MIN CHARTER 2018-12-14 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -6 December 14, 2018 here to speak for saving our lands and honoring the wishes of our citizens who have signed petitions and supported land to be purchased and it is before they are lost. We gathered almost 10,000 signatures as Debbie said when we did the first campaign and it was a wonderful experience to meet people and realize how much it was important to them to have land saved for future generations. Public land is our legacy for generations to come. We believe it is critical that we save our land before it is all privatized, degraded and inaccessible to the public. Some developers have failed to take care of the `aina an example of this is the failure of Waikaloa resort to protect the petroglyph fields. They have watered their golf course and made it possible for weeds and trees to grow in the field and it breaks up the vegetation, breaks up the lava. Many smaller developments are problematic too. Many property owners have obtained subdivision developments along the ocean adjacent to a forest or a historic trail. Too many of them later block the easements or encroach upon them and get away with it because the County will not enforce the conditions of the subdivisions. Some of them are even impassable because of the difficult terrain or the loss you know where a cliff where some of it collapses. The planners don't even look at the land to realize that the easement they are requiring is useless. The only way to preserve our important lands and our easements is for the County to purchase important lands and allow responsible entities to manage and protect them. Thank you very much. CHR. ADAMS: Thank you very much for your testimony. If I could ask Gary Harrold please to come up to the table. Mr. Vicente. DWIGHT VICENTE: Communication No. 10.1, Communication No. 21, and Communication No. 24, commenting. MR. VICENTE: Good afternoon, my name is Dwight Vicente. I am representing Hawaiian Kingdom. On approval of the minutes, I reserve the right to clarify any of my statement I had made in the past. Communication No. 10.1, the election problem we have here, goes way back to the amendment to the constitution or the forced constitution on King Kalakaua, 1887. Where it was required that you be a U.S. citizen to vote here and it still exists today if you read the voter registration requiring one to be a U.S. citizen. Most people here are not U.S. citizens. They were not naturalized to one of the 13 states. Nor are they 14 amendment citizens, federal citizens, former slaves in the 13 slave states, and under Article five of the Northwest Ordinance that's the limits of the 14th amendment. Moving on to Communication No. 21, there are no public lands here. Under the Mahele, the lands are either crown or government lands all subject to native tenant rights. You hear a lot of times people talking about public access, what about native access under the Mahele and lands are not purchased or privatized. It is all under the Mahele. Its lease lands. Under King Kalakaua, 2.4 million acres of lands were leased for 25 years. Those leases were subject to by the lessee as a quiet title. They claimed to own the land and that is the problem we have Page 25