2012-12-06 Windward Transcript Connections

Home

difficult to develop. So we chose that one. And I think part of the reason we chose it was because our school has always had a focus on sustainable industries. We want our students to be able to get an education that will allow them, if they choose, to find a job on the Big Island, or at least in the State of Hawai‘i. So this is important to us because the Constitution again makes a point for agriculture land and the preservation of agricultural land. Article XI says “The State shall conserve and protect agricultural lands, promote diversified agriculture, increase agricultural self-sufficiency and assure the availability of agriculturally suitable lands.” For us, it was very important that we are able to do something that we wanted to do from the beginning. We’ve only be able to do it on a limited basis; and that’s to develop a strong agricultural program at our school. So this site was, looked like a good site when we looked at it. All of the surrounding, or most of the surrounding neighbors were in agriculturally zoned houses. So when people in Pacific Plantations first bought their houses, they knew that they were buying homes on 1-acre agriculturally zoned lots. In looking at the map for the area, you’ll see that there are a lot of agricultural lands in the area. In fact, as you go up Kaumana Drive, or out the new Puainako Extension, there are over 2,000 acres of land that is zoned Agriculture. And the land is also, if you look at County documents, you’ll see that the majority of that area is also deemed for future urban expansion. And so as a school, we saw two things. We saw that there’s a lot of agriculture land, we saw that the majority of the neighbors were on agricultural lots; and we did not feel that that would be a problem. If you look at the zoning issues between the State and the County, over the years, I would reference Nathan Pohakea Roehrig’s article in 2002 in the University of Hawai‘i Law Review; and I’m not going to read all of that. But he did make a case for preserving agriculture land and not taking large agricultural lots, subdividing them out into smaller lots which are not even used for agriculture. So I think this is an important document to look at and I reference it in here. I also want to point out that the General Plan that was updated in 2005, and I’m not sure if it has been updated since then, but it does -. With no CDP to look at to give you guidance, I think you have to fall back to the General Plan. If you look in the General Plan in Section 14.9.2, the goals, two of the goals that are talking about State land say “Utilize publicly owned lands in the best public interest and to the maximum benefit for the greatest number of people, acquire lands for public use to implement policies and programs contained in the General Plan.” And one of the policies, 14.9.3 says “Encourage uses of public lands that will satisfy specific public needs, such as housing, recreation, open space and education.” In our mind, this makes it clear that this Planning Commission needs to look at the use of this land that will impact the greatest number of people. Now I understand that there are neighbors that have done petitions in Kaumana and I’ve heard a number of 500 signatures mentioned. Okay, so if we say here’s 500 opposed to the school, our population at our school is 360 students, about 60 staff members, and probably at least 200 other family members that are impacted by our school directly. If you look at the area that we service, charter schools are not defined by a single geographic location. Our school draws students from as far away as Pahoa in that direction, to Keaau, from Keaau up through Volcano. And we have two families now that live in Naalehu that are actually coming into Hilo and renting a house in Hilo so their children can attend our school. We have students from throughout the Hilo area, including Kaumana; and we have students as far away up to the north as Laupahoehoe. So I’m asking you to consider that 6 EXHIBIT D