Sonny’s been waiting….” Could you explain what you’re talking about? MAROHNIC: Well, that was just, you know the song “Sonny’s been waiting?” SIRACUSA: No, I don’t know the song. Is that why I didn’t understand? I guess that’s why I didn’t understand the statement. MAROHNIC: Oh, I guess go. Well, it was the promise of giving land to the Hawaiians and they get on the list and Sonny, this is making me cry, he dies. He dies while he’s on the list. So the thing is you wait for a promise that might never come. So we don’t want to wait for the mapping. WATANABE: Okay. It doesn’t look like we have any further questions. Thank you. You may be seated. Patrick, right? 45 CONANT: Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank you for this opportunity to let the public speak. I realize you don’t want us to read it but at least my, and you have it in front of you, I’m pretty sure, at least I’d like to read my third paragraph of my last, just to make a point. I grew up in Honolulu. I didn’t just see the 1950s on public TV. I was actually there. I remember Henry Kaiser and his pink bulldozers at Hawaii Kai, the whole nine yards. So I can relate to what Commissioner Iwashita has said this evening. I’ve seen that whole process happen and I don’t really want to see it happen here. I’ve owned the lot in Volcano since 1975. I took all the money that I inherited from my parents when they died bought that lot, that was my dream. I moved over here ten years ago and built a house and am really happy here. I like the way this place is and I’d like to try to keep it the way it is. So let me make a couple of points here. I was involved in the PCDP process and since I’ve now been sworn in I need to make a correction here. I’ve been involved since 2005, not just 2006. I was at the original meeting and I did attend the land use working group meetings as well as the natural resources working group meetings. So let me launch into this here to make a point. “I believe that the Plan represents the ideas of those people in Puna that understand how democracy works, i.e. if you don’t get involved in the decision making process, decisions get made for you. I would have to ask of those who do not support the Plan, how many of the 130 meetings did you attend and make input at, or how many comments did you send in by email? I find it hard to believe that people ‘are too busy” to spend at least a few hours over 2 years to make their concerns known as the Plan was being written. The County provided a good forum for residents of Puna and enough time to come up with a Plan. Anyone that opposes the Plan had plenty of time to make their concerns known to the Steering Committee and lobby for those concerns to be part of the Plan. Now is not the time to complain to the County of Hawaii that you oppose the Plan. ‘If you snooze you lose’. “In closing, I would like to especially thank Larry Brown and John Whalen for their patience, help and dedication in the preparation of the Plan. Everyone that has made input to the PCDP realizes it is not a perfect plan and none of us agree with every single thing in it. But that is how democracy works. The Plan represents a large cross section of ideas of Puna residents provided via the County’s PCDP Plan process and it should be accepted by the Planning Commission as the guiding plan for our district.” One other omission here I just noticed, the second to the last paragraph, my reference to st December 31, that should be December 31, 2007. I guess that’s it. Thank you. WATANABE: Mr. Iwashita? IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Would you support Mr. Tucker’s testimony about having committees be established in the Plan so it becomes law as far as implementing? 46 CONANT: Assuming that things actually get implemented. I don’t want the planning process to drag on indefinitely. I think we’ve got a good document here that should be codified and then take it to the next step. And if for the way to do that is via implementation committee, then so be it. IWASHITA: So my impression of what you said is you would agree -. Mr. Tucker suggested there be in the law added to this plan the requirement for these committees to follow up and make sure that things got done. CONANT: Yeah, with a timeline so it just doesn’t go on indefinitely. IWASHITA: For those committees to actually start working? CONANT: Yeah, and finish. IWASHITA: Well, okay. Would you agree with the comment that this document is intended to be a “living document?” CONANT: Yes. IWASHITA: Okay. So I would suggest to you and I’d like your comment that in order for it to continue to live that money needs to be blood –. Money is going to be the blood that makes the thing work, if this document is starved of money in the budgetary process and these committees aren’t funded, right? CONANT: I admit that would be a bad thing, yes. IWASHITA: So you would support basically funding the committees to get this done? CONANT: I would. IWASHITA: Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Stephanie. BATH: Thanks everybody for being -. WATANABE: Mike please, and name and address. BATH: Thank you for being here. It’s past my bedtime and I really don’t function well when I’m tired, so -. I’m Stephanie Bath and I served on the Puna Community Development Plan Steering Committee. I was also the liaison for the transportation working group. I live in an old growth kipuka in Hawaiian Acres about 8 miles as the crow flies, we don’t have crows, as the Io flies. And we watched Puu O vent form. I remember when Safeway was where the County Council now meets and 47 Sears was in the old shopping center. There was only one light that was between Hilo and Puna. Things are changing. We need to have a plan. During the Puna Community Development Plan process it has been said that we were paddling together in the same canoe. It was more than clear to many that the canoe was launched before it was seaworthy. At times there was a whole lot more bailing than paddling. We were given few supplies for our journey. Together our community pooled together what resources we had to plot our course. As we continued our journey it seemed that there was a disconnect at times between the people of Puna and various County departments. Not everybody was on the same page, but we all endured. On a personal note I want to say that this time around the Puna Community Development Plan is a whole lot better than it was in the old days; and anybody that went through this process last time I think can attest to that. Rather than focus on the many flaws of the process at this time, let’s focus on what was created. What was the outcome? It lies before us in the Puna Community Development Plan draft. I just want to summarize here. People spoke about natural, cultural and historical resources being preserved. We heard people talk about more efficient roads, mass transit, the need for police, fire, emergency response teams. A big issue was the option of having redundancy in roadways just in case Highway 11 or Highway 130 was closed. They wanted protection against speculators that just buy lands only for profit and don’t give anything back. Farmers wanted to be able to farm without raising taxes. It’s in here. I think that people of Puna had an opportunity to be heard. I liked Bill Walters’ analogy of the process being sort of like an elephant where there were nine (sic) men feeling different parts of it. The thing about Puna is that there was another man that was involved and he was also blind but he didn’t have hands, and so he didn’t have the tools that the others did to take part in that process; and that’s part of Puna and that’s just the way it is. I think that what came out of the plan generally speaking does reflect what the people want for Puna. I think that includes malihinis and people that have been here a while. I was a little sorry to hear some people testify earlier that they weren’t heard. Some people disengaged in the process and that was their choice to disengage. Perhaps it was because their personal perspective wasn’t being reflected in the majority. So I just wanted to give you that input; and that’s it. WATANABE: Thank you. It doesn’t seem like we have any questions. BATH: Okay. WATANABE: Robert Williams? WILLIAMS: Good evening, Chairman and Commissioners. My name is Robert Williams and I’m president of the Hawaii Island Chamber of Commerce. Our organization represents over 300 businesses and over 700 members. The Hawaii Island 48 Chamber of Commerce believes strongly in good planning We commend the creators of the Puna Development Plan for pioneering this, the first completed Hawaii Community Plan. Unfortunately much of this plan is dependent upon changes to State and County laws and the creation of new government agencies and commissions. These changes will not affect just the Puna district but the entire State and County. We believe that the proposed plan goes far beyond the scope of a community development plan. This plan if enacted as an ordinance would require extensive changes to the State Land Use Law, the County permitting process, the zoning and subdivision codes, the Department of Health rules and regulations, and the County General Plan, just to name a few. We do believe there are many good ideas and concepts in the plan. But it is overreaching for a community development plan to rely on or expect the State Legislature, the Governor, the County Council and the Mayor to pass enabling legislation, change rules, and create the government bodies that this plan requires. We must ask the Planning Commission to recommend the community development plan committee revise the scope in reach of their plan. Thank you. WATANABE: Thank you. Do we have any questions, comments, no? Thank you all. By the way, Mr. Williams, did you submit what you wrote? You haven’t submitted that? WILLIAMS: No. WATANABE: Oh, okay. Well, you can submit it at your leisure some other time, if you care to. Thank you. We have two more testifiers that have signed up, Emily Naeole and Alex Frost. So I know Emily is here. We have an Alex Frost here? FROST: Yes. WATANABE: Okay, would you raise your right hand, please. