good morning thank you all for coming and your patience waiting today september twenty seventh two thousand and sixteen my county planning commission is called to order  take a moment and recognize our commissioners present we have commissioner good morning chair commissioner robinson commissioner you gosh she commissioner castro marcher and commissioner  at this time we're going to open a four for public testimony and when we should testify any agenda items you may wish to testify now is still waiting for later and this is gives people opportunity to testify now and i have  away for the gender i had comes up so you can either choose to testify now or wait till the gender item comes up one or the other i do have one person sign up here and am sorry davis do you want to testify no ok police identify yourself you have three minutes my name is how davis five sixteen call evie dr i have three parts to my testimony this morning number one is about the commissioner hutson and i'd like to give you a petition max about four that it's the recent one we're requesting that mr hudson reduce himself from the wilson matter and a number of reasons why first of all i went back and i looked when the commissioners  were seated on this committee and i said to myself why is this is wilson not going for a special event special exception permit back in two thousand and twelve well i think i got my answer in two thousand with mrs wilson and then two thousand and fifteen mr hudson was seated on the commission if you take there's dates and you put them together that's twelve thirteen fourteen and fifteen and then mrs wilson applies for special events permit maybe it's a coincidence or maybe i'm just paranoid but it looks like we have four out of nine people seated now that are would be in favor of mrs wilson's permit mr hudson cousin m wilson's house for get togethers i just want to bring that to your attention when you see that petition which is signed by over one hundred thirty people and there's more to come i think this commission should really look at the smell test and the fact that why would you want any type of of conflict of interest shedding shadow over this issue with mrs wilson by having friends and relatives and boyfriends sitting on the commission number two is this petition for the people that live within five hundred feet of mrs wilson's property it was left out of the paperwork turned to your committee by miss flamm or because she only attached it to my intervention i'd like to give you a copy of that and this is also the format that i used for the distance but that was revised so there are actually more people that live within five hundred feet of her house than of originally also also on page one you'll see there's an asterisk next to mr michael name he wished to be removed off of that so i did so thank you last but not least you're sorry we have three minutes that's all any questions from the commission could i just say one thing about the the email that i said in that all the commissioners have i'd like to read that and ask yourself why any commission of a sitting on this board would send a letter to his constituents saying that the notice is was on the front page therefore we have no position then why the public hearings are closed they're not closed and then the last one says the future public ok hearing the testimony is a technicality i think not commissioner danny although i have decided to recuse myself on this particular issue that mr davis is testifying on in light of his circulation of private e mail comments that were going to the board of directors of the phase one members up to subdivision which is not involved in the law in a rich controversy i would like to  good morning commissioners and we are public hearing item number one those here requests from ms debbie mitchell consultant for short term mental home permits for the international colony club and what we have for you today is application we're lumping all seventeen properties together into one public hearing but there are seventeen different applications mr kerr will and hopped we'll make the presentation and sort of explain the circumstance good morning mr chairman and the members of the planning commission and also i thank you to the applicants for showing up on this issue that is going to review a hearing required for short term rental homes because there are two currently within five hundred feet of the proposed seventeen that you're going to be discussing today that was on the twenty fourth of may two thousand and sixteen the council adopted revisions to nine hundred sixty five of the maui county code and the revisions then required that a public hearing would be held if there were more than two within five hundred feet which in this case there are an addition the international colony club was discussed well in name and also by feel a number of times that they represented a unique situation that was going to be addressed in the code change so i in may when the code changed one nine hundred sixty five zero three zero a then allowed a condominium regime which had a subsequently on behalf of the residents many of whom are in the audience today then submitted separate applications all with separate fees in order to be considered for short term mental home use now the international calling club was built in the early sixty's and it ties in to the overall master plan of ghana poly resort there are some historical photos in your brochure that  community this non gated community has been used for vacation rental in fact many of the homeowners were under the impression they could do this and have been paying actually the hotel tax for many years  certainly with regards they've been paying their t a t and g t so in order to become legal with the county of maui's new code we do have seventeen coming in at once this isn't unprecedented there have been changes which reviewed multiple lot owners when it affected all of the individual owners in really the same way so from a administration standpoint instead of having seventeen separate hearings we're going to be looking at these all in one today there's been representative floor plans of a two in a three bedroom that were put into the report the homes are very similar in nature spread out across the area up at the international colony club at twenty seven fifty dollars to drive just to give the commissioner some background there proximately forty one short terminals that have improved in west maui the limit is eighty eight so where are these to be approved today we would be moving towards the limit but we wouldn't be anywhere near the threshold the code says that when we become close to ninety percent of the threshold then the county council will have to review the threshold and they can do whatever they wish but they're still going to have quite a number left before we hit that threshold as i indicated before the i c c was built under this horizontal property regime in the jet hatch dwelling does have its own seventy m k so that allows them to apply for the rental home permits today  you may ask well why are we even here isn't this even isn't this a resort zone well no actually this is own multifamily residential are three residential district so since this is not within the hotel district  they do have to come before this board in order to review for the short term mental harm permit process  that being the case miss debbie mitchell is the applicant she has a power point presentation that's going to go over this i would point out that these are the number of notifications that had to go out  every one of than five hundred feet and what's remarkable is we only had two responses out of all of those so there doesn't appear to be an upswell of opposition for this project so mr mitchell will give the presentation without any other questions will move forward thank you good morning commissioners mr spence that councillor my name is debbie mitchell and i'm here representing seventeen owners of international colony club it's already given a great description of the project it is located plantation condominiums which also do short term rentals this aerial view kind of shows you how