2008-01-03 THUALALAI - Laserfiche WebLink

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KUBOTA:Mr. Stirling, I hate to be categorized as an irresponsibl Commissioner. I grant you that the traffic problem that you mentioned on Palani, all the Commissioners here have been, as far as weÓve been sitting on the Commission, been aware of it. And we have consciously asked our departments to look into it and bring update to improvements, but heretofore nothing has come about. Now, I would like to have our Planning Director respond to Mr. StirlingÓs characterization of the planning as well as the CommissionersÓ responsibilities. Short of putting a moratorium on all further developments, I donÓt know how else we can do that; and I donÓt want it to be on my shoulders entirely. GALDONES:Mr. Yuen? YUEN:Sure. This is really an overall question on the island and not just in this particular location. My question is if you keep this area and they develop it at 3-acre lots, then what happens? If we want to look at the ultimate big picture, thereÓs no ultimate control on the number of people who moved to the island or the number of people who moved to Kona. Simply, there are still vacant properties for people to move to. And the question is where theyÓre going to move to. If you have an actual, if you actually have a moratorium on the creation of new building sites, the law of supply and demand means that the building sites that presently exist will be bid up in price. And what will then happen is that thereÓs a ripple effect and the people who donÓt have money have to move farther and farther away from the places that they work. For example, and, ultimately, the ultimate place for people to live becomes Ocean View and they drive maybe 40 miles to where they work instead of 10 miles to where t Now this proposed subdivision, I will not make any pretenses, is affordable housing subdivision. ItÓs, thereÓll be Level 1, three of the lots will be more expensive than the one-acre lots that they propose to make; but thereÓll still not be anything that people would consider affordable. But we really donÓt have, we donÓt have a situation or the luxury of saying that simply by not creating more building sites we have fewer people or we have less traffic. The control that we have in planning is primarily over where people go and not the ultimate level of development on this side of the island. Getting to the more specific issues, the only, I have a question how much a moratorium on rezoning in the Kalaoa area, the area along Mamalahoa above Palani, would change the traffic situation on Palani. There are a lot of people that use Palani and a lot of people, a lot of itÓs a cross-island traffic, a lot of its people coming, a lot of it is people using Palani as an artery, rather than just people coming into subdivisions on the road. Certainly, Palani needs improvement. I think we circulated to the Commission about a year-and-a-half ago a list of road projects in Kailua-Kona that included improvements to Palani. The major improvement, the actual, the biggest problem with Palani is it has got bad alignment. Ultimately, it has 13