2008-12-05 THWN RAINFOREST - Laserfiche WebLink

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urban areas and not to then restrict how much could be within that footprint. That was the major thrust. There were some other issues but that was the major thrust. As it relates to this, we have a very significant concern now as we did then that this area not be considered part of urban expansion. And there are basically two reasons for that. The first we’ve been hit on, and that is we have, excuse me, Tom has discussed, and that is the roads surrounding this property are private roads that we own. We feel not just legally responsible but personably responsible. There is a school on either side of Milo Street and the kids, the elementary school kids, are on one side, and there’s a playground on the other side. Added traffic puts those children at risk. When the school asked if they could put a cross-walk across Milo, we told them, yes, you may under one condition, or two conditions. But the main one was you have to get a civil engineer to draw, to give you a drawing that would put in an appropriate crosswalk because we don’t want your kids to get hit by the current traffic there. We insisted on that. We didn’t think it was enough to just draw a line to cross the street. So that has been a consistent concern. There’s also a safety concern on Railroad which the applicant maintains he has access to. And that is if you go towards Hilo, you’ll see the pictures there, and you’ll see that there are significant sight distance problems on there. Also, we have an agricultural processing plant that virtually sits on that road; and we have a strong concern that someone is going to step out of that factory and get nailed by a car. We have that concern today. But as we look at this applicant, the zoning he has asked zoned for, if it is it taken to the farthest degree, would greatly increase the traffic, in our opinion, on both of those roads, making them very unsafe. And can you cover us with liability insurance? You could, but I would give the same answer that I gave to Christian Liberty when they came to us and said how about we double the liability insurance? My response was, hey, do I care more about your kids than you do? It’s not about liability insurance. It’s really a safety issue. It has to deal with infrastructure and the safety of vehicles. It was pointed out that you have vehicular traffic generally in the morning and late in the afternoon that corresponds with work schedules of people down typically in the agricultural area. The types of uses that could be put here would allow constant all-day long traffic that would put at risk the children of the school, and the people who work at the processing plant, and so on. People have talked about the industrial nature of this property, if I could just finish this one thought, over the years. It was highly industrial at a point in time where Puna Sugar controlled this whole area and it was their truck processing facility and they owned, they didn’t own, they leased just about everything around there from us, or owned it. So it was one user control over that whole area. That’s not what we’re talking about now. We’re talking about many, many users. WATANABE: Thank you. Any questions? Yes, Mr. Iwashita. IWASHITA: I guess procedurally because of the access issue and I guess the change in the recommendation, are we actually going to proceed with this or is this going to be deferred until access is resolved? WATANABE: Well, it’s up to us, it’s up to us. But the intent is to continue this. However, both parties were present and had requested that they at least be able to present comments. And so at the present time my intent is not to proceed to a deliberation but to EXHIBIT C 13