it is isolated the red lines indicate the boundaries of the property and the rural kind of poly golf course is a new housing development that is on ag land and they are also conducting vacation rentals so with the exception of the small island there of colombo place which is just east and south of the property it is all either resort or condominium vacation rental area as mentioned there are two short term rental permitted areas in within five hundred feet the first is actually on the property itself it's cottage number forty two and then the second is that twenty eight ten collect a place in is just up the the end of the driveway of calif we drive the property is on ten acres and it was constructed as curt mentioned in one thousand nine hundred sixty four of the red indicate the cottages that have applied so you can see how they're spread out and there are four general parking areas there are not parking areas at each of the cottages they are general parking areas but each cottage is assigned to parking spaces so they are not specifically called out to each parking area but there are enough parking spaces to to accommodate them tracks that run south there and you can see the property is buffered by callup to drive as well as the access road utility road there before the highway this is the old sugarcane train store station which is just to the north and again you see the large western campoli villas there across the highway east facing going up the hill to the left side are where all the coffee plantation lots are located and then just up the hill will take you want to kind of only hillside these are the large resorts which are fronting and just the highway the western kind of ali villas  and you can actually see up there in the left hand corner you can see where the international colony club is located so it is just very edgy sent to this particular development and then lastly to the south is the royal hi resort and consists of the main hotel and then all the additional cottages which are all short term rental callup drive is the main street that goes along the western border facing south and facing north so you  an idea of the size of the street and again the buffer area between the prop the property and the highway the main parking area as large of a comedy it's about thirty six vehicles and then to  the space around the property and you can see from the handout that i gave you where the other parking areas are i've highlighted those in yellow and then additionally a long drive there are designated parking spaces for vehicles so the parking is very adequate without impacting any of the surrounding areas and i would just point out back on this just to the right of that van is the manager's office there is a full time site manager that handles any guests arriving they check in with him he is aware of the vehicles that are there and he handles any repairs and things so there is an on full time on site manager for the property as curt mentioned we're just giving you an example of the through the floor plans of  cottages there all have been individual eyes to some extent but this will just give you the basic layout there from between eight hundred thirty eight hundred square feet the two bedroom as well this is a little view of the neighborhood they're all one story cottages very neat very well kept they have a very mature and well kept landscaping again because of the nature of where the parking areas are located golf carts are often used for guests to unload luggage or food just supplies from the store so you'll see that the golf carts around and again i don't want to give too much you time with the interiors you've seen those in your report they're very neat and tidy two and three bedrooms and the living areas very well done these are just representative of what they all look like this is a great one of the owners provided this is a postcard which i've also included in your package that was from the mid sixty's and international calling the club was developed as a vacation rental in the text in the verbiage on the postcards make reference to vacation rentals your maid service is available so if its intent from the start was a vacation rental situation house and ground rules also when folks are purchased their property they are made aware of the house the ground rules they may frequent mention of long term and vacation rentals about notifying that the the renters must register with the site manager the site is aware of the part of the cars that are on property and where their parking so it deals with it has dealt with vacation rentals from its very inception and on top of this if these permits  granted they will of course be provided with the house rules that apply to this ordinance so those will take precedence over over these as well we have seventeen different applicants the applicants our great majority of them have appeared here today before the council there and make sure we have local residents who are applying we have one resident who has lived there since one nine hundred seventy three and she can testify if you have any questions about what life has been like there what what the property is like we have board members here that are applying we have part time residents and frequent visitors some folks have as we have said have been renting because they thought it was legal to do so they were not aware that it was not and so as soon as it became rather public knowledge that this was happening before the the ordinance was even finalized the changes they contacted me they put down a lot of money and they got this process started so that they would be legal as soon as as was possible so and then there are some new applicants who have not applied before i won't belabor too much with the zoning skirts covered that pretty well but again they are our three multifamily residential and the changes to the statute basically allow this horizontal condo regime for each condominium unit which these are they're all single family separate little houses that they each be allowed to apply for a short term rental home i know there was some look at rezoning but there are folks that live there full time and so it wasn't we weren't able to get enough to actually rezone it there are a couple of folks that were able to grandfather because they were able to produce the records that showed continuous rentals since one thousand nine hundred one but for these seventeen applicants this was the method that they had to to legalize their operations and i went back into the planning committee minn it's and show where when this was being discussed international colony club was mentioned directly as an example of what this change would apply to and so there were several instances where international colony club this is this was the intent of certainly one of the intention of is this change to the ordinance so this portion there were many revisions to the to this ordinance but this particular portion was passed by the planning committee on the fourth of february of this year and then the complete bill was passed at a meeting on the twentieth and i believe it was inactive by the department on the twenty fourth so the entire process was followed seventeen times as kurt can attest here we did three hundred and fifty nine certified  as of the date of today we have one letter of support and one letter of opposition always was a letter of support ok right so we have two out of three hundred fifty nine ok so phone calls were ever received thank you so the one letter of protest that we did receive was from a gentleman on the very fringe on collect a place of the five hundred foot i have done several other applications in that area he has opposed every single one so his his opposition is a short term reynolds it is not to the international colony club i did reach out to this gentleman we sent him a letter and we tend to call and visit but he does not live here full time so we were unable to connect with him but we did reach out via letter a as we mentioned there are two other permits within five hundred feet which is why we are here today before you again want to just reiterate that these owners want to do the right