PCDP - Amending the Amendments

[Rob Tucker]

At the conclusion of last nights meeting with Councilwoman Emily Naeole in Pahoa last night I actually learned a little something. Larry Brown explained to me that the most recent proposed amendments (eighteen in number by my calculations) are being put forth to "improve" some of the earlier amendments.

It seems the "repairs" needed some "repair". Reminds me of a line in a movie (Brazil) where a heavily bandaged woman explains "my complication had a little complication".

I didn't learn who is amending the amendments - I assume it is Chris Yuen.

On July 1st, walking into council chambers, I was aware of six proposed amendments. The next day I learned that there were then twenty seven. Walking into last night's meeting I thought there were "only" forty one. At the end of that meeting I understand that there are now fifty nine.

I gotta say that if you need a calculator to count them you better be able to see what's going on.

Question to Larry Brown and Chris Yuen:

Can you provide full link, information and analysis of the content of the (let me calc the number...) thirty two proposed amendments that I have no understanding of. This "community plan" process seems to leave us 48 hours to digest this stuff before the next council meeting. Or do you not have enough........ time?

Thank you all so much.

Rob Tucker
FoPF

[JerryCarr]

So now we have amendments to amendments which may need to be amended themselves. I clearly heard Mr. Brown say that everything would have to go very smoothly for the plan to be enacted with the amendments before the end of the current Council term. Does anybody who has actually observed the workings of the Council and the County Planning Bureaucracy think they can move forward with this on the organizational level of a Japanese railroad schedule? They could not do it separately, and the required process would require them to work in tandem to get it done in time. Whether Councilwoman Naeole knows it or not, the amendment process can either kill this thing by delaying it or diluting it to the point that it does not resemble the plan the citizens produced.

Not feeling too cheerful about our prospects, but hopeful none the less,
Jerry

[JWFITZ]

After reading the most recent version of the plan myself(that I could get a hold of), I personally came to the conclusion that it really DID need a great deal of work, and although I agree with the ideology of the piece in general, am not particularly comfortable with it as it rests. I would at this point probably NOT support it. Generally, I have a tendency to believe that no legislation is better than bad or incomplete legislation, and mistrust the fairness of the system in general. It's far too easy for powered interests to ignore community plans completely, or get variances or simply pay fines, and so often these sorts of projects only clobber the well meaning individual, who will I suspect will be increasingly encumbered by fees, permits, and other non-sense that serves no one except the county clerk who's making a wage doing it. As well, having met a few of of the "draftees" responsible for the plan, I'm even concerned that their heart is not really in the right place--but are more interested in creating a plan that provides a position of authority for themselves, from which to launch their own personal profiteering. Some of those people should back away from their cause--their attitude does the whole a disservice.

Of course one finds this sort of thing a lot of places, and of course I'm not launching any accusations: simply offering ones thoughtful and hopefully measured take on the process.

[peteadams]

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no legislation is better than bad or incomplete legislation

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One thing that is not characteristic of legislation in general (at any level of government) is that it is created by a truly grass roots effort. While I share your distrust of legislation in general, as it is so often driven by focused special or ideological interests, the PCDP was truly bottom-up and not top-down. It may be rough. It will undoubtedly need to be amended. But we need a baseline by which to judge the amendments. In many reports already it has been alluded repeatedly that special and ideological interests are some of the major sources of these many amendments. Already the grass roots effort of several years is being undermined by the very interests that a community process is designed to minimize. I am strongly in favor of immediately passing the PCDP as the ordinance it was promised to be as a baseline for the future refinement, and hopefully blossoming, of an ongoing community focus.

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other non-sense that serves no one except the county clerk who's making a wage doing it

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Trashing the lowest rungs of an organization, corporate or government, for making a wage is gratuitous and inappropriate. Do you trash the grocery check-out person because of the price of milk? If the county clerk messes up the fees you are supposed to pay, OK, have at them. But if your problem is the existence of the fees, you need to direct your ire at the council persons and legislators that enacted the requirements for the fees.

