2010-07-23 TMEN - Laserfiche WebLink

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HOUSEL: Thank you. Do you have a comment you’d like to make at this time? FUKE: Sure. Yeah, we’ll be very brief this morning inasmuch as there are some public testimonies that we’d like an opportunity to respond to those testimonies at the end of the presentation. But very briefly, just to give you -. The staff’s report is very comprehensive in terms of the location, the size of the property, what the developer’s intensions are and so on and so forth. I just wanted to add several other items, which are covered in the submittal but was not necessarily expressed in today’s presentation. Just for the Commissioners’ and the public’s information, the access easement to the site was conveyed to the former owners of the property way back in 1977, and the purpose of this access easement was largely to facilitate the development of some medical related type of use. The County Council ironically was the body that had to approve a resolution, and subsequently, subsequent to the approval of the resolution, then the former owners paid the appropriate price and they got that easement. The former owners of the property at that time was a group called Kona Medical Associates, and they had the property ironically zoned Commercial Neighborhood, which is what the current applicant is proposing to have, back in 1977. And like all of the zone change conditions, you have time restrictions in terms of when you have to start, when you have to complete, so on and so forth. After a series of extensions, they just couldn’t do it in a timely fashion, and then they sold the property to the current applicant, which is MEN Real Estate Investment, and one of the partners is Dr. Sugai over here. And so when MEN Investment got the property, they realized they too couldn’t fulfill the time constraint. So they said, well, you know, we give up and we’ll have the property revert back to the Single-Family Residential zoning district. Then about a year and a half ago I was approached by Mr. Ghalamfarsa on behalf of the applicant to say they want to resurrect the project. And so rather than my explaining it, I think it’s best to have Dr. Sugai explain the reason why they are coming back to this Commission and ultimately to the County Council for this project. SUGAI: Thanks, everyone. My involvement with this project was more from the hospital and the doctor’s point of view. At this time we have a major shortage of physicians on the island and especially for hospital-based physicians here in Kona. I’m one of those hospital doctors and I know firsthand because right now I’m putting in probably about 80, 90 hours a week, on a short week. So we are looking at it from a physician’s point of view. Right now we have a difficult time attracting doctors. If we are able to attract a doctor, however, the next problem is how to retain that doctor here. At the present time we don’t have any office space that the hospital can point to. So, you know, the only thing we can do for a new applicant doctor is to give him cards of real estate agents to try and find him a doctor (sic) – that’s a very discouraging process. And then a lot of the applicants who apply for Kona Hospital say, “I give up. I don’t want this,” and they leave. So we lose a lot of prospective doctors because we have no place to put them. And with this project, it was my intention to hopefully have enough office space so the hospital administrative, when they attract a doctor, will be able to point across the road and say, “This is where you can put your office and you can start practicing.” The other important object was the location of this project. It was simply because a lot of doctors, like myself, when I get called for an emergency C-section and the baby is, you know, dying, I have to be up there as soon as possible and, you know, within three minutes, if I can’t 5 EXHIBIT A