HomeMy WebLinkAboutCOM 0896.035 2022-2024 p /vAG
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From: Jerry Miki cc;
Sent: Sunday, June 2, 2024 12:58 PM
To: Council TestimonyLAJ
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Subject: Rejection of Kona Three LLC extension request
1. I am John Gerald Miki,a resident of Kona Vistas Subdivision, County of Hawai'i,State of Hawai'i. I arrugairaj
Kona Three LLC's application for another 10-year extension of development originally approved in 1984. I have firsthand
knowledge of the following facts and will testify if called upon to do so.
2. I am 86 years old, born and raised in Hawaii,who spent summers with my Chinese grandparents(who settled in
Kona in the 1890's) in Kealia in Honaunau in the 1940s. During the school year I attended weekly class at the City lParks&
Recreation Resource Center at the McCoy Pavilion in Ala Moana Park where we kids learned of Holualoa Slides where
warrior chiefs hurtled down rock courses at speeds up to 40 MPH on skinny 12 foot long by six-inch wide sleds on
mamane hardwood runners, often wagering their lands,wives &even their lives against rival chiefs.The Holualoa was a
hair-raising but thrilling tale for us kids.
The Holualoa Slide is an important archaeological feature of pre-Western times that cannot be replaced. In 1994
I took a "Hawaiian Beliefs& Practices" religion class taught by Pualani Kanakaole, Hawaiian Studies professor at U.H.
Hilo. She said that when pre-contact Hawaiians needed to carve a canoe or a tiki god they would take a human sacrifice
(a slave or captured enemy chief) up into the rainforest and search for a suitable tree. Upon finding one,the kahuna
would sacrifice the human before felling the tree with adzes,then bury the body at the base of the tree(trading one life
for another in homage to the forests gods).They then used a holualoa, like the one at the Kona Vista site,to slide the
giant, now sacred log, down the mountain to the sea using ropes.
Twenty-five years ago, my wife and I attended a lecture at the King Kamehameha Hotel by Dr.Yosihiko Sinoto
who told our audience that the largest archeological artifact in the entire Pacific Basin was the Great Holualoa Slide in
Keauhou, Kona.Working with his mentor,the renowned Dr. Kenneth Emory of the Bishop Museum,they determined
that the Slide was 60 feet wide and 6500 feet long,four to six feet in height and built on a 1200 A.D. lava flow.
Commoners smoothed the Slide with ti leaves and banana fronds, but holes remained on its rocky surface.When huge
winter waves pounded the Kona shoreline, a kahuna would stand on the beach and signal with a white tapa flag for the
race to begin. One chief would catch a big wave to race a competing chief speeding down the Great Holualoa;the first
chief to reach the beach and grab the white tapa flag was the winner. Hawaii was a warrior society where men died in
such contests.
As we walked the upper 200 foot slope, Dr. Sinoto said that Bishop Estate had bulldozed the lower 4,500 feet of
the holualoa to build a golf course which one can view today at the at the cut in the old Government Road mauka of the
golf course's Club House and Vista Restaurant, marking the destruction of an irreplaceable Hawaiian artifact.Auwe! How
much more of our Hawaii Island will be destroyed to placate the greed of Outsiders? The County Council should deny
Kona Three another 10-year extension and the land should be purchased by the County.
Respectfully,
John G. Miki
Colonel, US Air Force(Ret)
Comm. N.. b '•3J
Ref. To: ) IlI�i
1 Ref. Date JUN m 4 2024