2008-10-03 TCOUNTY COUNCIL - Laserfiche WebLink

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WATANABE: Okay. WOODWARD: Where did everybody go? Nobody cares? YUEN: Nobody is interested in this bill which would end all necessity for the Planning Commission to meet about rezonings for many years to come? So, it’s very interesting. But this is an overall amendment to the Zoning Code that has been proposed by the County Council. Very often, you know, the Planning Commission deals with individual rezonings; and also amendments to the Zoning Code itself comes to the Planning Commission for consideration before the County Council takes final action on it. Examples of overall amendments that you’ve looked at would be things, the parking requirements are contained in the Zoning Code. There was a Council-initiated bill to look at the parking requirements that the Planning Commission considered. Eventually it failed when it went back up to the County Council. Well, this is a bill that was initiated by the County Council. It was passed in Committee to have a resolution to have this bill be considered by the Planning Director and by the Planning Commission. So the draft bill is now contained in Exhibit A, and also the Planning Director’s background and recommendation. What it says is that rezoning shall not be granted in any district unless there are adequate public facilities as determined by the various departments; and it covers the areas of parks, police, fire, and wastewater. It starts off, if you read the bill carefully, it starts off saying that the adequacy shall be assessed; but then it goes on to say that the standards by which it shall be assessed shall be based on certain standards that are contained in the bill.And so adequate park facilities are defined as a minimum of 5 acres of public park facilities with developed recreational facilities per thousand residents in a district. So to do a professional job of seeing what this means we did an analysis in the Planning Department of how many developed park facilities we have. The bill doesn’t further define what should be considered as developed. But generally we look at, certainly, if you had a ballfield, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, some other kind of developed facility, that counted as developed. Even beach parks with facilities like Onekahakaha we counted as developed. We didn’t actually do this, we mostly worked from an analysis that had been done in 2000 in support of the General Plan. So large open area parks like Kekahakai State Park, Kalopa State Park, do not generally count as developed. So much of the park acreage got counted out of the bill. So what we concluded in doing that analysis is that the parks were short in all districts of the island, except North Hilo which has a very small population and has Laupahoehoe Park, and South Hilo which does have quite a large amount of developed park facilities compared to other districts on the island. Then for police it said one manned police station per 12,500 residents and three police offers per thousand residents. What we did, and we had to first assume that Council meant authorized positions rather than the actual number of hired bodies. There are often vacancies and so you don’t have that many hired bodies. But it’s also, you know, it can change on a day-to-day basis. So we also did an analysis of the sworn numbers of police personnel; and, again, the County would be short of three per thousand in all districts of the island, except North Hilo and South Hilo. South Hilo is a little misleading because, and also North Kona is a little misleading, because many functions are handled out of South Hilo District and out of North Kona District and they serve the other districts. For example, a Puna vice case is done by vice officers EXHIBIT E 2