2007-05-24 TWAIKOLOAMAUKA - Laserfiche WebLink

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GRAHAM: Any other questions from the Commissioners? I don’t have any record of public testimony on this, so if anybody in the public wants to testify, please go over to the front table there and sign up, if you would. Mr. Fuke? Excuse me. Jeff? DARROW: Sorry about that. If we get a chance, I’m not sure if the applicant’s going to address this, but we did have one minor request from the representative from the Department of Public Works to add in a little change. Maybe at some point in the hearing we can ask the representative from the Department of Public Works to come forward and present that change. GRAHAM: Okay. DARROW: Thank you. GRAHAM: Mr. Fuke, I believe I swore you in earlier, so you can go ahead and testify for us. And give your name and address again, please. FUKE: Sure, thank you very much. I swear and affirm on the truthfulness aspect. My name is Sidney Fuke. My business address is 100 Pauahi Street in Hilo, Hawaii. Just to give you some general background, and in partial response to Commissioner Siracusa’s question, my client who is Waikoloa Mauka, LLC purchased the property in – I think it was October – excuse me, August or September of 2005. I think some of the older Commissioners, maybe perhaps yourself and Commissioner Siracusa, may have remembered that there was this great debate between the former owner, which was Waikoloa Land, and the Planning Department in insistence on having -. When Waikoloa Land, the former owner, came in for their time extension request, the Planning Director had recommended and I think the Planning Commission also concurred with the Director’s recommendation, which required several things. One was that in light of this being a golf course with 1-acre lots in the State Land Use Agricultural District and in light of the recent Hokulia decision relative to the Judge Ibarra’s decision, The Planning Director had recommended that before final subdivision can be approved, the property must be reclassified into the State Land Use Urban or Rural District. The other two conditions which the Director recommended and the Commission agreed, and ultimately became the Council’s position too, was that there would also be an affordable housing requirement and there would also be a fair share impact fee requirement. All of those conditions were strenuously objected to by the former owner. But when Waikoloa Mauka acquired the property and then we had to kind of assume the responsibility of getting the time extension through the County Council, the decision was made by Waikoloa Mauka to agree to all of those changes. So specifically in relation to where the project is right now, we are still doing the subdivision, but we know that we cannot get final subdivision approval until such time that the lands are reclassified into the Rural District. That petition has already been filed with the Land Use Commission, and a draft Environmental Impact Statement was prepared. The Land Use Commission will be actually visiting the site next week Thursday, I think next week Thursday.If next week Thursday is June th 7, two Thursdays from now, I’m sorry. So hopefully, if everything goes according to plan, the idea was to have the Land Use Commission hopefully favorably act on it the latter part of this year or the first quarter of next year. As, subsequent to the Waikoloa Mauka’s purchasing the property, then they had to introduce themselves into the community, because they purchased not necessarily only this property but also a number of other properties; actually they purchased in excess of 13,000 acres of land, so EXHIBIT C 4