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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 33 of 51
<br />HERKES: Transferring some duties.
<br />BESS: Is it more centrally, putting it all in one place?
<br />RAY: Well, if somebody else would like to phrase it differently, my sense was do we like the idea of
<br />creating a Division of Permitting.
<br />BESS: One-stop. Yes.
<br />BALOG: A Division of Permitting?
<br />RAY: That’s what they called it, yes.
<br />HERKES: If you want to vote, let’s stay on the subject, now this is what we’re voting on, right?
<br />BESS: Where I am is that I want a one-stop. I don’t know if I’m necessarily on board with the division.
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<br />BALOG: Before we answer that, I just got to ask our legal attorney this. You know he’s the guy who’s
<br />supposed to advise us, vs. another attorney’s opinion. What our esteemed fellow Board Member, Mr.
<br />Bess, said, if you followed his recommendation and you looked in the book, there’s no Charter
<br />Amendment necessary if, instead of doing what they proposed, you did the exact opposite. Is that
<br />correct? If you read this document?
<br />YUEN: That’s a hard one because I would say, from a legal point of view, that there are some of the
<br />things that people have talked about as being one-stop, that can be implemented without any Charter
<br />changes at all. To give the example that was discussed up here on building permits, I think what
<br />happens, a building permit, a person brings it in to the Department of Public Works and then, it’s been a
<br />while since I’ve done this, and I think they are physically told to carry it over to the Planning
<br />Department, and then the Planning Department checks whether you can put that kind of building in the
<br />zone, and I think they also check the setbacks in the Planning Department. Am I correct on this? Now,
<br />there’s nothing in the Charter that requires the citizen to have that experience. The County,
<br />administratively, could set it up so that one person is trained to handle that, and the person who reviews
<br />it in the Department of Public Works could have a copy of the zoning map, so that can be done. Now
<br />let’s take the other example of what I said, you needed to make a change if you were going to move it.
<br />The subdivision approval. Some of the work is currently done in the Planning Department and some of it
<br />is done in the Department of Public Works. Just to give you an example, a brand new subdivision that
<br />somebody is putting in where they’ve recently had the zoning, like a developer type subdivision, there’s
<br />not a lot of discretion and there are not a lot of decisions made by the Planning Department. Most of that
<br />is going to be done by the Department of Public Works and is pretty mechanical. Where the Planning
<br />Department tends to get involved in making decisions are things where you have non-conforming lots,
<br />and pre-existing lots, that is, lots that were of record before the enactment of the subdivision code, and
<br />very often people will go to the Planning Department and inquire whether they have these lots, how
<br />many lots do they have, which ones are buildable, which ones are not buildable. If they are going to do a
<br />consolidation and re-subdivision, they’re going to reconfigure it. Those kinds of decisions currently are
<br />made by somebody in the Planning Department. Now, what is the experience of the citizen that goes in?
<br />The citizen gives the application to the Planning Department and, I think, the Planning Department, even
<br />with the roads and the drainage and the like, they route it over to the Public Works Department. So there
<br />are two different bodies working on it, but the person has gone into the Planning Department and
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