2017-01-05 Hearing Transcript - County Council Bill 227 Draft 2

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and we go out and conduct a site inspection and find out that they have exceeded those limits and need to come in. The other thing I might mention is we've only received one complaint in the eight years relative to agricultural tourism, and that happened to be in a residential zone property which it's not even allowed, so. Okay, so these are some of the changes that are proposed in the alternative language, and I'll just run through these. We're almost done. We are—we like the idea of adding in agricultural based commercial operations as part of ag tourism so that's been included. We took out that confusion regarding the educational tours. Just left that separate. We've added in the definition of agricultural based commercial operations, and we've kind of refined it a little bit more than what [the] State defines it as just so that it's clear it needs to be connected to a working farm and that products grown on the property as well as products grown in Hawaii can be sold as part of that. We've deleted the entire Plan Approval section for agricultural tourism, and in the agricultural tourism, some of these are very similar to Bill 227, Draft 2 including the removal of the 10,000 limit. We're going with the idea, again, the gross sales of the ag products exceeds the gross sales of agricultural tourism activities. Maximum amount of visitors instead of 3030,000 to 10,000, we feel that 30,000 to 15 [000] might be a more appropriate number. If they exceed 15,000 visitors a year, they'll need to come in for a Special Permit or a Use Permit. Hours of operation. If they decide they want to revise that or change that instead of going to the Planning Commission, they would request the Planning Director upon a finding that there will be no significant adverse impact on surrounding neighborhoods. Instead of the requirement that was in Bill 227, Draft 2 for access, we've kept the existing language that we have where they have to provide, they have an existing legal access to a public highway which may be via a private road or easement. And, again, this was previously a requirement they had to submit as part of Plan Approval. Instead of the, there was, Bill 227, Draft 2 had quite a long period of time you could request a waiver. Up to nine years in certain circumstances. We feel that might be a bit too much. We'd like to keep it at the two years because basically, the whole point of it is you have to have a working farm to have agricultural tourism. If you're asking for a waiver, you know, from that unbalance, then something's not right there. We'll allow that to be able to come into place, but not for a long period of time. We feel it's, they really need to have that working farm as primary principal and the ag tourism as secondary and accessory. 6 EXHIBIT C