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As well, having met a few of of the "draftees" responsible for the plan, I'm even concerned that their heart is not really in the right place

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There were at least on the order of a hundred people involved in the PCDP, probably more. It was a truly community effort. Trashing the PCDP based on your perceptions of a "few" people is really pointless.

[JWFITZ]

Sorry, I don't want to be seen as nonconstructive negative. That's not my point.

First, the example you make about the county clerk and your metaphor about the grocery clerk, which is not to the point.

I of course would not begrudge the clerk for the price of milk.

I would, however, begrudge a grocery store that somehow passed legislation to force me to purchase their milk. THIS is what we are speaking of, if legislation is passed that requires new permits, fees, consultations, and other processes that 1) serve no sensible purpose 2) cost me money 3)to the point often were benign small scale operations becomes unprofitable/untenable. If I had confidence that such processes were indeed benign, and were able to be applied fairly and constructively to all, I would feel very differently. At the moment, with a background of nepotism, localism, and low level corruption, I have little confidence in this indeed. In general, we hold those who prosper by corruption accountable at whatever rung of the ladder of corruption they live on.

Second, the PCDP is most certainly NOT a community effort. It is an effort made by a certain small segment of the Puna population, expressing a more or less affluent, elitist mainland attitude. Before anybody gets particularly twisted by that comment, let me point out that by and large the spirit and ideology of the PCDP I would personally wholeheartedly endorse. But, it must be asserted, that the majority of Puna, unfortunately, as we seem too often to forget, is poor, rural, uneducated, and dispossessed. In general, and perhaps my biggest complaint with the plan as it sits, is that to my mind it takes far too little interest in the needs of the average citizen of Puna. I might even go so far to say it seems to cast them adrift.

The average citizen in our area could not give a fink about bicycle trails. They don't care a bit about grubbing and grading, or embellishments to zoning regulation. They'd love to see jobs. The fact is that the development we all hate has been the primary provider of living wage jobs in Puna for the last 10 years. Clearly, the hobby farms we see here and there, and service jobs catering to the retired and elderly are NOT going to replace these lost jobs and there is no indication of any will to pay persons in these fields decent living wages. In fact, there is a clear effort in the PCDP as I read it to arrest such development that HAS paid living wages. I agree this must be done, but it must be done without pulling the plug on livelihoods. It is simply an unfair omission to ignore this issue.

I am in no way "trashing" the plan, again, at least in spirit, if not in particular, I'd support it. Others will trash it. As well, some involved in this process are expert at providing their opposition with ammunition. But, I must say, if you presume to be expert enough to stamp your name on any document that attempts to portray the moral high ground, well, you had best walk on water. Everyone knows that to be the case, and I'm sure those were the rules in the baboon troop for as long as plans were made and agendas were launched.

[punafish]

Ya gotta appreciate getting a contrarian point of view, whether you agree or not.

The PCDP may not be a community effort in the pure sense of the word. And it may also represent an "affluent, mainland attitude" (although some of the folks at the gathering voicing support for the plan didn't look at all affluent to me). But moving out of the complaining mode, I want to know how you get the poor, rural, uneducated, and dispossessed involved in the process? And what if they choose not to be involved? Do you just let development in Puna continue unabated at the whims of the mainland AND local developers? And even if you are an advocate for the dispossessed, how would you possibly know what they want? (Especially if you have a "mainland" mindset.)


Some would argue that development in Hawaii doesn't pay a living wage at all, except for the developers who cashed in on the boom. Listening to friends who work in the construction industry, they say that local developers are the worst at exploiting the poor, uneducated and dispossessed. Even the moke lucky enough to earn a decent wage in construction doesn't have much to show for it now. In this sense the boom-and-bust nature of construction is similar to tourism; it gives you a nice, short-term fix, but nothing long-term to hang your hat on.

I'm not smart enough to answer the questions, just throwing it out there for the ones who are...

[Rob Tucker]

Accepting that there will be contrary points of view I will offer this as a full participant in the PCDP process.

