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

Home

Hawaii County Charter Commission -6 December 14, 2018 Harry in Kohanaiki. Kohanaiki is very rare. We worked for a year with the owners and we had great owners. Harry worked on that, we worked with the opposition people over in Kona and we got that to happen, but you don't see Kohanaiki happening anywhere else in all of Hawai`i. I would venture that that is a rarity and it is because we put the time in the effort in to make that happen. It was great. It doesn't happen often. The other thing I wanted to mention is that you know we have had the history, Debbie mentioned it, problems with the people that want to control the amount of money that is in the County and getting, you know, turning down the votes that you know that, I am not going to go into that, it's boring but it was a lot of hard work that the people spoke and that is what you as commissioners are here for. You are at the Mayor's (inaudible), but you are here for the people of this island and 1 am probably going to miss something, but 1 just didn't want to duplicate what everybody has said. The obvious things that the Army, the state people, are not going to fund something if they think that you are going to turn around and sell it to someone else. Another thing that the voters did not vote for is bathrooms, buildings, and roads. They voted for open space, not for anything else and you know we need to keep that in mind. If this is what the people said in their vote, we want to stick with that. They also you know, I just yeah, I ain going to miss something but mainly 1 think what you need to hold in your minds as your job doing this, is what did the people ask for, what did the majority of the people ask for. The other thing, I am going to go to CA -9, we should have done this in the very beginning but what do we know? This is all grassroots. I mean Debbie and 1, we made signs. We didn't have them printed up. We painted and made signs in the beginning. We didn't know what we were doing in the beginning, but we had a lot of grassroots support. We should have probably put the person that worked on this project into the project but we didn't know. We trusted Harry. I mean we even trusted Harry so much we didn't, we said hey, Harry, if you need this money for you know a hurricane or whatever, you know, you can take from this fund. In the beginning that is how it was and so they trusted that a good person would be put in that was passionate about the land and that would do a good job for us. He got a guy that had been retired, he pulled him back in, the guy sat at a desk, he didn't answer phones, he didn't really do a lot. He wasn't passionate. You guys are all passionate about something and that is why you are sitting here in front of me. This guy was not passionate about anything. He didn't do the job. It backed up and backed up and then the people that took over it were doing it not even part-time, like a third of part-time and it as you have heard, it takes a lot of time to put this all together and so, what I want to say to you is that we need a person in there that's passionate about land, that's paid for by the two percent and that knows the job and gets it done and also works with the Trust for Public Land. The Trust for Public Land over in Oahu puts away thousands of acres for ag, for everything conservation, for everything, and conservation lands can be sold. State conservation lands can be sold all over the place. We lock the land into conservation and so what this person would do is work with Trust for Public Land Page 28