2024-02-27 PL-SMA-2023-000038 Bill and Cindy Armer Opposition Testimony

Home

• Proposals are routed to the 15-20 county department heads for them to identify any issues that will impact their area of responsibility. Why are there no red flags from police, fire, civil defense, medical, water and sewage, engineering, DOT and all the other salaried department heads on this project? Every segment of county government will all be severely stressed by the magnitude and location of this project. • The applicant did not submit traffic studies, safety proposals, pedestrian usage data, vehicle speed recommendations, a neighborhood communication plan, or traffic routing considerations for those turning into/out of the applicant entrance on North Kahakai Rd, from heavily traveled AM Drive. Alii Drive is the most used coastal road from Kailua Village to Keauhou, with only 6 mauka-makai connectors between Palani and Kamehmeha III Hwy. During the hours of 4:30 am and 10:00 pm there is no busier thoroughfare in Hawaii County with walkers, runners, strollers, auto, bicyclists, and dog walkers. During emergency coastal evacuations, there is no bigger bottleneck of panicked visitors seeking higher ground. • The neighborhood is already impacted by Royal Kona Hotel's 430 rooms and to propose a 100+room hotel on the adjacent southern property boundary is the height of developer arrogance. The applicant claims sufficient parking spaces but our experience is that inadequate parking is ever-present for all the existing tenants on AM Drive especially during events, holidays, and high season. Over three hundred people will be housed and working daily at this facility with no ocean frontage to even view the ocean. There is no question that they will migrate 24 hours a day onto all the adjacent properties--especially the green frontage area at Kona Reef. Kona Reef will need to purchase three gated entrances to our property in order to not be overrun by trespassers with nowhere else to park. The applicant is proposing to build a 40 foot tall structure on top of an existing concrete foundation. However, the construction site is located on a slope such that the makai side of the structure would be 74 feet above ground level. This clearly violates Hawaii County Zoning Code (Sect. 25-5-93)which explicitly limits the height of buildings in hoteilresort areas to 45 feet. This concrete facility is perched on top of a massive lava tube that was filled with concrete over the course of several months around 15 years ago and now they propose to add four stories of concrete on top of that precarious foundation. * The proposed 100 "Room" hotel would actually consist of 9 standard guest rooms and 91 2-bedroom suites. At 80% occupancy, there would be over 300 guests plus the necessary hotel support staff to squeeze into the 143 proposed parking spaces. The additional cars would greatly exacerbate the traffic congestion and parking issues already existing in Kailua Kona. Yet the developer has not conducted nor even requested a traffic and pedestrian safety study