2017-11-29 BDHRA Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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2. Update from the Long Range Planning Division regarding the comprehensive review of the County of Hawai`i General Plan. SANTIAGO: Hi, good afternoon everyone. Mahalo. My name's Hans Santiago, I work with the Planning Department, Long Range Division. I also want to introduce April Surprenant who's the Long Range Division Manager, and Bethany Morrison who's the Senior Planner. Thank you for letting us come here and talk about the General Plan update. The Planning Department has been working on this update to the General Plan since February of 2015. So we'll go through the process that we've been using to do the update and if you have any questions at any time, please, let me know. So the current General Plan, it sets forth the long range policy for the physical, economic, environmental, and social cultural well-being for the entire island. It's kind of our overarching planning document. It's mandated by HRS and by the County Charter. And it establishes the County policy and prioritizes implementation actions that are needed to achieve long-term goals. In order to ensure that the purpose of the General Plan is carried out, the County Charter requires that we update this plan and that all public improvements, projects and land use be consistent with the General Plan. The General Plan provides opportunity to map out our island's future and to help us address our challenges and establish our needs and priorities. As you can see from this diagram, our process has been quite involved; it's an involved process and many tiered. So as I said, that the County Charter requires that we update the General Plan every ten years and this is kind of the multi-faceted approach that we took to begin the update. I know this diagram might be a little confusing, but we, as part of the process we looked at trends and forecasts. We also looked at all current community development plans, any type of functional plans, any private plans, transportation plans. We also looked at current policy review and we had a bunch of staff looking at different types of topics that are required by charter to be a part of the General Plan process and we also did something called scenario planning where we inputted a bunch of data into a GIS platform, and we did some scenario planning, what if we, what if we protected all the ag land in the county, what would that mean for future projected trend growth in certain areas and so forth. So we were able to do several different types of scenarios and see how that would affect what was projected trend and we're in the process of developing what we call a preferred scenario, which would then inform us going forward in our proposed goals, objectives, policies, and actions in the plan itself, so many tiered. We're getting towards the end point where we're starting to put together recommendations and we're finalizing the public output input, excuse me. So we pretty much broke down the process into five different phases and we're ending the—we're in the fall/winter of 2017. We're starting to work on, on recommendations and we're closing out our stakeholder engagement, public input process, although we are accepting public input. We're getting towards the state where we're putting our recommendations together based on our scenario planning, the public input we've already received, and the topic research that staff has been doing. So our current General Plan—this is a diagram from the plan itselfas I mentioned, the General Plan is the overarching highest order or umbrella plan that the County uses that all land use Page 4 of 10 Banyan Drive Hawaii Redevelopment Agency November 29,2017 Minutes