2008-06-20 TKONACDP - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

consideration of individual specifics when it comes up for application of this Plan. It could have been perfect in a perfect world; nothing is perfect. The bottom line is we have something that a lot of effort has gone into. And I was very personally moved and very happy to see the people that I saw at these meetings being sincerely concerned about the cultural concerns, especially those -, and I’m happy to see that that was picked up on by Commissioner Domingo because it was taken into consideration.And otherwise, I couldn’t have had anything to do with it. That being said, I’m in definitely in support of this. This is the place that we can start with. As time goes on, I’m sure other opportunities will come up for, you know, future plans and what have you; but we need to get something going now, so that we can change the course that has been taken in the past where things have been not as carefully planned out as this has been. And thank you all for your time and effort. RHO: Thank you. Questions from Commissioners? If not, we can move to Stephanie. NELSON-BROOKS: Good evening. I’m Stephanie Nelson-Brooks, and I’m at P. O. Box 308, Holualoa, 96725. I’m here this evening – and before I begin, I also would like to thank everybody who has participated and made this possible and brought this Plan to fruition – and I’m here as a person who actually worked on that Plan. I started out as a facilitator, and I was very privileged to lead many meetings of just small meetings, 13, 15 people max, and guided meditations about how do you envision Kona 20 years from now. And every single sentence anywhere that was uttered from anyone that attended that meeting was written down. And it was a colossal job to take – I think it was like over 8,000 statements – and make a plan from it; it was tremendous. And I want to thank everyone who did the meetings, participated in that, and also the people that we paid the $500,000 for getting this all together. I also worked in the mapping in the Work Groups with mapping, and that was a monumental task in getting people to sit down and take these maps and put on the maps physically the things that we envisioned happening here. And there were all kinds of committees to do that. And lastly I was part of the recreation committee, and Chrys Yamasaki devoted so much time to helping us work through this. And when we got back the Plan a couple of weeks ago, we actually saw it, I was thrilled to see that everything that we wanted was in there, the parks – even a pet park, a place where you can let your dogs run actually. And I don’t want to use up too much of the time, but I also have to say that I would have liked to see several other things in the Plan. And that doesn’t mean I don’t support the Plan; I fully do. But it’s like anything else in retrospect. I would have put more of my energy into somehow getting more local people involved. I did talk with people in Milolii, and they had a community meeting there. And I’d spoken with Wally Lau – I used to work with him at the Neighborhood Place. And it just kind of like fell through the cracks. Now that it’s done and finished, I do have, you know, regrets about not being more adamant about it. And the other thing is about long-term residential drug treatments here; I think that that is a necessary component to making this a successful community. Anybody who has a relative or a friend or a child, someone in their family, that they know it’s difficult to go and visit people who really are depending upon your support, if they are over on the other island, on Oahu. So that’s something that I didn’t see in the Plan. I didn’t even think about it that much, but in retrospect I would like to see that; if we could EXHIBIT B 25