2009-11-06 Tcouncilconcurrentparksfire

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LEITHEAD TODD: I have a number of concerns over the proposed language. Part of the concern is that it only, it uses just active parks as the standard for measuring whether you have adequate park facilities. So as an example in Hilo you have your Bayfront Park where you have all your canoe facilities there; but that’s not considered an active park because it doesn’t have any ballfields on it. So it would not be considered in your computation of five acres. Similarly, in Hilo you have Onekahakaha Beach Park, Richardson, Four Miles, none of those would be computed as part of that five acres because none of them have developed recreational facilities like a gymnasium or a ballfield; and so I had an objection to that. Because somebody might come in, like let’s say you had Kohanaiki who was coming in and proposing a development, and in exchange for that development they were going to give you 700-acres next to the ocean as an ocean park but there are no ballfields, there are no soccer fields, there’s no gymnasium -. And so under this standard you could not approve that proposal because you weren’t getting an active five-acre park out of it. It also impacts small rezonings because in areas of in-fill or somebody who wants to -. Let’s say you’ve got a 20,000-square foot lot and you want to rezone it to create two 10,000-square foot lots but you didn’t have these five acres of active park close by, you couldn’t do that. And so the only people I felt who could really comply with this in an area where there were inadequate parks under this five-acre of active would be somebody who had a very large piece of land who could then set aside some of it for a park.So somebody like a Palamanui who can come in and say, okay, I’m going to give you 20 acres for a park. And so I had some problems with how that was adjusted. The other thing is that there are so many things here that are beyond the control of property owners. And I felt that, you know, the real issue is that if the Council or the Planning Commission is unhappy with the proposed rezoning you can put conditions, you can require fair share, and if, it might be much better to try and collect people’s contribution towards construction of facilities from the smaller parcels than to just do a flat out no on it. But my principal objection in the parks area was the fact that you could not consider the beach parks or passive parks of somebody who wanted to give you some place that was just going to be forest and it was just going to be trails. That would not count as the five-acre park space. WOODWARD: Any discussion? It seems to me that this, like I say, this is being revisited. The County Council threw this at us last year. And what it essentially would do, my understanding is it would prohibit rezoning County-wide until the County met its own requirements as far as infrastructure. And so anybody that was trying to put together anything would have to essentially contribute more than their fair share to bring that part of the County up to its own imposed conditions. And I think that’s absolutely unfair. So this is the same thing we saw before. And I assume that’s your interpretation also, Madam Director? LEITHEAD TODD: Yes. WOODWARD: Okay. 2 EXHIBIT D