2018-10-18 Leeward Exh C (AMEND REZ 926)

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KAY: Yeah. VITOUSEK: Has the County Cultural Resources Commission reviewed the preservation plan? KAY: At the time the preservation plan was drafted and submitted, I don’t believe our Cultural Resources Commission was seeded. So, no, they have not. VITOUSEK: Okay, but, I mean, now we do have the Cultural Resources Commission, and, you know, according to Hawai‘i Revised Statutes 6E-42 State Historic Preservation Division is required to have the opportunity to review and comment on mitigation plan that affects a permit, and, ultimately, it’s the County of Hawai‘i, or the permitting agency, in this case the County of Hawai‘i’s responsibility to make the actual determination. At this point if these guys have been held for years and years on end, and the public is losing out of that as not being able to access the property, at some point I would think that, because the County has this Cultural Resources Commission in place, the County has to make its own determination as to whether or not this preservation plan is acceptable per these permitting conditions, and review that so that the project can have some knowledge on whether they are in compliance or not and whether these sites are being maintained appropriately. KAY: We can certainly follow up with the State Historic Preservation Division and see where they are at with that. And the way that we direct, the way that we engage the Cultural Resources Commission is at the call of the Director to have them review a project or an application or something like that, so if it’s the pleasure of the Commission to direct the Director to do that, we can take that under consideration or we can have the Director kind of address that at this point— VITOUSEK: Sure. KAY: —sorry to put you on the spot. VITOUSEK: I mean I definitely don’t feel like I can direct the director to do anything, but I can make a recommendation that, you know, something like this where there is a clear need to have public access into that area for the community to have to be able to appreciate these resources that are down there. And a department is not meeting its regulatory time periods. And because of the way that the historic preservation laws are written, it is ultimately the County’s responsibility to move forward on that. And because the County has the commission, it seems like they are adequately suited to deal with that. YEE: More of a higher level comment would be I just met with Susan Lebo and Sean from SHPD, probably two weeks ago, to have a very private conversation around their untimely response to things. They certainly recently again lost their archaeologist on this side of the island, so that hasn’t helped the situation any more. But they are expecting, they were approved for more staff. It’s just trying to get the bodies into SHPD to do the work. But I also think I have very good communication with them right now, and we can try to have them move things up in the priority, but in a larger scheme there’s just a lot of bottlenecks with SHPD, which I’m 13 EXHIBIT C