2011-04-27 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Hamakua but it’s actually all of that area. But for the area of Hilo that’s from Pukihai all the way out to where you hit Puna, there’s no CDP. And the last Hilo CDP that was done was back in, 33 years ago, so it was like 1967 or something like that, was the last time it was done. So that becomes an issue whenever we’re doing rezoning because people grumble. But during that period of time we have updated the General Plan. And the General Plan has addressed some of those issues. And we’re coming up on General Plan again shortly. MS. O’HARA: And I have a question about that. I haven’t read the code related to the action committees, but the CDPs move forward as input to the General Plan. And then the General Plan is adopted. And then we begin the process over again. It’s a ten year process. So how long are those initial action committees supposed to be sustained. Because it would seem like over time they would lose effectiveness. MS. LEITHEAD-TODD: Well under the County Code, they’re there forever. You create the steering committee to adopt the CDP. Once the CDP is adopted by the County Council, then you create an action committee. The purpose of the action committee is supposed to implement or help implement the CDP. What’s happening is frequently the discussion at the council is they would like to turn the action committees into mini planning commissions. They would like everything run through the action committees including, in some areas, we have a real tug and pull because they want to review subdivision applications. Not just rezoning, they want variance applications. They want all of that to come through them. And I’m saying that I can’t do that. I don’t have the staff or the time to meet deadlines. I already have two Planning Commissions that I take stuff to. The next time we do the General Plan is probably going to take me twice as long to get a General Plan through the commissions as it did the last time when it was done. And that’s because we have one commission that met two times a month. I now have two commissions that meet once a month but they’re both required to review the General Plan. So what might have taken six months to a year the last round could take 12 months to two years to get through the Planning Commission’s cause each of them only meets once a month. Or in order to get it through quickly, I have to double the meetings. So, I just think that there were some things when you create boards and commissions that they didn’t think through in terms of how do you efficiently do a big document. Cause I notice some of your recommendations about getting the zoning code updated every ten years rather than piecemeal. I was on the County Council when we did the last zoning code. And we also tried to do the subdivision code. And what I find happens is that things, in a two year election cycle, it’s very difficult to get a large document through unless the mentality is, don’t examine it, just adopt it and then we’ll fix it later. But if you don’t have that and what happens is things like zoning codes and subdivision codes, you don’t get that kind of a vote.People want to examine what the road standards are. People want to examine what the variances are, etc., etc. We never got the subdivision code through the County Council. And so I have a list of fixers, and we are currently starting to try and come up with a number of amendments that we’re going to be introducing, because our fear is that if we did something that’s comprehensive, I can’t get it through the County Council in any relevant period of time before you hit an election. And then you have new members on the council and they want you to start from scratch. That’s what happened to the General Plan the last time. Because every time we had an election, the new guys wanted us to start from scratch. We could have been 18 months into the process, and the newly elected guy said no, I 26