thing they believe they were doing the right thing all the time they were paying their taxes thirty eight taxes they had chosen the hotel rate which is the highest tax rate because they thought that was the appropriate thing for their operation so they they have been paying taxes all along and of course operation of these homes will bring revenues to local businesses and local residents in continued tax revenues to the county value in the state of hawaii this allows this granting these permits will allow local residents and businesses of employment opportunities tourist based companies will also benefit from this and of course again the tax revenues to the county of maui and the state of hawaii we thank you so much for your consideration of this we do have as i mentioned mini of the applicants are here today and we would be happy to answer any questions that you have again we have one of the residents that currently lives there and has been there since  seventy three she can give you an idea of what it's always been like we have the board president is here and we also have the property manager that's handling most of the of the management for the different individuals as well as  rest of the individuals so we thank you very much and hope we can answer any questions you might have thank you very this time we're going to open the floor for public testimony anyone wish to testify please come enforcement and probably the director might wish to allude to this but enforcement is often dime driven by complaints so if there are no complaints or if no one puts in a request for service then enforcement of short term rentals is not normally happening however they have been proactive in recent times and the director can probably speak more to  strategy but it has been just from a complaint or in perspective and it's my understanding from miss mitchell that the applicants are not renting now and so they immediately stopped operations and also in looking at this the department considers this it from a historical perspective i just to to kind of further answer your question i know that there's been comments about short term rentals and whether the commission really likes this process the council has determined the a t f and west my region are appropriate number this is from a historical perspective some place that has been operating in a resort community very different than lonia boko very different than gentleman farms very different than single family houses that have been built recently  so that's how the department would come about in supporting this no notice is a violation were issued for this property how zoning may be going forward in the future with regards to acting short term reynolds that's more of a policy decision and probably the direct can speak to that director thank you mr chairman first let me ask curt were there any were there any complaints no complaints that i that i've ever seen from neighbors regarding rental operations ok so and i think that might fill in one of the blanks for the commissioner the there was some discussion at one of the last i think it was the last planning commission meeting of his planning department doing proactive in force months yes we are  information that person testified about was incorrect when this ordinance was passed there was a big push for proactive and foresman by the county council by members of the public and we pursued we wrote about four hundred notices of warning we you know looked up ads on the internet we did the research to find the exact addresses and then followed up and found the owners and issued notices warning for those those properties we are now following up with those four hundred that we initiated there have been some notices of violation issued i can't tell you how many off the top of my head the but this is this is just our proactive part refer to requests for service or orifices or complaints those are in this kind of case they're pretty much synonymous we get a steady stream of complaints about vacation rentals and we do follow up on those i don't know how many notices warning we've issued i do know that one very enthusiastic gentleman filed about one hundred or a fast is within a period of about two days so i get these notices in my inbox and i was just like wow it was it was the same person  he was proactively looking for enforcement so we are very busy with enforcement and we are pursuing those things diligently we're trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves otherwise it's ineffective dunnage the international colony is outside of kind of play operations association my company's operating area so there's no conflict of interest relative to providing testimony on actually ahead of their time they incorporated projects like the international colony club to be one step above the hotel room type of accommodation within the resort and that's why when something to provide it a little bit more than you can get in terms of odell room as an accommodation the intent of the master plan itself was to contain all of the impacts that hotels and short term runnels have within a confined destination resort so you don't impact the community in which you operate and that was the basic principle behind the mass the planning for the resort and so you don't have what we see today the impacts of short term runnels filtering through all of the residential areas of the communities and creating impacts for residents that had no notice of what was intended for that particular incident in this case the notices provided the subdivision that's immediately next to it i believe came after the international colony club was built and the residents that were there were already aware of the international colony collapse operation at the time they purchased their interests so i would be supportive and from my perspective this would take up sixteen sixty seventy so i think short term rentals that would otherwise be scattered all of victory to be put in the right place from my perspective think you'd only have me for the inside commission a kind of chilly this is probably for the director explain to me the difference between the i c c and pool mana like the difference because i is in my mind i was saying why didn't they just come to the table during pool mana when we were doing the whole pool mana thing and this is sort of separate is it the same or is it different i mean how is how is it how  the how is this different and come on i guess or is it i don't think of that much different my understanding is it was discussed not just this one time at council but and for whatever reason the council declined to include this in robinson anybody can answer this question so whoever can give the answer i understand that there's seventeen different applications on seventeen different lots are they seventeen different tax map keys or are they are there is it one division tax in the as one considered one tax parcel ok here's my comment is i understand that it's a post of been the master planned and people have been renting it but it's in our three tax  so did the the people of i c c go to the tax department and say we're actually working as a hotel and we should be taxed as a hotel and not as the not as accommodation tax but as a property tax they were given the option for their property taxes to choose the what their use of the cottage was some people chose apartments some a few chose homeowner but the majority of the folks chose they it was their option to pick the hotel rate and they delivered it one of the owners when he purchased it was under the apartment number when he purchased it he chose the tax parcel number in his taxes property taxes went up over five hundred percent so this is a delight deliberate i would think of think of it just like a regular condominium project where you have six or eight stories and one hundred different units all of those units on the one piece of property but each one of them are owned by different owners they each one of those units has its own unique tax amount key number it's going from point numbers of her you know of ok i get what you're saying is you know it's still like an apartment so they are taxed on