Planning Director's Letter to the Puna CDP Steering Committee

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each other informally, and even accidentally, as a key ingredient in community life. It can be a beach park, a town square, a shopping mall, even a coffee shop. Puna has some outstanding community gathering places, like Cooper Center in Volcano, but it needs more. The government can often stimulate this kind of community building, by providing land or funds. 7.What should the policies be toward second dwellings on a lot? The potential population increase in Puna is very large with one house per lot, but current county and state land use rules often permit two or more houses to be built on a lot. The requirements depend upon whether the lot is in the state land use agricultural district or in the urban district. Almost all of the subdivisions in Puna are in the state land use agricultural district. In the agricultural district, county rules allow more than one house through the Ðadditional farm dwellingÑ process. The owner must submit a farm plan and show some need for agricultural labor. The current requirements for a second home are not very stringent. It is almost certainly true that most additional farm dwellings have not actually been built to house farm laborers. More often, they are really used as ordinary rentals, or to provide a separate house for a family member. In the state land use urban district, a second home can be built using the ÐÓohana dwellingÑ process. As a practical matter, almost all lots in the urban district will qualify for Òohana dwellings, but it is often difficult to put the Òohana dwelling on the lot because the Zoning Code requires an additional 5Ó setback for the Òohana dwelling, and does not permit setback variances. From the standpoint of the individual lot owner, being able to get a second home can be a great convenience, but looking at the area as a whole, it creates the potential for even more population growth than the number of lots indicates. A few years ago, it was becoming common to see the second home c creation of a Ðcondominium property regimeÑ, or ÐCPRÑ, on a lot. The CPR enabled the lot owner to sell off a separate portion of the lot, in effect, creating a re-subdivision of the property without any improvements to the subdivision infrastructure. Left unchecked, this would have led to even more units in the subdivisions, but the county essentially ended the practice with a change to the subdivision code in 2002. At present, the second dwelling on a lot is not that commonly used, and so there is time to re-evaluate the policies on this issue. I will be happy to discuss these and other issues at the Steering Committee meeting on November 15.