MIN CHARTER 2019-01-25 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -7 January 25, 2019 feel angry as a resident of this island that this issue would come up again one more time. A waste of taxpayer money and it is just kind of well I guess the feeling that the voters voted, and they voted, and they voted, and still the ability of the Mayor to just ignore it. So I am here to speak for a very specific reason. I am the President of the Friends of Ainy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden and we are on the cusp of receiving financial assistance from the PONC fund. It is going to make all the difference. We are buying the garden. We are buying the garden for the people of this island. It is not going to belong to an off island person anymore. The Bishop Museum got itself in a mess and we are going to buy this and we hope that... it is not a hope, when we receive money from the PONC fund, this issue of perpetuity, the garden has basically raised enough money from the State of Hawai`i, from Legacy Lands, we are the first federally funded community garden in the Pacific region. This is a huge feather in the cap of this island. It is just amazing, $550,000 is going to come to us and in the fine print at the end, the garden is never allowed, never allowed to be sold. It is impossible. We have to change the Articles of Incorporation to state that if we should ever run into financial problems, not that we would dissolve or sell, but that we would merge into another organization, a like-minded organization to preserve forest in perpetuity. So when I see the County stepping out on this, I would have to say brittle, thin ice of somehow reneging on you know, real estate contracts, I would just run away from that a thousand times. So you have heard, I am sure you can tell that I am you know, I am no, no, no, and yes, yes, yes, to get a paid professional person to assist. There are millions of dollars in this fund and there are many suitable pieces of property on this island that can go into this and we should be proud. We should—who cares what the other islands, if they have a little PONC fund or a big PONC fund, come on, we are the Big Island of Hawai`i, we have the most land, we are the hope for the State of Hawaii. This is where the tourists want to be. They want to experience our beauty. They will never experience it if it is all chopped up and we are seeing it in IMAX theaters because there is no reality left. Thank you very much for listening to all of our very peculiar opinions. CHR. ADAMS: Thank you. Ms. Morin you will be next and if I could have Mr. Warshauer please come up please. MARIE MORIN: Proposal No. CA -7 and CA -13 in opposition and Proposal No. CA -9 in support. MS. MORIN: Yeah, uh, my name is Marie Morin. I am a retired wildlife biologist who has worked in Hawai`i for many years. I am speaking as the Secretary of the Friends of Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden of which Maile is the President and a very hard act to follow. Anyway, 1 do want to point out that our membership at this point, we are only, we are not even three years old as a non-profit and we have 450 members and every one of them strongly supports our acquisition of the garden from the museum. I also wanted to say to Brenda Ford and Debbie Hecht that you are my new heroes for going at this three times and hopefully this won't have to keep happening. I of course am against Page 24