2008-05-22 TPUNACDP - Laserfiche WebLink

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WATANABE: Ms. Stapleton. STAPLETON: Good afternoon, Members of the Commission and ladies and gentlemen of the public. My name is Frankie Stapleton. My address is 14-803 Crystal Circle in Nanawale Estates, Pahoa. I am speaking on behalf of myself; however, I am a volunteer with AARP, I’m a member of the Nanawale Community Association, the League of Women Voters, PATH and Friends of Puna’s Future. I am a published author. And I’m retired from 30 years as a journalist and a public school teacher on this island. And I only give you that background because I couldn’t believe my ears when I went to the first hearing and I was listening to the first four speakers who kept saying that they had not been invited to the CDP process, and that the Puna CDP does not reflect the needs and wishes of the people of Puna. I am here to absolutely refute that on record, sworn testimony. I felt so strongly about this that I’ve driven all the way from Puna today and sat here through all of this. I feel that the Puna CDP does reflect the needs and wishes of the Puna community, which is the fastest growing district in the State. Not only Puna district, which is already more than the size of the Island of Oahu, but it also has the least infrastructure of any area in the State. I joined the CDP process the same month I retired from the State DOE, August 2006, and I went to all of their meetings. I’m not on the Steering Committee. I didn’t expect to be on the Steering Committee. And I had to find out about the meetings just the way the rest of the public did, which was a website and public notices. People who expressed the idea that they should have had special invitations -, I’m sorry, but I never saw the lady from Foster Kern at any of our meetings. I did see Mr. Bill Walters at our meetings. I never saw Mr. Arakawa at our meetings. And Mr. Arakawa, I had to tell him, “When I first moved to Hawaii, I lived in Waipahu three years; you couldn’t get into or out of Arakawa Store or parking lot.” And Waipahu is an even bigger mess today. So what I’m trying to tell you about this process, I worked on the Transportation Working Group, we were -, the Working Group – back up a second. Since we are the first one to have come in with our completed Plan to you all, I wanted to explain a bit about the process we went through because I hear these misconceptions from you all. And I’ve heard misconceptions stated here. We had to first take into -, we were directed in all of our work by County employees. Now, Mr. Kim (sic) mentioned all these different documents – he showed the size of the Puna CDP, showed the size of the Kona one, Volume I, and he showed the Shipman regional plan; and ours was the smallest. We kept getting instructions that we needed to synthesize, synthesize, synthesize. We weren’t supposed to give specifics. You do need to realize that each one of these regional groups is getting a different directive from their County representatives who are telling them what to do. We had the ground shifting under us all the time. When I joined the -, there was a huge meeting in Pahoa, August 2006, and that was where a lot people jumped on the bandwagon. And I must say that over the years of covering public hearings here in Hawaii County, that I have been so pleasantly surprised by what came out of the Puna public this time around. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, we were a joke, you know; I mean, everybody had fun making fun of the speakers who would come out from Puna to testify in public hearings. Well, we aren’t going to win any fashion awards, and we aren’t status oriented with cars and all of that; and our status orientation is really going towards the sustainability thing. All of those big mega-mansions that are coming up along Keaau-Pahoa Road do not represent what most of Puna thinks like, okay? EXHIBIT C 18