2006-08-25 TPLANNING DIR. - Laserfiche WebLink

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I’m also worried about the phrasing of this particular amendment, particularly the phrase “department of health licensing approval.” My understanding from looking at the research over the last God knows how many years is that these types of community programs work best when there is community support, and I mean community support in the immediate area. That takes time, I would suggest to you. That takes time to develop. There are ways to develop it. I’m a fairly new newcomer to Hawai`i but I know enough about Hawai`i to know that there are ways in which you talk story, and where you get the community together and you go over and over and over, and you resolve these disputes. It takes time, probably a year before you even open up the house. Then you’ve got the community support. As it stands now with the way this is read, if I interpret it correctly, and I could be wrong, I’ve been wrong before, my wife keeps telling me that I’m wrong sometimes, is that all they need to do is get the Department of Health’s support. And once you’ve got that support, that certification, so on, it doesn’t make any difference whether the community supports it or not. But I’m sure there’s no provision in the Department of Health that they have to come and get community support. So they just simply move in whether it’s five, or eight, or ten, or whatever number. It also trumps any CC&R’s that might be existing in the development. You might have a CC&R that might prohibit it; and we happen to think our CC&R’s do prohibit this activity. But you might get a CC&R that specifically prohibits this activity, but the Department of Health certification would trump that. They come in, they buy and they’re on their way. So having said that, I also suggest, since we’re talking about the Keaau Ag Lots, that you take a look at the history of the Ag Lots. And I don’t know that much about it but other people do. And they tell me the history involves the Puna Sugar and the fact that these lots were made available to the workers in lieu of their last salary; and it was designed to provide a retirement and a long-term home for many of those workers; and many of those workers are still in the Ag Lots. A number of them have turned over, like our property, and so on. But a lot of them are still there; and many of them couldn’t come today, and they will be there at the Hilo meeting. They couldn’t come because they work, or otherwise. So I would ask you to be sensitive to that history. And people are very upset. Every meeting we’ve had, and I’m on the association board. I was one of those when they said with those who don’t want to be on the board sit down, I couldn’t sit down fast enough. So I’m on the board. But more importantly, every meeting we’ve had the vote has been virtually unanimous against this facility, and those meetings included representatives of Marimed. And I think the first vote was 50 to 1, the second vote was something like 80 to 1; and every time we’ve had a meeting, if you know association meetings, you know you’re lucky if you get this number of people to turn up. And on this issue we’ve had incredibly number of folks turn up; and they are very upset and very outraged about this facility coming into our development. And it doesn’t mean that we’re opposed to a facility that provides treatment for these kinds of children. We think that they’ve gone about it the wrong way, we think that it doesn’t fit with any of our development, it violates our CC&R’s and the number of other things that we’ve talked about. EXHIBIT D 13