2008-06-20 TKONACDP - Laserfiche WebLink

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sorted and categorized by topic; so we got the sense of what the priorities of the community were. And the point that I’ve made over and over, because it was so conspicuous, is how unified people seem to be, you know, with their priorities, depending on whatever the topic was – under traffic or transportation or land use or environmental resources or cultural resources. The priorities amongst the community were very, very similar, and it was empowering to move forward to try to do a plan when you can see there is so much unity in the community. And after that stage we invited people that had special interests and issues, if they had special interest in recreation or transportation, to form Working Groups and try to give their more specialized knowledge or interest on a particular topic.And those meetings went for a number of months and resulted in a proposed policies and actions from the Working Groups that they submitted as well. We also had a number of large charrettes; and the primary purpose of the charrettes was to invite large numbers of the public – I think we had a couple hundred of people or 300 people at one of the charrettes – to find out where people would prefer to see growth and where people would not prefer to see growth. And we had big mapping exercises like – you can maybe – these are some photographs from the mapping exercises where people were asked, you know, if you are looking at the whole Kona District and there is going to be growth, where would you rather see it; and so people were able to designate on the mapping exercises what would be preferable for areas of development and where they would prefer not to see it then. And again, that is quite unified in terms of the conclusions that groups came to over several meetings. There was also exercise in protected places – where are the areas of the Island that people felt need to be protected; and one of the charrettes, that was also an exercise where people were asked to give input. From there after all the information that we harvested from small group meetings, public input, Working Groups, large charrettes, the Steering Committee was established. And here you can see the members of the Steering Committee and also the staff and consultants that were primarily involved in working on the Plan and all the information that we harvested from the community: Wilson Okamoto – Earl Matsukawa and Tracy Fukuda who couldn’t be with us tonight; the Planning Department – I was the most active person representing the Planning Department; and also Roy Takemoto from the Mayor’s Office who is very essential part of helping to put this Plan together. And initially Research and Development was very active in facilitating the small group meetings; Research and Development under Jane Testa’s department has been really, really active in training people to facilitate to go out to a community and to run small group meetings, so that we can get public input in a positive fashion, and they need a lot of credit for providing that support, and training facilitators, asking people in a community, “Do you want to help facilitate meetings?” So they played a major role as well. This is the Vision that the Working Group developed, and the Steering Committee kind of finished, honing down into a few words to try to give a feeling of the input we were getting in a Vision statement, part coming up with the Vision statement, but that was the Vision statement that was arrived at with the Steering Committee to try to capture as much as possible the feeling of how we wanted to prioritize the Plan. And also we arrived at eight guiding principles that were intended to be the framework for all the policies and goals and objectives and actions that are contained in the Plan. If the EXHIBIT B 2