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth now before the Planning Commission? TESTIFIERS: I do. WATANABE: Thank you. I guess we can begin with you, Ms. Naeole. NAEOLE: My name is Emily Naeole. I live on Makuu Hawaiian Homestead. I just wanted to start by saying thank you to the Steering Committee for all the hard work they did. My first point is many people came to me after, you know, when the process was going and after Mr. Whalen was on board and said that the small groups, you know, the manao that they gave on the small groups was actually scrapped; and that’s what some of the people came to tell me. 49 Number two, Bill Walters, Shipman landowner. I brought this up to Chris Yuen at one of our Council’s meeting, couple of our Council meetings. And, you know, the thing was, my manao was somebody from the Parker Ranch was on the CDP Committee from the Kohala district, and on the other side of the island. So that was my mano. I say how come one can and the other no can. So, you know, just that point I’m trying to throw out. Number 3, you know, the farm lands, about the County acquiring farm lands and leasing them out to the people, I don’t think that’s proper. And this is only my opinion, yeah. So it’s all good. And then I wanted to put out about the Hawaiian Homestead. And this was about, you know, about the water table and all of that. To me, you know, Paradise has all been built, everybody else, Ainaloa, the whole Puna, my side District 5. And I neva see no blockage but now I feel like my home my Hawaiian people that have the Homestead, I feel like there’s a blockage coming to my people. And I’m offended. I live there in the Makuu Hawaiian Homes. I was at one of the meeting one night, at the Steering Committee meeting, and I heard them talking about my homestead. I said, excuse me, are you talking about my backyard? They were. And so that’s another concern I have. And then, next I just wanted to say that one day in my Council meeting I seen the Kohala Steering Committee came forth and I was so impressed. The reason why I was impressed, I seen a blend of people. I seen some Filipinos, some Japanese, some Hawaiians, some Caucasians, some Portuguese people, a blend of people. And so then when I seen my group from the Puna area, I thought it wasn’t balanced. So I need to share the manao. And then number six, I just wanted to say I want to create more jobs within District 5 for my people. I drive to Hilo five days a week going to work; therefore, I see the traffic every morning and every afternoon. I sit in it, I feel the pain for my people. My people going out of the district to work and, you know, Puna, Hilo, Keaau, wherever else they’re going, but everybody shooting out. So that’s another manao I needed to share. And number seven, local people they are not vocal people. I’m very unusual, yeah, because I’m loud, yeah. I’m very aggressive and I’ve learned it from my haole friends, I have to say that. I have a lot of haole friends in my District 5 and Rene’ is one of them. And so this is something I’ve learned, it’s not part of my culture, yes. Thank you. And then I just wanted to say when people come from away sometimes they have different kinds of manao. And then, you know, some of my local people, our people are moving away. I mean many of them are just moving away, no more jobs and, you know, they going to the mainland, Las Vegas and wherever they’re going. And then a lot of people from the mainland is coming to visit us, cheap lands so they heading Puna right now. And I just wanted to say, you know, being that I’m the Chairman of the Human Services Committee of the County of Hawaii, you know, we gave away $1,600,000 last year, and I’m the Chairman. This year we’re giving away $1,500,000. And I know that there’s a lot of people suffering, no more jobs. So that’s why to me I feel like creating jobs in my 50 District is very important, yeah. And I know what’s poverty, I know what is being poor, been there, done that. And number eight, you know, I’ve been communicating with Department of Hawaiian Home. They have 100 acres right in the back of the fire station, our new fire station. I said I want to do an industrial park so my people don’t have to run out, they can work at home. That’s just the manao for me to put out. And I heard Mr. Tucker say we’re starving for zoning in my district. You know, and Rene’ says people have been coming in for special permits. And this is what I’ve been saying in my Council meetings as the District 5 Council lady, I feel my district has been shortchanged; and I say it over and over again. You know, I heard somebody talking about, what you call, you know, medical. Right now Makuu Hawaiian Homes have gone to Waianae, to check out the Waianae Comprehensive Center. We feel like we need to bring something like that to our district because we’re growing so fast we don’t have enough facilities to help our people. And then last of all, I just wanted to say I asked Pete yesterday why your district had two steering committees and mine had only one. You know, the thing is me I’m makaala, I’m looking, always looking around this whole island and seeing what’s going on. And so why my question I asked him yesterday. He said because Waikoloa is so different than Kohala. I said, you know what, not fair, you always get two and mine only get one. And so, you know, my district is, I mean, until Bob all the way to Kau and to what, to Ocean View. So we have a big district in this Puna area. So I said how come one can, the other one no can? That’s why I need to put this manao out, because I’m a very truthful lady and when I know one manao I going share. Thank you. