2019-03-07 Hearing Transcript - William Quinn Pahoa Farm & Garden

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be required to submit an access assessment prepared by a professional engineer for review and acceptance by the Department of Transportation. The assessment should include both verification of sight distance and an evaluation of the driveway for commercial operation. The Applicant has chosen not to conduct the required access assessment prior to the Planning Commission hearing or approval of the permit essentially. The Planning Director cannot support a Special Permit for a commercial use if a safe access for that commercial use cannot be ensured. The request is contrary to both the General Plan and the Puna Community Development plan. The General Plan Course of Action 14.3.5.1.2(a) states that centralization of commercial activities in Pahoa Town rather than along the Pahoa Bypass to serve the residents of lower Puna shall be encouraged. The subject property is located outside of the Pahoa Regional Town Center boundaries designated in the Puna CDP and, therefore, is inconsistent with the preferred CDP land use pattern. Further, in 2012, the County Council passed Ordinance 12-89 amending the LUPAG Map in the area to support the CDP concept of developing Pahoa as a regional town center by designating land area for higher density Urban uses in the town center and directing commercial and industrial uses away from the Bypass. Finally, the Director typically does not recommend approval for Special Permits on lands located in Urban General Plan designations as changing the zoning of the property is a more suitable land use entitlement process. For the reasons previously stated, the Planning Director is recommending that the Planning Commission deny the application for Special Permit. Since the last hearing, the Applicant has submitted a letter to us asking us to reconsider or giving us an update on what he's done to try and identify alternative access from Pahoa Village Road, and then has also indicated that he has engaged an engineer the line of sight issues brought up by Department of Transportation. Just to be clear, DOT asked for not only a sight distance evaluation but also an evaluation of the driveway for a commercial operation. In the February 4th letter to the Commission, the Applicant indicated that they did hire an engineer. They went out to do a sight distance evaluation, but the Applicant was not willing to pay the money before a determination was made on the Special Permit to come up with a report. Again, just to reiterate, DOT asked that all of that be cleared away and approved by DOT prior to us granting the permit. The Applicant has chosen not to do that. There was also another piece of correspondence that came in, and this was a January 29th memo from Department of Land and Natural Resources, State Historic Preservation Division, saying that they had no objections to the Special Permit on archaeological or historical resource grounds. Just to kind of reiterate what we said the last time, the Director feels like this is a good project, but it's located in the wrong place. It's something that from the beginning when the Applicant's representative came in to kind of touch base with us and see generally how we'd support this, we told them right along that this was the wrong place and gave them all the reasons that we stated EXHIBIT D 4