2011-05-04 Windward Planning Commission Hearing Transcript SP 11-115

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The property is located outside of the Pāhoa Regional Town Center boundary on the Puna CDP map. The boundary is shown with a dotted dash line, and you can see the subject properties just on the other side of the Pāhoa Bypass. A little history of the development of the existing campus, there is a campus existing there now as you may know. When the applicant came in to establish the campus in 2001 there was a State law that the Planning Department determined exempted charter schools from needing to get a special permit to establish a school on State Agricultural Land. The Planning Department erred in that determination because in 2005 the Third Circuit Court ruled that public charter schools do in fact need a special permit in order to operate in the State Land Use Agricultural District. So shortly after that ruling the applicant was notified by the Department that they needed to get a special permit; and they are submitting this application today to fulfill that requirement. Currently there are several buildings on the campus, and I’ll show you that in one of the next slides. There are also 250 students and about 30 staff members on site at this time. So the applicant’s request is to get a special permit to legitimize the current campus operations and also to allow the expansion of the charter school campus to serve 400 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. They’d also like to provide continuing education and meeting facilities for the larger Pāhoa community. This is a site plan of the property. Again, you can see the Pahoa Bypass on the right side of the slide, and Post Office Road at the bottom of the slide, and the campus in this area here. There are three driveways off of the Post Office Road, those are show in pink. And the existing buildings, it’s a little hard to see but they are shown in light green. There’s an administration building here, two classrooms on the lower campus, and then two classroom buildings on the upper campus. And then the proposed future buildings are shown in a darker blue color, two classroom buildings on the upper campus property, and a building that would be used as cafeteria and auditorium, as well as another classroom building on the lower campus. So I’ll just kind of walk you through a view of the campus. This is if you’re turning off of Pāhoa Bypass, which will be just off the slide in the foreground, and then turning on to Post Office Road. You can see it’s paved and then drops down to gravel. The campus is actually on the right side of the slide. You can see a portion of the existing macadamia nut orchard here, and then off in the distance is their driveway access. This is a close-up view of the driveway access to the right off of Post Office Road. And their parking lot is gravel with marked up parking spaces. This is the administration building. This is one of the duplex classroom buildings. There are two classrooms in each of these structures. And then this is a covered wood platform that is on Parcel 2 which is a portion of the property that is owned by the Roman Catholic Church. The school is going to use this property for outdoor recreational and agricultural education. And then on the upper campus you have two duplex classroom buildings, one here and then there’s actually another duplex classroom building inside of this quonset hut structure. And then you can see the gravel driveways throughout and the exit, I’m sorry, the entrance. This is the entrance that is closest to the Pāhoa Bypass, and then a view of the Pāhoa Bypass looking towards Kea‘au. Again, this is Post Office Road which accesses to the campus, and then a view of the Pāhoa Bypass looking towards Kalapana. And across the intersection, so Pāhoa town would be further down this road here. The Planning Director is recommending approval of the special permit; and we do have conditions to that approval that were presented to you. We also would like to make a correction to the conditions and add one more condition. So if I can just direct your attention to the goldenrod recommendations that we handed out to you. 2 EXHIBIT A