Why? (lot sizes)

[Haaheo okole puka]

The single county system worked here up until the 1960's. After that, as Rob pointed out, it became unbalanced with regard to the appropriation of funds. As an example, if one were to place the island of Hawaii over the top of any of the West Coast States, they'd see several counties are covered by this island. The span between the populated areas here is fairly big and an expectation to see equal distribution amongst those areas is fairly unreasonable as we have seen.
The property tax base is collected by the County as it is in many states. Thus to collect those revenues it needs to be accomplished as a County. Township typically derive their funding from other state implemented taxation revenues (for example Washington state townships received much of their funding from car tab revenues until that program was restrained by a local initiative, reducing a great deal of funding to those incorporated townships). At this time I don't think the State of Hawaii has a program to fund incorporated townships/cities, that's a whole new mess of measures to make townships happen in a State that has none.

At this point, I don't see a remedy to keep funding here in Puna unless we take control by measure of creating our own county. Then we can focus on our problems without interference from other districts interests. As per any fighting, that wouldn't be our concern. Our concern would be the future of Puna County.