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redevelopment agency shall not be affected by this charter.' That lends me to believe that maybe we can't do away with it by Charter. • REED: We understood that it can be, but we understood, also, that the life of the agency was for, according to Mr. Takase, 35 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 building permit once this whole area was cleared out and things started to develop after that. There was probably a moratorium on building for several years. YUEN; Actually that provision has been in the Charter since 1968. There was a Hawaii Redevelopment Agency before we had a Charter. It was established under State Law that all the counties could have redevelopment agencies. At that time, there was federal money that came in and would be funneled into these redevelopment agencies. So there was this agency. They did the Kaiko'o Redevelopment largely. The Charter had that in there, probably because nobody could figure out what to do 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 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 built, there were a number of regulatory -type issues that remain. All the buildings have things that you might call like restrictive covenants. They're not exactly restrictive covenants, but they're controls on buildings. And the redevelopment agency retained the right to approve or deny changes like that, uses of the buildings, and so forth. And so it had that function even when it stopped having money. In the mid -80's, there was some hope that downtown Hilo could be redeveloped and the redevelopment agency, which had not had any members for several years, was re-established, and came out with the Redevelopment Plan for the Downtown, which has some design -type criteria which, I think, are being reviewed by the redevelopment agency currently. And those functions could be transferred to the Planning Department to do as part of their permit reviews, and to the Department of Public Works 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 actually do projects in the downtown but that never materialized. So, in brief, you folks will have to remind me, if we put this 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 eliminate the redevelopment agency. HERKES: So we can just take it out? Do we need to insert the other language, or can we just eliminate it? YUEN: I'm not sure it would need to be printed in the Charter. It could be adopted as an amendment, the agency becomes abolished, and then would be just not in the Charter anymore. It's just abolished. I've got to think a little bit about the best way to do that. And the other thing I want to look at is I want to talk with Gerald Takase about this sunset in '99 to make sure that this is necessary to abolish it. If it is the wish of the Commission to do away with it, I think we are going to need to abolish it because I think what happens in '99, is that it loses all its control of the Kaiko'o Redevelopment Project but would still remain in existence as a Commission with nothing much to do.