an individual basis ok that's good and and you said this is been going on since one thousand nine hundred one when the grandfathered in or this has been happening hundred sixty four since they were since the inception different owners have come in i'm just saying that there were a few owners that were renting that were able to produce the records necessary for the grandfathering which provided  unbroken proof of rental sit back all the way back to one thousand nine hundred one that was the requirement for grand grandfathering non conforming i guess it's a conforming use or whatever they call it but the rest were not able to produce those records had they been able to they would have been also able to do this but they just didn't have the records to prove it so this was the only mechanism for them to legitimately get their permit and continue renting as as far as grandfathered in i saw where there is only one short term rent those that only one person was grandfathered in as their more no this was the first applicant it's cottage forty two and they applied two years ago i assisted him with fares and they it was in during their application process that it was discovered there wasn't really a consider eighty eight there are those caps are permits available to be gram to they are not they would not include grandfathered you know it's been just  grandfathered at somewhere along the line a uses conforming to use is permitted something changes in the law of a lot of times oh my goodness i think it's one thousand nine hundred one some of our laws change redefined short term versus long term where there was no definition before so if somebody wants to prove that they they can do short term rentals they have to prove that before that date they were doing short terminals and then continuously without a one year break it says if you discontinue a non conforming use for more than a period of a year that extinguishes that to use so they can show that it has been a particular use has been done for since whatever time the law changed to the present that would be considered grandfathering so long as there is not a one year time lapse a gap in that they can continue so since one thousand nine hundred one you know you're talking well over your time in twenty five years you have to come up with records that show that they had been in this use that difficult to do and is getting harder and harder to do as time goes on and properties pass on from one owner to the next to the next so we seldom say that he uses grandfathered simply for this reason they have to show it only the couple there have been able to do that though many more have been short term granted over time and your our application there are a whole lot in that one parking area if you look at your map ok and i'm just it's one of the requirements during check in guest check in is that they check in with the site manager the site manager is located his office is located by the big parking lot but he would then direct them probably in the direction of where the cottages are located manager is aware of those and it would definitely keep those reserve decide for long term residents there are not that many long term residents i think maybe four or five that actually live there and the site manager is well aware of who those are and so if if maybe you can see from the pictures there are cars that are covered with you know car cover so obviously they've been there for a while i would say he would be the one that would direct the individuals to park in and possibly leave those those spaces open for those long term residents because certainly they would they would have priority gibson which is a homeowner from the standpoint of having enough parking space in that particular area for instance if i was a gas and i applied for a cottage right of their guests manager apparently would put some kind of a card or something on the dashboard to tell the people that this particular person is a careless and is authorized to park there that i don't know does anyone in the audience know ok so it's just was full would i know whether they're all authorized sort of sure and i think the residence since this has been an ongoing practice this is something that the residents who live there are accustomed to i would say this that they are are well aware that there are strange cars there all the time and certainly they the reason why the manager site manager is located there is to just provide an overview certainly they would be able to ask him if they had any questions about vehicles because those vehicles are required the guests are required to register those vehicles with the site manager so he would be the resource person for that why are only seventeen people shown up and not everyone because they're not all short term rentals there are some local residents that live there there are some that are rented long term so it's not all it's just the majority of them are short term mental and there there were in all honesty some that chose not to for one reason or another but these are the four and they may have hired another consultant but these i can speak to the ones that have contacted me but they are they're not all short term mental uses who have thanks chair so the other part of this i guess is you know when we get these applications one of the things that i personally look at is is this one of those people that you know is a catch me if you can kind of person you know like they are doing it illegally and then you know they get caught what have you so i guess you know since this is just a bundle of seventeen i can't necessarily drill down on each one of these is i guess there's a couple different things you know g e tax t n t who was a painter who wasn't and then the hotel you know rate you know were there people saying oh i want to get my exemption and they're still doing it you know is is like those kinds of things i just sort of curious about a seventeen where do we land on that i'll just  mr director i'll just say that if if there are other vacation rentals and they choose not to train a permit and they're not operating legally they run a risk of getting caught and getting fined what i'm saying what if there is to say one of these applicants i'm so i'm talking about the applicants themselves and say you know was there somebody that was doing it illegally and saying you know ok i want to they're not paying their they weren't paying their ged they were paying their t eighty they were paying their get their home owners exemption and they were still doing a short term rental but we did get seventeen applications right and with each one of those applications an applicant is required to provide their ged and their t h o t licenses and prove that they they have it now you know well they're required to show that they've been producing paying their taxes correctly all of the seventeen did show that they have t teen g t and when it was really kind of remarkable is that certainly the vast vast vast majority supermajority of it been paying hotel resort tax in addition which is extraordinarily rare for anyone coming in even if they had if they had a private more remarkable is that they actually elected voluntarily for years to pay over telling resort taxes that it's very rare to see any of the applications that have been coming in now whether other people should have done it that's  question but this one is noted that i mean i'm just taking this example here and they were hotel resort for years prior so that's my answer to your question for these people not it would be finalized they took the state were willing to take the step to engage me to make their applications happen so they weren't waiting to find out if it was going to you know be bad or trying to hide they actually as soon as they knew pulled down their advertising and contacted me to start their applications so there was a preponderance of evidence that they were attempting to do the legal thing the right thing they thought they were doing the right thing thank you debbie on the  er that went from the homeowner rate to the hotel rate has it taxes increase over five hundred percent commission robinson thank you the tax