Developers of a proposed light industrial park in Lualualei Valley want more time to secure adequate access to the site, since one government official after another has told them that the project will not likely receive the approvals it needs without that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During hearings over the past several months on whether to redistrict the relatively isolated 96-acre site from Agriculture to Urban, some members of the state Land Use Commission warned representatives of Tropic Land, LLC, that if the company could not secure a long-term agreement with the U.S. Navy to use its Lualualei Valley access road by the close of the hearing, it was unlikely they would support the project.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The state Office of Planning has also conditioned its support of the project on the company acquiring long-term access along the road, among other things.<\/p>\n
As a number of testifiers made clear during the hearings, nearby Hakimo Road, a city road that winds through agricultural and residential lots, is not a suitable access to the site, which is likely to include a base yard for large trucks in the area.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s own traffic assessment concluded that the project would add hundreds of cars an hour to Farrington Highway, where traffic has already been classified as unacceptable by state Department of Transportation standards. Even with mitigation, the traffic situation would still be unacceptable, the assessment found.<\/p>\n
University of Hawai`i professor Panos Prevedouros, testifying last month before the LUC as a traffic expert, said that because Farrington Highway cannot handle any more cars, the commission should not consider a land use change.<\/p>\n
When asked by Bryan Yee, the deputy attorney general representing the OP, what part of his expertise and training he used to come to that conclusion, Prevedouros said, \u201cThe part that is common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although access along Lualualei Naval Access Road would do little to alleviate traffic on Farrington Highway generated by the industrial park, it would reduce the likelihood that the additional cars would clog Hakimo Road, which the OP has called \u201csubstandard.\u201d<\/p>\n
The LUC has taken no official action regarding access, but Tropic Land\u2019s attorney took the concerns expressed during the hearings by commissioners Normand Lezy and Charles Jencks seriously.<\/p>\n
By the time the evidentiary portion of the hearing closed last month, Tropic Land had not secured a long-term access from the Navy. Project manager Arick Yanagihara told the commission that the company had accepted the Navy\u2019s offer of a five-year license for now and is negotiating something longer in the meantime. Yanagihara says his company has asked for at least a 30-year easement, a term that the OP seems agreeable to.<\/p>\n
At last month\u2019s hearing, Jencks told Yanagihara, \u201cYou\u2019re a banker. … What do you think the odds are of getting a loan without access?\u201d<\/p>\n
According to correspondence provided to the commission, negotiations between Tropic Land and the Navy had been going on for more than a year and a half. Lezy told Yanagihara that he was puzzled why the company had not made more progress.<\/p>\n
On February 2, the LUC directed parties to the redistricting case, including the Office of Planning, the City and County of Honolulu, and the Concerned Elders of Wai`anae, to file their recommendations to the commission by February 24. The commission would have likely decided on the petition some time after April, but on February 15, Tropic Land attorney William Yuen filed a motion with the LUC to extend for 90 days the time for filing recommended findings of fact and conclusions of law and to reopen the hearing. The LUC was scheduled to decide on his request late last month.<\/p>\n
In his motion, Yuen stated that Tropic Land seeks until June 17 to introduce into evidence a written agreement with the Navy for a long-term easement to use Lualualei Naval Road for access from Farrington Highway.<\/p>\n
Yuen wrote that he was in negotiations with the Navy and anticipated that Tropic Land would reach an agreement with the Navy by June 17.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, at the other commission …<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
A day after Yuen filed his request with the LUC, the City and County of Honolulu\u2019s Planning Commission held a hearing on revisions to the Wai`anae Sustainable Communities Plan, which includes the spot zoning of the industrial park site.<\/p>\n
Community members — in almost equal numbers of supporters and opponents of the project — filled the meeting room at Kapolei Hale City Hall on February 16.<\/p>\n
A handful of supporters wore matching T-shirts announcing their love of Nanakuli, while an almost equal amount of young adults, some of them interns at MA`O organic farms, wore \u201cNo panic, go organic\u201d T-shirts and held signs that read \u201cMalama `Aina, protect ag lands,\u201d \u201cGrow food, not concrete,\u201d and \u201cStop the [purple] spot,\u201d referring to the color used in maps to identify urban zoning in the proposed plan revision.<\/p>\n
A day before the meeting, Alice Greenwood of the Concerned Elders of Wai`anae and Marti Townsend of KAHEA: the Hawaiian-Environmental Alliance, wrote the commission requesting that member Kerry Komatsubara recuse himself from voting on the plan, since he helped prepare Tropic Land\u2019s redistricting petition to the LUC.<\/p>\n
Komatsubara did not attend the meeting the next day and before testimony got underway, commissioner John Kaopua also recused himself. Kaopua is a member of the Nanakuli-Ma`ili Neighborhood Board, which voted the night before to support the Tropic Land project.<\/p>\n
Most of the testimony against the plan focused on the need to preserve agricultural land in the valley.<\/p>\n