The PCDP started with 130 small group, in the living room, meetings and involved about 1,300 people. Those 1,300 people I describe as "community". The statistics of those meetings show, for example, that people who identify themselves as Native Hawaiian - a group comprising 11% of district population- participated in the start up meetings at a rate of over 22% - twice their demographic strength. One of the underrepresented groups were, as I recall, people who identified themselves as caucasian.

The input from these meetings was referred to regularly and often and used as a basic point of reference in our Land Use Working Group. So while we all might have hoped that 10,000 showed up to give their input I do not think that 1,300 should be dismissed.

The issue of who speaks for those who do not speak was raised regularly by some advocates. Hannah Hedrick was very vocal on that topic. It was hard to find a magic mirror or crystal ball to inform us of the opinions of the uninformed. But we tried.

Point by point I think the PCDP effort, until this final last stage, did a good job of thinking in terms of "we" instead of "me". Here at the end run there are some "me" types that have to play their hands.

We will see what happens soon enough.

I would like to personally apologize to those individuals who feel we did not do their work for them effectively.

[JWFITZ]

Rule and plans by are by very nature always elitist. Governance is those who have the time and power on their hands to either further their own privilege or to assume to know what is best for those who are unable to speak for themselves. No? Still, I'd be very surprised if 1 out of 100 "citizens" of Puna knew anything about the PCDP at all. So, I'd say, not in the pure sense or any meaningful sense is this a community effort. As well, you simply cannot expect poor people, after working menial jobs all day, raising families, and by and large uneducated, uninformed, and prejudiced,and poor spoken, to feel comfortable in a public setting with those educated, empowered, and privileged. I do not believe you can involve such people. You can only advocate for them. And without apologies that is what I am trying to do, once again. Of course, this opens me up to the charge of elitism. Fair enough. I do not personally believe that elitism is necessarily pejorative. Elitism can simply be that of one with more power or privileged aiding another. Of course that is very different than exploiting or ignoring another.

As for developers--I simply do not know the truth. When I first arrived here almost a year ago, speaking with guys on job sites, a semi-pro framer would earn 20 to 25 dollars an hour. That to my mind is par with what is paid on the mainland, and these guys were not finishers. I think that is still mostly the case. In the context of "farm labor" here paying half of that, I'd think this is a major, major loss. This of course is open to dialogue and working out the real details. The real details I do not know. The point in fact that wages are a hot-button topic make me tend to think that today, for the average Hawaiian, things are markedly worse.

Under the PCDP my neighbor would lose his livelihood, if enforced. He works out of his home, and does very fine welding and mechanical work on land zoned ag3, which is not a permit able activity. It isn't even today--strictly, but the current state of affairs with their slack enforcement allow him to provide for himself and his family in a dignified and valuable manner. The PCDP encourages a much more rigorous stance towards such issues, ignoring the entrepreneurial manner in which many local families make their better than average living. I know personally that there is a marked lack of care among some of the framers of the PCDP for such issues. Not surprising, this attidude comes primarily from those who make their living in civil government but not in the private sector. I myself have been specifically threatened with complaints if I were to follow through with my plan to build Hawaiian voyaging canoes on my property under provisions of AG3 as an unpermitted activity--by those whose names appear on the PCDP document itself. All I can say, is that anyone who believes building a canoe in the forest of rural Hawaii is out of touch with either its ecosystems, its history, or its traditions is seriously out of touch. Especially out of touch, in my neighborhood, with crime, smashed abandoned cars, absolutely feral human beings and dogs running amok--to be concerned with gainful employment and a couple hours of saw noise a couple of times a week. . well, what can you say.

[JWFITZ]

Oh, and by the way I have a lot of respect for Hannah and her advocacy.

Credit where credit is due.

[Seeb]

Not to be a wet blanket, But if the districts own council person is against it the likelihood of anything but a evil mutant version being past are extremely slim. It would be nice to be able to see all the amendments before there voted on , the original document has some fubars if you start cobbing on top of that it’s going to be ugly.
I think time to start working on a plan b like - maximum voter turnout


The devil is in the detail