rate increases because their profit increases when they're classified as a hotel and they can rent out as a short term rent on sort of a long term curfew you mention and this is going with my fellow commissioners question about people paying the hotel rate and you said that they were all paying the t eighty in the g t majority is not all so how do we find out of the seventeen which one was not paying the hotel tax rate for the property tax you know it's i saw something on t v last night one person said you know to avoid taxes or something that smart i think i think it's actually an ethical so that's where my vote is these get swayed it's who did it right and subsequently the majority did but if we're applying for seventeen i'd like to know that all seventeen are doing the right thing well first of course on any other short term home rental we've never gone we've never had that criteria for them having paid hotel tax on any prior then this is just an example of people that's looking at the real property tax just you can you can pull off one page it has to do with their assessment information about their taking a homeowner's exemption and it has to do with life threatening i mean this is this one for example if the hotel resort to two thousand and sixteen and i have that information here well i didn't bring all seventeen files with me this is just an example to show that that's the kind of information that we had in here and there is this land value exemption value  they all weren't and none of them were taking the homeowners if they had been running with regards to all of the hotel and resort tax out of the seventeen i don't have all of the tax information for that and i understand the plan the promise criteria but it might differ from my criteria as far as just because and looking at other examples of short term reynolds were usually finding that they would have been at the g t they weren't taking homer's exemption but certainly no one would have ever moved up to a hotel resort they may have moved to commercialise residential but it would be ex i've never seen anyone other applications to come in seventeen families a mile we could definitely use and the testimony that i've heard with it was people paying the hotel tax rate for a lengthy period of time you know swayed me because those these are people doing the right thing the whole you know is piggybacking on the rest of the people and when we have one short term vacation rental already on this property and then we have three grandfathered in that's twenty one out of forty which means they will control the board which means that the homeowners might be voted out on the next time and that's a concern of mine of having forty properties and twenty one on the short term rental the other night to be might might have to move if they if they all like the board to pa so they may have been paying a different rate but it was appropriate so they are now going to have to pay the new rate because this is a new application and currently just confirm that there are four residents full time residents there the rest are not so that's but just in increasing the majority aren't that may explain the difference because there are some new applications i think there have not been renting previously i think there were two or three that had never been so they would not before we'll even accept the application a lot of people have other properties that they may have businesses they may have one so well and i guess is the testimony because i said look with my fellow commissioners when we were trying to find the validity of the honesty of these people he said well they all came in with tt's which law have to have you have to have even sort of a sort of misleading right because they have to come in with a t t but but prior to apply one of them had to it would have been a good answer let's get off of that i think i've got the answers that i need and you know stall is it two stalls per two bedrooms zero to two stalls for a single family house and it to bed and three bedroom it doesn't matter no if you're doing a short term home rental  that on the street there's a designated parking sloss is that is that the owner of the the problem is that a prior owner that is the disney stars or they just made those thought as theirs is their private road it's a private road so that those are the roads for the international colony club jointly owned between all the owners so is the ordinance no parking on a public street or no parking on a street it or call it says no parking on the street but ok well there are no parking stall also signed to any one unit but it would guard us or whether they're on a street whether they're in a parking lot in any location on that on this particular property but we're counting street parking as part of available parking spaces correct do you have the or are i with the when i visit out there all the parking there are approximately seventy and in the lots total so ten are on the street yes correct and there's the photograph in the lower right were some units have two stalls and some units have one are you aware of that yes and as i said the ordinance if these permits are granted the or this ordinance will take precedence so with these parking stall and certain units have to start right so a unit that has one cannot become two because it's you know it's that's in the bylaws unless the board has to has changed it so you know the board president is here i could ask him would you be willing to discuss actually miss joe what rockwell who is the current resident at is going to address that issue something called the house and ground truth and in the house and ground rules everybody gets to parking stopped that too small lots that call up who fill up fast because third very small so what we tell people is if that's where you're going to be you can only have one in that lot in your other one it's in the big block so we're not telling anybody that they can only have one car everybody can have two cars it's just that because of those two small lots you can only have one car in the small  allowed to now limited but i do notice that there's a couple of covered cars that they're meaning it's obviously somebody that you know has their car they're gone they covered it come back they use it so we're going to stalls per unit for each one of the seventeen or the covered cars one of those seventeen i get is like those people can i'm just saying ok that's going to eat up as one of their stalls right right if they've got a car sitting there  o of the seventeen do they have it to joe and maybe you can answer this question or people in the gallery can answer the question but of the seventeen do they have a stored car on  not sure i understand your question the cars that are covered are counted as one of their two cars correct and if they have a and s t r h they need to have two stalls of which now one of them is eaten up hairs here there are only two requirements for parking for short term rental homes regardless of the i mean for a normal regular single family house or to require this isn't normal single family house ok so the two requirements are one parking space if there are more than four bedrooms being used there are not more than four better each one of these are one or two bedroom units so all they need is one space ok the other one is looking it just says that the the parking cannot be on the street that's all it says they have adequate parking if the guests don't park on the particular street they're covered because they're not assigned stalls so it's far as the department is concerned we're good to go with the way that they have their parking arranged right you say in one of the one parking required for two or three bedroom house that's the right and what i'm hearing you just had only one parking stall is required to any home less than four bedrooms know if there is more than four bedrooms i regularly single family home needs to parking spaces not by code if a short term rental home as is renting has more than four bedrooms then they need to add a stall so all of these are less than four bedrooms so so one style per unit is all th us and then the other