HomeMy WebLinkAboutCOM 0496.026 2022-2024P/Pu3u
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From: Greg DiBenedetto
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Sent: Monday, October 16, 2023 9:29 AM
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To: Council Testimony
Subject: In support of Bill 82
Aloha to the Health, Safety and Wellbeing Committee,
My name is Greg DiBenedetto and I have been the president of the Black Sands Beach Property Owner's Association
for
3 years, and a resident of Black Sands for 12 years.
I am writing to express my strong support of Bill 82.
As with many of the older, poorly -planned Puna subdivisions, Black Sands subdivision was set up to fail by its creators,
many decades ago. In addition to the usual lack of basic infrastructure and any common-sense neighborhood planning,
Black Sands never managed to enact CC&R and therefore lacks any enforcement mechanism to collect our voluntary
road fees. To enact CC&R today would be politically difficult within our body of residents, and financially out of reach
due to legal fees.
As such, we have kept our road fee low for years (we just raised it to $50 per year), and still only receive payments from
less than 25% of property owners on an annual basis. Strangely, about 80% of our road fees are paid by absentee
owners, mostly on the mainland, many of whom have never even been to visit their lot. This demonstrates clearly the
lack of buy -in our road association receives from our disappointed residents.
We have tried to develop alternate income streams to help fund our roads: We have received donated lots from
generous owners, which we have sold on the market with proceeds going into our road fund (rather thanuse such a gift
for a new park or community garden, for example); we also now own and manage 32 mailboxes for our owners,
generating money for the roads, while also filling in inexcusable gap in service by US Postal Service.
We regularly receive complaints from our residents about the impassable conditions of some of our roads. Their
complaints are, unfortunately, well-founded, because our annual revenue provides only enough money to mow the road
easements on 3 of our main roads, and to fix potholes on these same roads every couple of months. Very occasionally
we are able to find time and money to do special clearing projects on other roads that have become an immediate crisis
due to aggressive cane grass, guavas, etc. Even less occasionally, we are able to scrounge enough money to reseal the
asphalt on one of our prinicipal roads.
The expense of doing any major capital improvement (such as paving our 3rd and most deteriorated principal road) has
been estimated at about 10 times our annual revenue, and those bids are now several years old and likely to be much
lower than actual current costs. Indeed, the only way we have been able to pave our main roads at all in the past was by
receiving the favor of leftover scraps from improvement projects on Highway 130. We have been living on crumbs for
decades.
The effect of this long term neglect is to leave our residents subject to isolation from essential services - such as
ambulances, fire department vehicles, and even package deliveries, not so mention unnecessary car damage and
repairs.... It also fosters a general sense of neglect and abandonment in our own neighborhood.
We applaud and and strongly support the County to lend a helping hand to the least served Puna residen ,.in the,- .
way that Bill 82 is designed to do.fflA
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1 Rif. To:
Ref. Dated 7 2023
We understand that it might be impractical for the County to assume full ownership and responsibility for these private
roads. But Bill 82, if implemented as written, can help subdivisions like Black Sands catch up on years of deferred road
maintenance, to the point where the management load going forward might actually be within our reach. My hope for
the future is that we can make enough improvements to rally our residents to become involved in further improvements
— it is usually easier to recruit people for a winnable fight than for the clearly losing cause that our roads have become.
Help us help ourselves.
Mahalo Nui,
Greg DiBenedetto
President
Black Sands Beach Property Owner's Association