2004-10-01 TKONA HALE - Laserfiche WebLink

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SAUNDERS:Yes, thank you. I do think its appropriate to give you some context, and Ill be as brief as I can. Ive lived in Hawaii for 10 years. Long story short, I came across an investment group out of San Francisco in my former position, got to know them and vice versa. I ended up joining them. They decided that they needed for their various development projects to have a local person that maybe was a little more sensitive to how it is to live and work in Hawaii as opposed to where they are in San Francisco, so I joined them. One of my tasks was to implement the project that you see on the wall right there. I started out by reading the Kailua Village Design District manual to see what that was all about and understand that. I came here numerous times, talked to a number of people, realtors, people in the business community and others; and the more and more I talked to them, it occurred to me that the design that we had in place, the 80 units, certainly achieved the density that was allowed. No question about it. But it seemed to do it at the expenseofsomeotherimportantthingsthatyoumightputunderthisheadingofA Lifestyle. For instance, the project had whats called the Double-loaded Corridor. Youd get out of an elevator and youd have a dark corridor, thered be no opportunity for cross-ventilation. It would be almost like a mainland-style project, which when you think of it if youre from San Francisco, maybe thats something that youre used to seeing. So we got talking more and more and decided that we really ought to look at dropping down the density and coming up with something that was more appropriate to the community. And I must say it was a situation of putting your money where your mouth was cause hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on a building permit set of plans for the existing plan. With the investors concurrence, we pulled, we stopped the permit down at the County and said lets go back and see if we can go back to the drawing board. We, also, another break-through was we found the adjacent property was owned by the Greenwells, Lanihau Corporation. I sat down with Jimmy Greenwell and we talked about our thoughts; and long story short, we thought that it might make sense to acquire that property from them and see if we couldnt do a better lower density design. So, in the course of that discussion, we both recognized there are considerable archaeological sites on the Greenwell property. We had an archaeologist go through it, review earlier studies; and we basically concluded that there was a mauka half, that except for one burial site, was clean. A lower half, there was just, as my daughter says, choke archaeological sites. And we thought it did make sense to do it, yes, you might be able to get some development on there. But we and the Greenwells agreed that we would acquire the entire 6 acres that basically runs from the Kuakini Wall down to Kuakani Highway and we would do a consolidation and resubdivision. The makai half that has the, most of the archaeological, we would put a deep restriction on the site that would preclude any development, not only if we owned but anybody subsequent to us. 6