Candace Fujikane, a University of Hawai`i English professor, presented a map to the commission showing all of the pig and chicken farms in Lualualei Valley, one of them as close as 70 feet to the proposed industrial park site. She described how the urbanization of Kalama Valley years ago pushed pig farmers to Wai`anae and suggested that the park would displace them even further. She added that before the land was bought for golf course development in the late 1980s, it had been farmed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is fertile land. We need to keep land available for the MA`O kids,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
A number of testifiers, including retired Wai`anae physician Fred Dodge, argued that the city administration should not have included the industrial park in the proposed revisions, since most of the community appeared to have opposed it at a hearing on the plan held by city consultants last November.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re essentially debating the future of what the community will look like,\u201d Cynthia Rezentes told the commission. She noted that while much of the community has consistently expressed a desire that Wai`anae remain \u201ccountry,\u201d she asked, \u201cHow do you define that? How do you include jobs that are not agrarian?\u201d<\/p>\n
She argued that the plan needed to go back to the community to allow for more discussion of the proposed industrial park (formally known as the Nanakuli Community Baseyard) and to give the time to LUC to decide whether or not to redistrict the land.<\/p>\n
Rezentes and MA`O farms managing director Gary Maunakea-Forth suggested that the revised plan was already out of date, given the movement in recent years toward food security.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you pass this, it\u2019s missing an opportunity to plan for agriculture for not only this area, but for the whole state,\u201d Maunakea-Forth said.<\/p>\n
Patty Teruya, chair of the Nanakuli-Maili Neighborhood Board, countered that keeping the country country has only resulted in things like unemployment and trash dumping in her community. She added that most of the people opposing the baseyard are from outside Nanakuli, where the project is sited.<\/p>\n
Nanakuli has been too rural for too long, she suggested. \u201c\u2018Country country\u2019 did not bring jobs or economic development,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Amber Demarco, a 20-year-old Wai`anae resident, also supported the project, saying she left the mainland to come home, only to find a job th
\nat forced her to leave her house at 4 a.m. and return at 11 at night.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need jobs,\u201d she said. \u201cChange is coming. It\u2019s gonna happen. I have nothing against farmers [but] I\u2019m into marketing. I\u2019m into freelancing.\u201d<\/p>\n
At times during the hearing, tensions between the two sides flared with park opponents booing supporters of more development and supporters grumbling when opponents spoke against the construction industry. Others heckled the commission\u2019s chair when he cut off testifiers who passed their three-minute time limit.<\/p>\n
Even with Rodney Higa\u2019s strict enforcement of the limit, there just wasn\u2019t enough time for everyone to be heard. Just before 6 p.m., with some 20 people still waiting to testify, the commission decided to continue the hearing at a later date.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If and when the commission accepts the plan, it will then be forwarded to the City Council for final approval.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all about jobs<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Project proponents have all said it will provide the Wai`anae community with much-needed job opportunities, but whether or not the industrial park will actually provide those jobs is impossible to know.<\/p>\n
KAHEA\u2019s Townsend (who also is the attorney representing Concerned Elders before the LUC) has suggested that given the current character of Wai`anae, local businesses aren\u2019t likely to flock to the park. Even if it\u2019s approved, the park will be empty, she argued to the Planning Commission.<\/p>\n
Tropic Land\u2019s Yuen told Environment Hawai`i that some businesses have expressed interest in buying some of the three dozen or so lots proposed, but because the land will be divided under a condominium regime, \u201cstate law expressly says you can\u2019t sell lots in a condo until you register the condominium. We\u2019re not there yet and that precludes us from offering lots to anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
At least one supporter who attended the LUC meeting said she believes that the industrial park may include land for a farm incubator, but Yuen said that he was not aware of any organization that had expressed an interest to use the land for that purpose.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe intent is to sell industrial lots. That\u2019s the kind of zoning we\u2019re trying to do.<\/p>\n
If it\u2019s going to be for industrial lots, I don\u2019t think farming is going to be a permitted use in that area. Our view is that there are a lot of other lands available for farming,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Yuen said he was not sure what the lots will sell for, but was sure it would not be for $30 million, as one opponent had suggested at the Planning Commission meeting.<\/p>\n
Yuen clarified that $30 million is what it will take to develop the entire project, not one lot. \u201cTo throw that out is misleading,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
(For more on this issue, read last month\u2019s cover story, \u201cState, City Commissions Face Tough Decisions on Proposed Industrial Park in Lualualei Valley.\u201d All articles published in Environment Hawai`i<\/i> are available on our website: www.environment-hawaii.org.)<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n — Teresa Dawson<\/i><\/p>\n Volume 21 Number 8, March 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Developers of a proposed light industrial park in Lualualei Valley want more time to secure adequate access to the site, since one government official after another has told them that the project will not likely receive the approvals it needs … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-march-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}