the other sections is is can't park on the street to be licensed as as to your rates just to clarify before when you were talking about nineteen or twenty one you think of us we have forty four hours it's not for it's our policy we just remain neutral we've tried to get this clarified and over the years it's been hard to get clarified so we're just happy to have it finally clear what we have we've had  cause i didn't see any floor plan for the car was just you know and you know it's like if you week we gave some some examples and there are seventeen and they all basically fall into the either the three bedroom or the two bedroom floor plan and in the each each of the applications have their own fire escape plans so they each individually have those i was not concerned about th escape i was concerned about the bathroom and orders the location of the bathroom is is very unusual i mean if you look at the land over and i don't know whether it's accurate or not but you have bathrooms next to the kitchen bathroom one and two right is this kind of the configuration you were looking at in this is a general representation obviously all of them have some slight modification personalization  are the plans that you were given they're accurate to each of the individuals so yes if that if that's the floor plan you're shown there then that was accurate to that unit and i believe kurt assembled those so i'm not exactly sure which ones he was showing but we just provide i provided these to give you a general layout of what a two bedroom looks like and as you can see the the two bathrooms are directly on the outside of the kitchen the way they were going to  bedroom number three has no bathroom there has to go down to bathroom one and two that's correct that is correct yes so get a good see it from this layout this this shows you also the same  ok so that was that that's accurate but there is for bedroom three there is also just directly outside there's an exit door outside so that does they do have without going down that long hall they can get outside immediately but they in order to use the restroom they do have to come down to the bathroom number two that's ok so it's not just to give you some perspective these permits are reviewed in more detail than perhaps the average person could know there's a twenty eight point checklist and this does require not only confirming the building permits were obtained by the county mary or miscellaneous inspection was done or an architect's stamp of approval was done at the time that the building was built in addition to that every property owner is required to hire an a s h i certified inspector to do a very detailed review on windows sized smoke detector and it's whether the plans are accurate so these permits have and considerable degree of review by planning and other departments throughout the county yes you read this section before by me give you so i can read it ok thank you the unit but to me i'm looking this seventeen units is it's organization of rentals i mean shouldn't this be looked at as a different way instead of just a one house that's a stand alone when we have so many that are next to each other as far as  consideration as far as my understanding about eighty eight works but it is for this we have these are all individual applications we're just bringing it to  you instead of holding seventeen different public hearings we're holding one consolidated public hearing everything but these are still individual applications for individual homes that are supposed to be used for this use eighty eight doesn't apply to the individual home it would if it was you know a condominium building as such or a hotel or a public facility like this building but in this case no it would not apply well and once in one sense we want to treat it like it's always been a hotel you know with it being grandfathered in other things there's always been the applications if we took one this particular commission meeting and for the next seventeen commission meetings we took another individual application i think that would be a waste of the commission time for one but we would not consider eighty a with each one of those individual applications stretched out over a year's worth of time i fully agree but i think and i don't know if i'm reading it wrong and you know and i'm asking you because because you're the consultant there and you know it's every case in club you know license you know  is it one of the things that the big don't want to have happen here my understanding is that this is dealing with time sharing which is specifically due to an attempt to divide the ownership you use a right of possession and it's that is what it's prohibiting believe that you may use the word vacation by believe the intent of this paragraph was to prohibit time sharing which is a division of the ownership right or use sort of my understanding such a timeshare program started any arrangement whereby a party has a vacation license so as long as so you're arenas as long as there's only one owner yes that's that's correct and the owners want and they're not dividing that ownership that that's what's printed to me that's what's prohibited i'm not a lawyer so i'm not going to say what i think it is but i just saw this and i saw vacation license and i just want to bring that to your attention thank you thank you  when the word license is used here they mean like a license is a legal right to use or occupy property as opposed to another kind of license to eat to do vacation rentals so it's my now if a person only has to be fifty one percent owner and another person is forty nine and they both have able to have a license you know they have there's a license to rent the property on the time to me that's still timesharing but i'm not the legal counsel colony club and owner number twenty three and and as joe had stated earlier commissioner robinson the board has remained neutral based on the opinion of our council for the bylaws because there was the minute toys study the confusion that had been brought up over the last probably five to seven years regarding the the current status of of vacation rentals and so we were given the opinion that that we should not take a stance either for or against book remain neutral and tell all of the matters were resolved and so i think the board is certainly so so this time sharing in your by laws where you are you are you to folks we are people to have be a hundred percent ownership no no we don't require one hundred percent ownership and the other comment that i would like to make commissioner robinson is i believe the board if you look at the byelaws the last revision was i believe in the eighty's ninety ninety two is the thing when i have an enemy and so it would be our goal this year as we are making this effort for the permits to go back and make sure that our by laws actually reflect the current situation and condition at the international college club if it does get towards fifty one forty nine boards going to look a little different in the rules might change but because you guys have forty four units that were not that max i think that might make some commission that's more comfortable thank you just want to individual homes that that is correct but the last number is forty five living with you but is that is that with the managers you did or you know with down there there is no onsite managers unit anymore there is actually just a managers  office that is located right in the parking lot not considered part of  units thank you all right can we have our department's recommendation please the recommendation from the staff of the planning department is the applications for the short term home rental permits the seventeen separate applications  do comply with the flexible standards for a short term rental home in accordance to chapter one nine hundred sixty five zero three zero for the restrictions and standards and light of that the maui county planning department does recommend approval of the short term home renel home permits each of which will be given a separate short term home rental number each of which will be monitored under the twenty two different