2008-08-22 TSKCDP - Laserfiche WebLink

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BERGIN: My name is William Carthage Bergin, and I live at 66-1520 Puuhuluhulu Road in Kamuela, Hawaii, 96743. WATANABE: Thank you. You may begin. BERGIN: I would like to open with a little bit of appropriate statements of gratitude. I’m soon to be 68, and in that many years of my life I don’t recall our County government ever giving those of us in the field an opportunity to participate in planning this far ahead. And I think many, many, many of us have made that observation and sought the opportunity to be participatory in this opportunity, So that’s a general statement of gratitude to the Council, to the Mayor, to the Planning Department, to its Director, to Corp. Counsel that was available to us, maybe not as often as we like her to be but nevertheless was there, and through Allen Salavea who did, I think, a very remarkable job of coordinating everyone, and of course, to Giovanna who was really our moderator whose job was to herd cats – and I think that’s a very, very, very mild way to describe what her professional role is in keeping us together in going in the same direction. But now down to the business. If we were to be convened by appointment through our County government, we didn’t start from scratch. What had taken place in the 18 months leading up to our appointments was the outreach program that in the general community of South Kohala was conducted by Uvonne Sakamoto Lindsey. And she did what we thought was a very thorough job in getting out into the field, into the smaller aspects of our community, and feeling out those people that often by their nature would not really be coming to meetings but would have very rich contributions to make to the direction in which we were going. And I think from that you can really look at the four point direction, our vision, and that really reflected so much of the sympathies and sentiments of those people. Now, as the process we were on, we needed some reminders; none of us are professional planners, and we needed to have the resource of our Corp. Counsel to help guide us in the direction to be careful, to be respective of those rights of property owners relative to the direction in which we felt we would like to go. On the other hand, we also had many community leaders that stepped forth and really helped us understand that in probably more graphic terms. And I think we owe a debt of gratitude to people like Mike Luce, Greg Mooers, who were willing to come forth and express those concerns in a very frank manner. We are grateful for the fact that the leader of Parker Ranch, CEO, Chris Kanazawa, was a frequent attendee at these meetings. But in addition to that, the four beneficiaries of that outfit, which as we all know owns the bulk of the land around that community, were kind enough to come before us and serve the expression that do be careful that whatever we do, not to go ahead and stifle the opportunity or the ability of that charitable trust to do what the law says it must do in terms of its beneficiaries. And we appreciate that. The aspect of our individual areas of interest, I think, was a rich combination of people that do in fact have background in planning and engineering, not certainly to the degree that we needed to have from the professional standpoint, but the experience of having subdivided property, of having land divided among family members to make sure that each of the four children did have an acre. But we were also very, very sensitive. As you can see, two of the vision points have to EXHIBIT E 6