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that open space is a valuable asset and that watershed protection is a high priority; and so this Plan recognizes that landowners who own lands with these resources are providing an ecological service to the community and that ought to be recognized in some way for incentives, participation in the watershed management and working to preserve our environment. I could go on and on. But in the land use element, the County Council made it very clear that its directives and objectives would be subject to existing zoning; and this Plan does that – it recognizes the rights of property owners and strikes a balance for integrating the community’s desires against the landowners’ rights. All in all when people look at the Plan, I think they can see a sense of excitement because this started in 2005, and even before that when the Council was wrestling with the 2005 General Plan ordinances, striking out some general goals and directions, asking the community for their participation. We are here tonight at the end of this long journey. So I urge you to favorably recommend this Plan. Thank you. RHO: Do we have questions? Commissioner Woodward. WOODWARD: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to congratulate you. It’s an excellent piece of work. But I have really three points, and two of them have to do with participation. Having looked through this voluminous document, I found that at your initial group of meetings, you had 800 people out of a population of 37,000 that attended those meetings; that’s 2.2 percent. The second round of meetings there were 350, which is less than 1 percent. So in the initial round you had 3 percent or less of the population actually participating in this process. My first question is what did you do beforehand to try to encourage participation in this process before it began. MELROSE: Before it began at the large group meeting basis -. First of all, those in relation to the total population look like small numbers, but in relation to the size of turnout at any public meeting that has ever occurred in a planning document in the County of Hawaii, it’s outstanding. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in a couple of General Plan update processes since I’ve lived on the Island; and the public participation in the early part of this Plan, I mean, scared me to death, quite honestly. But it was -, it is the underpinning here; actually, the cross- representation is really solid. What we did do during those large group meetings and during the small group meetings and the Working Group meetings, there was a constant benchmarking of those who participated against the demographics of the District; and whenever we found discrepancies or groups that were not represented, Nancy and the members of the facilitating crew out of the Research and Development Department actually went out to try to identify and get those – yes, youth are underrepresented in the discussion here. WOODWARD: Part of the reason I bring this up is I live in Kau and we are getting ready to do our Community Development Plan in the very near future, and I thought, 3 percent, well, we’ve got to be able to do better than that because I’m sure that you’re going to get retirees, you’re going to get the political activists, you’re going to get people with various interest groups to attend the meetings, you’re not going to get the mothers with little kids. And my thought was -, and I looked through Section 15.1 of the General Plan about sending out a questionnaire, and there is nothing that prohibits using that form of input in the Community Development Plan; so EXHIBIT B 9