2016-03-03 Hearing Transcript - Update Puna Pono Alliance et al GAF Claim

Home

th On January 8, 2015, the Commission, you have awarded the authorization of the release of th funds from the Geothermal Asset Fund. However, a month later, February 5, Chairman Miyasato has directed that a discussion and action on a motion for reconsideration by th Commissioner Ikeda of this January 8 action be placed on the next Commission agenda which th was March 5. th So, at the Commission’s meeting on March 5, 2015, the Commission voted to approve the motion for reconsideration and directed that this matter be remanded to the Planning Department with the request that the Planning Department and the Claimants work together to restructure the application and to structure a request for proposal, an RFP. Within two days of the March Windward Planning Commission meeting, the signatories on the original request notified the Planning Department that the contact would be Tom Travis. As of March 2016, a year later, the Planning Department has not specified any action required of the signatories to restructure the application. So, you have not actually told anybody what specifically all needed to be do, needed to be done by the claims adjuster, suggestions or to structure an RFP. The interactions between the Planning Department and the signatories included one meeting between Travis and Daryn Arai, in which the Planning Department specified again no action for the signatories. One set of emails in which the Planning Department suggested a revision process for Rule 12, which relates to the Geothermal Asset Fund. The signatories indicated they did not feel that the revision of Rule 12 is necessary to fund the study, but that they were willing to participate in such a process. Again, no follow-up on this has been received from the Planning Department either. In conclusion, it is clear that studies can be funded using Geothermal Asset Funds since the Commission has approved the Mayor’s office’s request to fund environmental and health studies and has used the fund to equip the County’s Fire Department as you already heard. If the County knows how to expend the fund for this type of expenditures, bureaucratic complexity should not be allowed to prevent the community from using the GAF for this most important and timely study. We and other signatories remain ready to do what is necessary to meet any requirements to fund this study. We ask the Windward Planning Commission and the Planning Department to take necessary action to release the GAF funds to perform this study. HEAUKULANI: Thank you. Robert Petricci. PETRICCI: Aloha Commission Members, and thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak again. It seems like this has been going on for years, and it has actually. Since 1989, when Director Kanuha with PGV wrote Rule 12 and, and that was after the community had spent a year trying to write, write-up these rules, and on the last day, all the community work was 20 EXHIBIT E