conditions of the report and therefore in consideration the planning department recommends approval of docket numbers short term west now eighty two thousand and sixteen triple zero five short term west now eighty two thousand sixteen double zero twenty one thank you thank you curt do i see a motion a motion commissioner kind of chilly they could share first off i want to say curt and betty thank you very much for all the work that you guys did on this because this was not this was not light duty so i just want to say thank you thank you for everything the that you did here i honestly was on the fence walking in the air after reviewing everything and it really appreciated testimony appreciate everything you guys got  you provided to us and the fellow commissioners comments and questions i'm going to vote in favor of this there's a few things that i look at is you know when you purchase a property you're given a bundle of rights and i think in the i c c whether it's true or not i think that there's an implicit bundle of rights that i can do short term rentals here you know we have the minatory a factor you know the grandfathered in which kind of adds to that sort of perception of the bundle the rights i think you know any time we have s t r is in front of us you know i always think i can this be long term rentals you know families displaced whatever it is i don't think that we're really displacing families i liked commissioner he donny's comment of well we've got seventeen of them in one spot so i kind of like you know it's like we're not scattering them all over the place i kind of like i like that in this is sort of what you know the use of this was really intended to so i'm going to go ahead and be voting in favor of this commission only like to express appreciation for the applicants coming forward and complying with the process of filing all of the up occasions the getting the permits to operate something that originated thought they had already had the right to operate  into the motion based upon the fact that i think this particular community is already a well established communities since one nine hundred sixty six and so the laws kind of persuaded them to make sure that they fall within the category of the threshold and that was one of the questions i wanted to our staff was there according to the count in was a small way it's eighty eight and i was wondering where are we in the threshold of that particular count if we approve this seventeen application right now do you know they could vary a couple but i counted forty one and forty one there were a couple approved i think that as many as we could be at forty three but forty one as of the first of the month and if we had seventeen will be at fifty eight so that would still leave thirty that would actually be great but my feeling is that a t m number probably move with or without a track record i do commend everybody paying their tt's even though they have to for th but most people doing the property tax and i think that's what you are really never see in mali is people actually paying what they're supposed to pay and i think that's great however  under or under things that we look at for a population and land use environmental culture resources among the population or policy says to maintain the balance between residence and visitor population by controlling regulating growth for visit facilities i think and again i think it's just a time there are in there's just so many families without without the billeted to to have a home and the price and if you just look it if you just look at the what height is you know it's people are going to rent these homes on they're going to make some money but the three bedrooms are twenty four hundred dollars plus a month that people can make money off of and they that i should be more attractive for this be enough a forty four unit rental and again this whole property be one but being mixed use and the cluster of it i don't see where the enjoyment is going to be for the other long term residents and a residents and that's what i'm going back to it's the residents of ma we i think we have enough hotel rooms there's always more coming on board we have another one in key here there's always rows being built but we don't have enough people to work in these hotels people to service the sort those people to be able to live here without having to move away and to a cluster of seventeen at one time i just think it's not needed and the objective is to protect the resident quality of life i think this could help the quality of life i'm a pick it's damaging it but i think seventeen units that were to be put into a long term rental program would go a long ways to alleviate the shortage that we have on the on the west side you know when we have  to move from the west side to this side because they can't afford rent because there is a lack of rental housing and to me that's part of the directors ever looking for is for a mommy residence to be able to to have a place and i know there's the you know of course there's other side say well why is why is it their burden to find to find residential housing and it's i think it's all our burdens i think the better the community does the better the island those are the people do the  better all businesses will be and i would not be supporting this because of the amount and the number of what i feel are very attainable rentable caught it is they're not overpriced they're not they're not roach shacks i think these would be gobbled up just like the affordable housing project that is just you know half a mile down the road where you know there's there's some five times amount you you know the comments see nine director can police repeat the motion the motion is to approve all seventeen applications as recommended by staff ok call for  on favored motion raise your hand i see four eyes for eyes oppose one may my vote is yes so motion carries congratulations eight commissioners were on item c two this is your second and final public hearing for for this meeting this is a bill that the planning department proposed to update and change the flood hazard area ordinance under title nineteen point six two our stop miner this morning is carolyn cort as you can see a lot of the changes were dictated by to update our ordinance in conjunction with the now changes that occurred on november fourth two thousand and fifteen of last year and i don't have a presentation but i can take any questions you may have amendments thank you and come mr chairman director commissioners i would just no that in order for my county to participate in the flood insurance program we are required to have this chapter as a part of title nineteen and as carolyn cortez pointed out that most of these changes are dictated by fema required by them in order to remain a part of the program pretty much the other ones but we opted for were just to mostly to clarify individual sections of it so it's not the certainly is not one of the more controversial items we have proper for you it's pretty much something that we got to do so thank you thank you director at this point you can open the floor for public testimony seen on pub closed comments from the commission commissioner robison i just have one question on the two point twelve to fourteen deletion of item number seven and libya which  realtors are mandated to disclose anything and everything that they main that they know about a property as far as the legality of whether it's in the floodplain or not i believe will become part of the title report but to say that a a realtor will know whether this particular property is in the flood plain or not i wouldn't i personally wouldn't just trust a realtors knowledge of the flood maps mr chairman there after we regularly have realtors and in flood confirmation forms flood and should date zoning confirmation forms and when they're selling a house or they are representing a buyer they will send in like a whole list of tax map key numbers for all around the island they want to confirm what the zoning as so they can disclose it so that that form includes  zone which flood zone any other special designation is like the special