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STATEMENTS FROM THE PUBLIC <br />CHR. SIRACUSA: Our first testifier is Conrad Hokama. Please come forward and you have <br />to keep close to these mics so that it can be recorded for the transcript. <br />CONRAD HOKAMA: <br />(At this time Conrad Hokama came forward to address members of the Commission.) <br />MR. HOKAMA Thank you Commissioners. My name is Conrad Hokama, and I'm the <br />president of the Pi`ihonua Community Association. I also have our Vice President, Ms. Julie <br />Tulang, and the other Vice President who is not here tonight is Mr. Jack Fuj ii. I do have a <br />printed handout for you but let me just read this to enter it into the record please. <br />Our Pi`ihonua Community Association would like to express our desire to be kept together as <br />a community within the Hilo proper district as you do your deliberations in determining the <br />future council districts. Our community has a long history; we're composed of the former <br />Pi`ihonua Camp 3, Camp 4, and Camp 5. Pi`ihonua is an old sugar plantation area so you <br />know we've gone through that history and for those of you who are not really familiar with <br />Pi` ihonua , if you take Waianuenue Avenue, go past Hilo High School, go past the hospital, <br />you go past Boiling Pots and you'll come up to Akolea Road. Akolea Road is our community <br />boundary and from there you continue on up and there and that will be Camp 3, it goes up and <br />if you're familiar with the Head Start program after the Head Start program there's a large <br />bridge that will be the boundary for Camp 3, it crosses the Wailuku River goes up and <br />transitions into the Pi`ihonua Road and above, if you continue up Pi`ihonua Road you will <br />continue into Camp 4 and Camp 5. <br />The reason we'd like to offer or at least share our past experiences of our community is, in the <br />past, for House Representative District, at one time they did use Waianuenue Avenue to divide <br />the House districts, and so within our community we were split in half. So, we're trying to <br />avoid that situation so we can remain together and intact as a community. We would hope that <br />you would be sensitive to that issue and try to keep our community together. It might be easy <br />to say, oh, we can use the river as the dividing line, but I just want to offer a caution that <br />although it sounds pretty simple if you have someone who is drawing the line who is not <br />familiar with the community, the river just does cross over the road, so if you take the literal <br />translation of using the river as the boundary, it will split Camp 3 being below the river and <br />then Camp 4 and Camp 5 being above the river. So, we want to be cautious about how you do <br />your explanation of drawing boundaries if you using the river, if you using Waianuenue <br />Avenue or some other landmark to designate the boundaries. <br />So, we're a small community, but we have a lot of history. Our community is very not high <br />profile, but we do have a very close knit community and we'd like to maintain that flavor. I <br />think it's consistent with as other parts of our county goes through their Community <br />Development Plans like Puna and Hamakua. You know people are working to develop that <br />sense of community and you know I think we've been fortunate to come from that perspective <br />already and so we'd like to continue maintaining that flavor. So, if you're open to a visitation <br />we'd be more than welcomed to have you come on up. We have a KaiCon, which is like our <br />3 <br />