Landowners make pitch to planners

WAILUKU - About 40 landowners, from giant plantations to owners of small lots, pitched to the Maui Planning Commission on Tuesday, asking to be included within the urban-growth boundaries being worked out as part of the revised county General Plan.

Or, in the case of Doug Poseley, to get all his lot at Olowalu inside the boundary. As drawn, the urban-growth boundary runs right through his lot, apparently making it unusable.

Chairman Wayne Hedani opened by explaining the unusual format: Each developer would be given five minutes, and he asked commission members to keep their questions brief, which they did. As a result, the panel heard the presentations but did not have much time to move on to the general discussion of the "Directed Growth Strategy." That will come at a later session.

The idea, Hedani explained, was to get the outlines of the projects before the commission, but without giving the developers an opening to clog up the proceeding by having "300 people coming before us to give three minutes' testimony" in favor of each of the 44 needy projects. He thanked the would-be developers for generally accepting the setup.

Planning Director Jeff Hunt also thanked them for mostly respecting his request not to dump a lot of projects on the doorsill at the last minute.

This was probably tempting, since Hunt has said the department would not support any amendments to the community plan while it is in process - a process that is taking years longer than contemplated.

He said, however, that "we will revisit our policy of nonsupport" once the commission has gotten a look at the possibilities.

In order to comply with the open meetings law, the setup had to accommodate public testimony, which was moved to the end of the day. By that time, several would-be testifiers had left, but there was nothing shocking in most of the testimony. The Save Honolua Coalition asked the commission to save Honolua, and Maui Land & Pineapple Co. and Alexander & Baldwin asked it to put their joint Haliimaile proposals within the urban-growth boundary line.

Most of the projects are well-known, and some are ancient.

Villages of Leiali'i, for example, has been planned since 1988. The state Housing Finance and Development Corp. asked that all, not just part of it, be slated for development. Also in West Maui, Kaanapali Development Co. asked for its Wainee and Kaanapali 2020 projects.

Kaanapali Land's Howard Hanzawa noted that the first had been the subject of regular community meetings for seven years and the second for 10 years. He dropped the closest thing to a bombshell at the meeting when he said that the latest community input had led the company to delete the golf course from Kaanapali 2020 and add a cemetery.

The public testimony provisions of state law have led to a logjam in county budget and community plan hearings, where highly organized pressure groups bus in dozens of supporters, whose mostly repetitive testimony makes meetings long but unproductive.

Hedani said the novel setup used Tuesday, devised with the Planning Department and with some informal consultation with the developers, was intended to give everybody a voice "without making the system inoperative."

Even Jonathan Starr, a member not always happy with the way Hedani runs the meetings, was satisfied when he learned that the nondeveloper testifiers would be offered the same time limit - five minutes - as the developers. The usual limit is three minutes, plus "one minute to finish up."

Until recent years, these three-minute limits have been more like New Year's resolutions than rules, but both the County Council and the planning commission have taken to using timers and, most of the time, calling an end when the beep sounds.

And so it was Tuesday, with the 40 presentations squeezed into about six hours, not counting the open testimony at the end.

* Harry Eagar can be reached at heagar@mauinews.com.