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. NAEOLE: Anybody get one question? WATANABE: Mr. Iwashita? IWASHITA: Thank you for your manao. Since you’re on the Council I just, maybe this is a comment. I wrote down challenged but I don’t know if that’s the right word, that might be the right, probably not good manao. But to me the implementation, everything you said, I really want to reiterate, you know, this is just the half step, this is the beginning. It took two years but it’s half a step. The challenge for the Council when you address this plan is, to me, finding the kala for staff to support the community committees that Mr. Tucker talked about that’s going to be responsible for implementing the village town center, help get those things running. Right? Because I think Mr. Yuen will admit that he no mo guys for do that. Right, no mo? And if you just pass the plan, you know, they no more extra people for do ‘em. Yeah, so that’s my manao. NAEOLE: So I just wanted to say so you’re trying to influence me to find some kala? 51 IWASHITA: No, I telling you. NAEOLE: Oh, you’re telling me, okay. I heard you. WATANABE: Thank you. Ms. Bowman. BOWMAN: Just a quick mahalo for your manao. And, you know, from Kohala, I do, I feel like, you know, we’re the kids who got more allowance than the other kids. But I just want to comment that and I think the reason why the makeup, if you remember that -. I believe all the Steering Committee Members live within 10 miles of each other of the meetings and, you know, we live at the end of the road so there’s nothing else to do. No, that’s not true. But, and I really hear you and I appreciate your manao on your vast area. But I think that’s one reason that we have the makeup of the committee, because the people are in such an isolated smaller, much smaller area than Puna. So thank you. NAEOLE: I just wanted to say that, you know, I heard somebody talking earlier about, you know, certain areas little bit different than certain areas. You know, and I see Volcano as being a little bit different than our side. You know, you guys have mass amount of forest. So, you know, I think if we were to break it down a little bit half then we have, this way would have been little bit better off. That’s my manao. BOWMAN: Thank you for your manao. WATANABE: Thank you. Mr. Frost? FROST: Hello? Alex Frost, Hawaii County Resource Center, Department of Research and Development. I’d like to just reemphasize couple of things. I was involved in the Puna Community Development Planning process at the initial community outreach and engagement phase; and my handout here that was passed out we actually tracked the amount of community volunteer hours. The amount of time that has been invested by the community members, the residents of Puna from all different areas, subareas of Puna has been tremendous, 130 small group meetings with broad representations. We have 330 native Hawaiians, we had Japanese farmers, Filipino farmers, at the initial phase, to make sure we would get the manao of those people that wouldn’t come to events like this. In 92 meetings by the working group they spent over 1053 hours. And, finally, Steering Committee meetings they met 29 times in the last 18 months spending 1362 hours. Overall the residents spent 5655 hours investing their time to make Puna the best it can be. And this is just a conservative estimate. This is, probably the amount of time that went into this process is double, which is almost a year of public commitment at democracy. It was messy, it was difficult, we were understaffed at times, it was challenging but everyone really pulled through.And I’m just really, really happy of the final document. 52 I just want to add the planned concept, some of the concepts in this plan is grounded in sound best planning practices. It calls for smart rural growth, transit oriented development, walkable communities to reduce reliance on fossil fuel and automobile, and create safe appropriate scaled communities for an 8-year old to ride their bike and not be afraid of being run over by a car. And it’s only a conceptual phase because this is a regional plan. A lot of the comments that have come about on the Keaau Regional Center or Pahoa Regional Center, these are all subarea plans that needs follow-through action; and it needs to incorporate a lot of the design elements which probably will require further community effort. Implementation, there’s a bill in the County Council to create an action, implementation action committee for all CDPs. So just to answer your question, Mr. Iwashita, about follow-through the bill is in Council and they’re reading it right now. Kona CDP, North and South Kohala CDPs, these plans will be coming ahead. And each of the plan represents a unique kind of sense of place of each of the districts. They’re structured differently, some of the priorities are different. But really the core of what the residents are saying is similar. So I just want to thank everyone that was involved in this process and for