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minutes 04-12-00Page 2 of 26
<br />REED: Yes. David Reed, Chairman of the HRA. I would agree with the two previous speakers. We have, through Mr.
<br />Takase’s help, determined that the agency’s sunset is sunsetting in October of this year, so it is probably not going to exist by
<br />the time the election comes around. And I think that the agency members would agree that its life is coming to an end. We do
<br />have meetings once every three months, and have had a couple of special meetings, and we do see things passed on to us by
<br />Planning and Public Works as far as their considering to be our jurisdiction, as far as approval or disapproval, but certainly,
<br />yes, it could be deemed as a duplication. Any questions?
<br />RAY: Questions?
<br />HERKES: I have a question, David.
<br />RAY: Marni.
<br />HERKES: As you know, we all worked with the HRA a long time ago. Maybe this is Virginia’s question, but if there were
<br />not an HRA, to whom would the downtown questions be addressed? Would the Downtown Improvement Association take
<br />those over, do you think?
<br />REED: The Downtown Improvement District was added to the jurisdiction of the HRA. I’m not sure when that occurred. But
<br />originally, when the Downtown Improvement Plan came out, the Downtown Improvement Association was supposed to have
<br />some say as to design aspects and things like that. That never really came to fruition as far as them ever being asked. My
<br />assumption is that Planning and Building, the individual departments, would take care of their own business.
<br />HERKES: Okay.
<br />RAY: Okay. Sue, you’ve got a question?
<br />IRVINE: Yes. I actually just went and looked at our Charter concerning the Hawaii Redevelopment Agency, and the only
<br />thing it says is ‘The status of the Hawaii redevelopment agency shall not be affected by this charter.’ That lends me to believe
<br />that maybe we can’t do away with it by Charter.
<br />REED: We understood that it can be, but we understood, also, that the life of the agency was for, according to Mr. Takase, 35
<br />years after the first building permit was issued after the ‘60 tidal wave. So, I guess it took four or five years to issue the first
<br />building permit once this whole area was cleared out and things started to develop after that. There was probably a
<br />moratorium on building for several years.
<br />YUEN; Actually that provision has been in the Charter since 1968. There was a Hawaii Redevelopment Agency before we
<br />had a Charter. It was established under State Law that all the counties could have redevelopment agencies. At that time, there
<br />was federal money that came in and would be funneled into these redevelopment agencies. So there was this agency. They
<br />did the Kaiko’o Redevelopment largely. The Charter had that in there, probably because nobody could figure out what to do
<br />with in the Charter at the time, because it’s sort of a half-State, half-County type-agency. They had it going. They didn’t want
<br />to mess it up by putting something different in the Charter so they just left it there. After the Kaiko’o Project was done and
<br />built, there were a number of regulatory-type issues that remain. All the buildings have things that you might call like
<br />restrictive covenants. They’re not exactly restrictive covenants, but they’re controls on buildings. And the redevelopment
<br />agency retained the right to approve or deny changes like that, uses of the buildings, and so forth. And so it had that function
<br />even when it stopped having money. In the mid-80's,
<br />there was some hope that downtown Hilo could be redeveloped and the redevelopment agency, which had not had any
<br />members for several years, was re-established, and came out with the Redevelopment Plan for the Downtown, which has
<br />some design-type criteria which, I think, are being reviewed by the redevelopment agency currently. And those functions
<br />could be transferred to the Planning Department to do as part of their permit reviews, and to the Department of Public Works
<br />as part of their permit reviews. The hope, in the mid-80's was, that there would be some redevelopment money to come in to
<br />actually do projects in the downtown but that never materialized. So, in brief, you folks will have to remind me, if we put this
<br />in the Charter, to take that part out of Article XVI, that says it shall not be effected, and the Charter can be changed to
<br />eliminate the redevelopment agency.
<br />HERKES: So we can just take it out? Do we need to insert the other language, or can we just eliminate it?
<br />YUEN: I’m not sure it would need to be printed in the Charter. It could be adopted as an amendment, the agency becomes
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