2013-02-21 Leeward Exh A - Director Initiated Amend re PUD

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So there is all these nuances that guys are looking at. It makes it very complicated. And in many cases in Hawai‘i it makes it very expensive to develop land for residential use. So it’s, I guess it’s good for people who can afford it; it’s not good for people who can’t afford it. MADSON: Thank you. That explains why the developer would prefer to use a P.U.D. to develop the property. But my primary question is why does the state require a land use application, or permit or whatever, in the first place? Why don’t they eliminate that, if they don’t think there is a reason to have it? GIFFIN: Director? LEITHEAD TODD: I think that’s a question that I have asked in the past, and it is actually interesting in some cases that -. I mean, the state Land Use Commission is supposed to determine where is an appropriate area for urban development, where is agriculture appropriate, where is rural development appropriate; but again, I think, just like we sometimes complain on the county level, that the amount of staff they have, the amount of resources they have, the budget that they have, doesn’t enable them to really go out and look at land and decide, you know, what’s appropriate and whether a thing should move from one classification to the other. It is partially because the State Constitution got amended in 1978. And in 1978 the State Constitution was amended and it specifically states that we have to preserve important agricultural lands. And so state courts have said that some of the duty cannot be delegated from the state to the county; that it has to be done at the state level. So even if the Legislature wanted to, you know, create more of a flow to the county level, it becomes difficult. They could, if they wanted to, change the acreage. Instead of 15 acres, there have been attempts in the past to say that the counties can rezone and reclassify up to 50 acres or 30 acres as opposed to 15, and that the state should just reserve the larger parcels for itself ; that’s gotten no traction at the State Legislature. It hasn’t gone anywhere, so we are stuck with 15 acres for now and for the foreseeable future. A lot of this, the goal in 1978 was really trying to protect large scale agriculture. There was a lot of state land that was in leases to sugar, and the concern was that the state would take that land out of agricultural production, create homesteads where people could go and get pieces of land. And so part of the goal was to keep state land really in agricultural production and protect some of the industries at that time, which were pineapple and sugar. What’s occurred is agriculture has changed, and there really is more of a small scale agriculture; guys are doing stuff on five acres and three acres whereas before sugar was, I have, let’s see, Hāmākua Sugar was 29,000 acres and that was just one plantation, but you needed that acreage. And so I don’t think the law has kept up with the changing reality and the changing nature of agriculture. But that was the intent; it was to protect the large plantation style of agriculture and to keep large acreages, and it was to prevent the state from moving the land into agricultural reduction. The strange thing – and I’m so sorry -. GIFFIN: No, no, go. LEITHEAD TODD: The strange thing is the greatest pressure and the greatest movement to reclassify Ag land to Urban has not been in places like the neighbor islands; it’s been on O‘ahu where they have A and B soil. It’s the best land in the state and that’s what’s become, it’s flat, it’s got good soil, it’s easy to build houses on. So you have vast acreage on O‘ahu that is theoretically the best place to have agriculture occur, because it’s got the best soil; but because it’s flat, it’s also some of the easiest place to develop and build houses and put roads in, and that’s -. So I don’t know that we accomplished what we wanted to do, because there are other pressures that come into 16 EXHIBIT A