the Planning Commission to host the special event to hear everyone speak. Thank you. WOODWARD: Mr. Chairman? IWASHITA: Mr. Chair? WATANABE: Yes, Mr. Woodward. WOODWARD: Well, first I want to preface my remark and question with the fact that democracy is not a perfect process. And, unfortunately, and I’ve done some research on participation in the community development plans that have been done in Kohala and Kona and Puna, and you get a bunch of activists, and hopefully you’ll have a broad section of the population. But looking at your numbers, if you add up all the numbers, and assuming these are all different people at these meetings, I come up with about 3100 participants out of a population of 40,000. That’s 7 percent. They run between 5 and, at most between 5 and 10 percent. So it is an imperfect process. And the reason I bring that up is we’re getting ready to start the same process in Kau. And I don’t know that we’re going to do any better because, again, democracy is not a perfect process, you can’t force people to participate. But, you know, I think that’s one of the things we’re going to be looking at in Kau, is outreach. You know, as I say I think you’ve done as well as anybody else but still it’s a small percentage of the population that is actually participating in this process, and by my calculation about 7 percent. FROST: Mr. Woodward, the Kona process is about 3 percent population participate in a small group. For the initial small group meeting which I was coordinating with the help of community liaisons we did a gap analysis to track which community members were represented, at least at the initial phase, so we didn’t leave anybody out. And that was the best we could do at that time. And just to mention Kohala, the Kohala 53 process is 12 percent of the total population participated. This is a community of 6000 people participated in the initial small group process. WOODWARD: Yeah, it’s really not a question of exclusion because nobody is excluded, and we do the best we can to get everybody in. But, you know, you just can’t, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. You just can’t get people to participate if they’re not, they don’t feel motivated. And, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. We just hope that what we get out of this process is a reasonable cross-section of the community so that we have a representative section. That’s the best that you can do, that’s all you can do. WATANABE: Okay, Mr. Iwashita. IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’ll give you my email address. Can you send me the bill number for the implementation bill, office@hilolawcenter.com? FROST: Office@hilolawcenter? IWASHITA: Yes, .com. Thank you. I have another manao to share. Can you before our next, if it’s possible before our next consideration of this Puna Community Development Plan provide an estimate of times/dollars whatever that you in your opinion would be needed to effectively or actually implementing, you know, be needed to implement the Puna Community Development Plan over the next ten years? FROST: I would have to ask the Director of Research and Development, Jane Testa, first to be able to say I can attend and share in the process. I’ve actually been involved in Hilo, Envision Downtown Hilo Implementation Process. They actually created a community plan that they have been implementing for two years, and they have come out with an implementation guide to share their experience in the struggles and challenges and successes in trying to implement their plan within the Downtown Hilo area. And that plan is available, so that might be an interesting document to review. But I’ll talk with Larry and -. IWASHITA: I will address an email to your director. FROST: Okay, thank you. WATANABE: Yes, Ms. Siracusa. SIRACUSA: I just want to address some of the statements that Commissioner Woodward was making a few minutes ago. And when we have elections we say, you know, such a percentage of the eligible voters are registered. There are a lot of people who never even bothered to register. And then of the ones who were registered only a small percentage actually show up at the polls or send in their absentee ballots. And so when we look at who gets elected it’s really a very small percentage of the general population that’s electing them; and yet we don’t say, oh, we can’t inaugurate you, you 54 know, and let you take office because there was such a small percentage of the potential amount of voters. So in a lot of ways this is very similar. And I certainly wouldn’t like, even though we would love to see, you know, 80 percent or more people turning out for this sort of thing, we can’t expect it; and we don’t throw out the baby with the bath water just because of that. IWASHITA: Mr. Chair, one final comment please. WATANABE: Okay. IWASHITA: Thank you. Along the same lines, you know, I really want to thank all of you and even those who left already who came out to do this. Because, you know, all these numbers we talked about, well, the bottom line to me is that you all have taken on that responsibility and you, I think whether you know it or not, represent those who cannot be here, especially the children cause I noticed tonight no more the keiki tonight. All right, but we’re doing this, or I am and I would hope you’re all doing this, with the mind that this is for, you know, me, my son, hopefully grandchildren, great grandchildren; and that is, a posterity is what we’re really looking at doing this for. Because if not for you it wouldn’t be done and the future would not be as bright. