2019-01-03 Public Testimony Transcript - Piilani Partners SMA 18-070

Home

elephant in the room? And, each and every one of you have a duty to adhere to the Geneva and Hague Convention and do your job, and the Planning Commission of not allowing the steamroller that is wiping life off the planet. That is the United States. Kona is going to run out of water. They're putting all their water into who? Americans coming over for their holidays. What happens when we need the water from our aquifer to give to our own people? Well, it got all bottled up and shipped off so someone can make some money. Who's going to make the money? Not the people here. My prayer is that you take this as an opportunity to change things. To be a planning commission. To be a committee. To be a legislature. To be whatever board it is that we sit in front of that says oh I looked around the room and I listened to the people and they're right, and this project is done. Now, let's go and do some real work. Because maintaining the status quo and keeping terrible things from happening over and over isn't progress. That's us just doing everything we can to make things not be that much worse. Progress is going and rehabilitating. Progress is saying there doesn't need to be a single more plastic bottle manufactured on Earth ever. Let alone a new company to make more of it. Every single one of you, you have been to the ocean. You have picked up this plastic in your hands. Every single one of you. There is not a person on Earth who has not seen the ravaging of plastics. Enough is enough. When somebody comes and tries to violate my physical body, I have the right to say no. It's not very well respected most of the time, but I have that right. And, our Earth is doing everything she can to be a voice through us to say no, and we shouldn't need a laundry list of all the reasons why. No means no. I oppose this project, and any other further commercialization of plastics, of petroleum, or the abuses of water in Hawaii. STITZ: Hello, my name is Julie Stitz. I'm going to keep it short. I want to say that I strongly oppose this project. Our oceans are clearly past the points of—we can't, we can't continue going on doing what we've been doing with plastics. The oceans can't breathe. We can't exploit our resources here. It's a bad project for our community and for the people, and it has nothing good to offer any of us here. Thank you. PAI: Aloha mai kakou. My name is Nani Pai. I oppose the Piilani Partners water bottling company. A little bit about me. I spent 31 years as an educator, most at Kamehameha both on Oahu and here on Moku O Keawe. One of the things I taught when I taught grades three to five was the importance of the ahupua`a system, and critical to that was the understanding, I think, of wai or water, fresh water. And, so, when this proposal came up, I thought, I thought about it. I read about it. You know, trying to keep abreast of what's happening both here and abroad, and I thought well, I'm going to come and see if, if my voice lends to the greater voices in the room. So, the importance of wai. In—when these islands were first populated, it didn't even half resemble of what you see today or even a hundred years ago, but just like today, the ability to get fresh water was important. So much so that when you—the measure of wealth to our people was the word waiwai and, you know, I don't know, I apologize for coming late, but that might have been already shared by some of the people that provided testimony or earlier. EXHIBIT C 16