2003-11-07 TNANI KONA - Laserfiche WebLink

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And I just wanted to touch on a couple of things besides that. I agree with everything that has been said at this table. I agree with everything that's going on. I am not, by any means against development. I mean that land is up there for other people to enjoy besides me. It's not just my land, and I understand that, and I know that lots of people want to have homes there and they want to live there, also. But a couple of things that really bother me. I have just, not too awful long ago, got back from visiting Florida, and in Florida I stayed in a little town called Jacksonville. And they, also, live solely on cesspools. That was how that entire community was developed. And it's not much larger than our community up there. But you can't drink the water there. You can't even water your lawn. You turn the lawns on, and it smells like sewage. It stinks so bad you can't hardly walk up and down the street. And any hospital or restaurant or other place of business that must have water faucets have to put very expensive filtering systems in their building to filter all of the water because the water in Jacksonville, Florida is so contaminated it is undrinkable. And they're also -, that's what they use in their showers and other places. And it happened not because those people didn't have a right to have cesspools, because that was what was going on, but because their county people, their county officials did not foresee how many more homes were on it, how much more sewage was going through the cesspools, how much more was being added until the system couldn't take it anymore, and then it was too late. My -, what I would like to see happen if putting a sewage system in is completely unacceptable at this point in time, I would think the next best step would be to make it mandatory that they all have septic tanks where at least we don't have that much more seepage going into a system that may or may not continue to hold for us and then have to backtrack later and say now we have a problem, how do we purify it? Let's find out how to keep it pure before we have the problem. And I think requiring septic tanks would be a good middle of the road solution. They're going to have to dig holes to make the cesspools anyway, so just dropping a tank in there is not going to be that much more difficult. That would be my thing on septic. I am also a little concerned that we are building homes without building the roads first. If anybody would take a look at Kailua-Kona, we are becoming gridlocked. You can't hardly get from one end of Kona to the other end of Kona before work or after work. I mean I -, when I first started working in town, it took me six minutes to get to work. It takes me 15 to 20 minutes now to drive the same distance if I go when everybody else is going to work or when everyone's coming home, and that's because our streets are just too small to handle the flow of traffic that we have actually have. And now we're seeing our little community becoming potentially gridlocked also. So it seems to me like if we -, if the County or the State, I don't know who plans these projected streets in a community, but the street in question above where they are was planned, it was planned to go all the way from our division all the way out to Nani Kailua, I mean not to Nani Kailua, to Palani and actually even further on past K-Mart and connect into that road. And I just don't see why, yes, it's expensive, but we all also pay taxes and we also all put 30