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. WATANABE: Mr. Woodward. WOODWARD: One final, final comment; and I’ll be very brief. I agree completely with what Commissioner Siracusa said. It’s not a perfect process, we can’t get everybody to participate. And the people that are active in their community are the ones that shape policy. They’re the ones that elect people. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You know, I think we need to do what we can to include everybody but, again, if they don’t want to participate you can’t make them. And it’s not a perfect process but it’s the best we can do. And after Alan Salavea gave us a presentation about this Community Development Plan Process, this is one of the points we brought up. But there’s really no way to do it any better.You can only get the people that want to participate. And I think you’ve done very well compared to some of the other community development plans. You know, we keep working on how to improve it but there’s a saying that’s the best you can do – final, final comment. WATANABE: Thank you. OLSON: Mr. Chairman? WATANABE: Short comment? OLSON: I would, if you would bear with me for ten minutes so I could address some of the comments that were made? WATANABE: We would like to do that. Can we take five first? 55 OLSON: Sure. WATANABE: Yes, let’s take five and we’ll reconvene to address Mr. Olson. RECESSED The Chair called a short recess at 9:40 p.m. RECONVENED The meeting reconvened at 9:47 p.m. WATANABE: Okay, will the Planning Commission meeting please come back to order. We only do have a few minutes. OLSON: I’m going to go through this -. WATANABE: So we’ll recognize you, Mr. Olson. OLSON: Thank you. Listening to this, you know, I will tell you that our body is painfully aware of its deficiencies; and we went over it and over it and over it. Mr. Williams from the Chamber of Commerce talking about State law changes, he’s absolutely right. And the fact that this process is mandated by the State, the General Plans are mandated, but the State doesn’t have a place at the table. So when we talk about placement of schools, we talk about health facilities, a whole long list of things that the State regulates, and they’re not here, all we can do is say, Council, Mayor, put this on your wish list to our legislative representatives. That’s what we’ve done. We were supplied with a lot of data about our deficiencies. I mean, we fully know that at buildout there will, if there is not another lot subdivided in Puna, there will be 167,000 of us if the 55,987 lots, tmks, are built on. We know that. We know how much we are short industrial properties, we know how much we are short commercial properties. But the controlling issue is water. The town centers and the village centers will not happen without water. And I suggest you read the Water Department’s response to our plan. Somebody is going to have to come up with the money for the water. We would have been happy to designate more space. But there is not any water, there is no plan for water. So, I mean, the limitations, we took this, I believe, as far as -. We are so deficient in all of these areas. We are so behind the eighth ball on this.But you’ve got to start some place; and that’s what we did. And I believe that if you approve this the way it is you are, you would be stretching the County’s resources to near the breaking point. I will share with you that I was part of the last CDP process in ’95 and I saw a copy of a letter from the then Chair, Mr. Mizuno, Larry (sic) Mizuno, from the Planning Commission at the time all these lots were built. And he told the other Commissioners that if you approve these lots you will bankrupt the County of Hawaii, and that is also in Land and Power in Hawaii. So we know, I mean, and we’re struggling with it. And if you guys want to help us convince the County and convince the State that you either reduce the number of lots out here or you give us the resources -. You know, we 56 need fire, we need police, we need playgrounds, we need everything that a community needs. And every one of these people who pointed out those deficiencies are absolutely positively correct. Having said that, I don’t expect the Chamber of Commerce guy from Hilo to be too happy because we’re trying to move our business, Puna’s business, into Puna. So there’s nothing in it for him. But that aside -. We could go over it, and I’m sure we will more. But, I mean, those were the discussions that we spent the last year and a half going over, is where will we get the resources to make this happen. Highways, Highways is not at the table. They’re now starting a whole new process. And we’re going to do, the community is going to do this all over again for Highway 130, and then Highway 11. We’re going to spend two more years, EIS process, funding, you