2005-10-07 TENVISION - Laserfiche WebLink

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love Downtown, my office is down there right now. I do a lot of events down there. But Ive also worked for the Downtown Improvement Association, with the Hilo Main Street Program. And I was fortunate to meet lots of wonderful people. And some of the people that Ive met included people from Lahaina who were looking to relocate because there were just too many people there and prices were too high for rent and to run a business. So were very concerned about that. And those were two factors that brought us together and our outreach into the community. Because of the rigorous outreach that we had included in our road show, and on page 87 of the document is the road show schedule, weve reached everyone that we could possibly reach in many various ways, from elected officials to walking and talking to Downtown people, businesses as well as people on the street, from Lions Club presentations to community association, to over 10,000 questionnaires that were distributed at the road show, at each of the road show presentations, as well as over 9,000 in the Hawaii Tribune Herald. We did radio interviews.AndIdontknowifyouvebeenkeepingupwithourcolumn,aroundDowntown, weve been discussing it, this community vision and action plan, quite frequently in that column. So we did a tremendous amount of outreach and invitation to the community. And the result is this is the community speaking to us here through this document. The community identified 56 lead solution partners, and at least two times as many, if not three or four times as many, supporting partners. So the community came together and said these are the folks that we think could help with this vision. And 18 lead solution partners including myself have already signed on for this project for this process. So it has been a tremendous amount of outreach into the community. And we ask you to realize that this is the communitys voice here speaking to us, guiding us; and wed like this to become a guide book for the community. The top two lead solution partners, no surprise, are the DIA (Downtown Improvement Association) and the County of Hawaii. When we first started the process of determining who could be a lead solution partner for these actions steps, hundreds of action items, as again you may have reviewed some of them, the government was at the top of the list in the very beginning. And we took careful time for and asked the community to consider other entities and other people because we realized that the government was not going to be the answer to all of the problems and to develop all of the actions. So it took very thoughtful and deliberative contemplation and extracting from community members who they thought could help us get these actions done. So were ready to move forward with this. We put up a map, thank you, I think Alice from the Planning Department ran and got this. Just for your reference this is included in the vision and action plan of the Downtown Hilo area that were talking about. I would like to turn it over to Susan Gagorik for a few words. And, again, I thank you for your consideration today. GAGORIK:Thank you, Alice. I am a Planning Department staff and I was assigned to work with the Friends of Downtown Hilo Steering Committee. I have to say this was one of the most rewarding, exciting and challenging projects that Ive worked on. During the last 15 4EXHIBIT B