know; and it’s just, it’s endless. But there it is. So, I mean, I await your suggestions if you’ve got any. If you can come up with any better ideas than we have, hey, I’m not and I’ll, I can guarantee you that the 11 people that worked on this are not going to have anything bad to say about it. If you see something we missed, have a go at it, cause we’ll take help from anybody. Thank you. WOODWARD: Mr. Chair? WATANABE: Mr. Woodward. WOODWARD: First of all, I’d like to congratulate you on two things. One is your very hard work and your absolute frankness; and that is very important to us. And so, once again, congratulations. OLSON: Watch what you wish for. You know, people have been congratulating me, and I will tell you in my frankness there are a lot of people behind me who have made me look a lot smarter than I am, trust me on this. You know, this has worked out from the hard work of so many people in my community who brought their expertise to this process free of charge for no other reason than they live in Puna. And this is their home and it doesn’t matter whether they showed up a year ago or they’ve been here for 30 or 40 years or longer, they’ve lived their whole lives. It doesn’t matter. They did all of this work for nothing, I mean, they paid for the paper, they paid for the ink, they paid for the computers. I’m astounded. I mean, when I started this process I had no idea that we were going to get the kind of help that we got. I mean I, you go into these documents, you look at those working papers; and we had to go and sort through it and decide, I mean, some really bitter decisions about, you know, what to include, what can you really expect government to do. We’re so far behind it on every level. But help if you can. WATANABE: Thank you. Shelly -? IWASHITA: Mr. Chair? WATANABE: Ogata, Ms. Ogata. OGATA: I have a question. 57 OLSON: Yes, Ma’am. OGATA: Can you speak to the recommendations from the Planning Director on some of the amendments that are being proposed? OLSON: Well, I mean, obviously, we differed on some things. I suppose the thing that stands out most in my mind is the reduction of the number of potential lots. I mean there are still some maybe 20,000 one-acre lots that could be created from large lot subdivisions. And those are, he had a different formula than we ended up with. Be specific, pick something. I mean do you have anything in mind? OGATA: No, I just, well, I’m sorry. I think that there were three major sections that the Planning Director was asking for possible amendments on. The first one was about the sewage treatment plants and septic systems. I believe that’s within -. OLSON: Well, once again, I mean we can only, this is a request because we do not control the Department of Health. OGATA: Right. OLSON: And they will determine whether a property will get a sewer system, a septic system or a cesspool. That’s completely out of our hands. It’s a State issue. I think to address Emily’s issue, it was specific to the small lot subdivision that is proposed above Highway 130. And we as a committee looking at the water resource felt that and allowing septic systems would potentially be a problem for Keonepoko Nui wells one and two. And I know Emily, you know, she feels that that was impinging upon her kuleana; and, in fact, it’s her water because that well serves primarily Hawaiian Home lands. So if she doesn’t want it in there, hey, it’s her water, she has got to drink it. Anything else? WATANABE: Mr. Iwashita? IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. OLSON: Oh, I -. WATANABE: Sorry. OLSON: Go ahead. WATANABE: You had some follow-up? I’m sorry. OGATA: No, no. I’m fine. WATANABE: Okay. 58 IWASHITA: Thank you, Mr. Chair. What’s your thoughts about this, the implementation bill that’s being proposed and -? OLSON: Well, I think that’s a necessary part of this. I mean, again, we took two years on this process, right? Which means that if this is done every ten years we’re seven years away from the start-up of the next round. What can we ask, what are the reasonable things that we can expect the County, not the State, not the Feds, not anybody but us, this County to do for Puna, fund and build in the next seven years? That’s really all we’re working on here. I mean I’d love to build some document that will go out infinitum, but the reality is it’s, that’s what it is. That’s my view of it anyway. So we’re hoping for some connectivity, we’re hoping for some village and town centers to get services provided to people in the subdivision so they don’t have to get into the car and drive 20 miles for a quart of milk and a roll of toilet paper. And beyond that, man, it’s just all hope because so much of it is not in our control of this County. These are State issues of transportation, schools, placement, what they will approve in health care centers. They license these things. We can only ask and we’re asking. WATANABE: Is that it? OLSON: Yes. WATANABE: Okay, thank you. OLSON: Thank you. WATANABE: I believe our time has expired, so -. OLSON: We’ve already almost expired. WATANABE: We’ll adjourn this meeting. Thank you. The discussion ended at 9:59 p.m. Respectfully submitted, Sharon M. Nomura, Secretary 59