management area or the historic district or the redevelopment  district there's a whole number of things so a realtor may not know but they can always call in and so can any other property owner then call and will give them this form and confirm all these different things for them the flood zone being one of them with that being said the rector so for banks and mortgage companies when they require some type information of that from you guys are again they will go back to the report we don't we don't i don't i can't tell you what goes on a title report not we don't generally get requests from banks we get requests from realtors and property owners how what they do with that information i'm not sure probably is a part of the disclosure but that's all i know so with  it's too complicated i you know i can't answer that but i'm not sure all what goes with i know some things that go along with the governor's proclamation that we can waive certain state laws as far as doing repairs and those kinds of things but as far as what it means to the taxpayers or to flood insurance rates i i can't say those things i think are probably yet to be determined so this may be just a redundant question and probably is a redundant question just having understanding and knowledge that at the state level right now we've got a conflictual law with thema regulations that we're trying to fix hopefully will fix this particular legislative session is this along the same lines as this i guess does this follow what the state law did and then we're going to have to correct it again or is this follow is this kind of prima driven that being able to build structures without having to obtain a building permit and review correct is in conflict with the flood code so  because so what they're trying to do is they're trying to correct it at the state legislature and our my counterpart the state national flood insurance program coordinator carol beam is taking that the changes to that legislation through the next session because females given us a deadline of i believe it's next year mid july or august in to correct that or else they may look that what they want us to revise is not really but for example of the severability clause is one that is located in another part of the molly county code but female wants it to be implements the national flood insurance program for the county of mali that was always sort of an understanding but they want it's the good specifically in the code so those are the types of things that fema is requesting us of us to change in this congregation one more question sure yeah commissioner concho is so then i guess as i look at this of all of the changes that we're looking at are all of them female mandated or is there then something that you as the department there then saying well why we're in here doing it we actually want to add this is well so or there's everything pretty improvement because when we first drafted it in two thousand and nine it wasn't clear to which valuation of the property that you were referring to so we were referring to the initial valuation so say if the property was worth one hundred thousand dollars in one nine hundred ninety we were referring to that valuation throughout the ten year period when computing a fifty percent substantial improvement because what happens if you exceed the fifty percent or fifty thousand dollars in this example you have to comply with all flood regulations and that means you have to actually  elevate your house and comply with current codes so this is sort of a grandfathering clause where if your improvements stay below the fifty percent over a ten year period your house can remain at the elevation that it was built and in this case it's below the base but elevation so we're clarifying the one hundred thousand an issue valuation and because what how we wrote it before is that we would carry that one hundred thousand through for the entire ten year period thank you commissioner i was and so on the changes and i know i see where the planning department has to require certain require to the flood where we have special because we don't issue building permits actually we're just of reviewing agency so female wanted us to put that in because it sounds like it would only be a picabo if we issued the permit so we have dire circumstances like the flood in against the walls or something like that with the building of it and we have the temporary structures that would be exempt or as a consider not a building permit right so tents are not actually don't meet the definition of structure for flood plain management the miners that have come along and the special circumstances that we've given permits to help protect certain things involving modification construction lining or alteration of any jane explicitly the river or stream so it's not it's not on the ocean applicable ok thank you our purpose here today is to recommend approval to the county council and correct yes that's correct both to recommend approval of the changes as presented to the county council the second move by commissioner do carries thank you thank you carolyn and just so everybody knows carolyn is our certified fema flood zone person for the county and extraordinarily knowledgeable on the flood zones and how to treat them and cetera great thank you that will take place at one o'clock so i'm just just assuming that the commission would like to bypass this one and continue on to the other items and we can take care of those things and reconvene sundown and i'm not exactly sure if i see exactly or can you objections to that commissioners question don column together just because they are terrified i have a question for the director yes please so on the yes i mean minors the top one kind of probably investments so this is a five lot subdivision and we're going to a minor why is it not a major and why is that a minor i don't have all the notes but to give some history this would be i believe the third time extension for a subdivision five lots so we agreed to give them a time extension and it actually is relatively small valuation s like sixty thousand dollars so that's why it becomes a minor right to know that there's a monetary threshold but how do we get to a five lot subdivision on maui being sixty thousand dollars worth of it's just so they're going to do road improvements so they're coming in for road improvements and then they're going to come in for something later and they're going to come in for something later so the total valuation is going to be more than i mean of the entire subdivision is going to excess of sixty thousand dollars will have to come in for the separate houses that's true but this is only for just infrastructure improvements it's been around for we did put a condition that we wanted and we want to know through the land management company what their timeframe is because if it's if it's truly this relatively straightforward project then why can't the company and the boards of directors and get it just completed and so we're wanting more information upon the next time extension so this is like the third time extension so when is the time extension actually three eggs year to go year to year no but i mean the current one if we say that's what i'd have to say soon like this month i sure i think actually i think it's the end of the month i remember  that i'm the new kid on the block here so i get that you know it's like there's there's a little bit but it's this is i look at these anyway so i just look at the dollar threshold for a pilot subdivision and i get that it's only for curb gutter sidewalks or something like that but it just seems as though it would because what is the threshold again i can remember half a million half million ok and it's in the golf course area on so that's i guess they're having discussions with a con a poly investment company and management about what exactly they want to do but i was concerned this time about why is it taking so long to do a project that appears to be so straightforward or as well we're having debate with our management company that it's really just paving something in some curbs and gutters and sidewalks why is it their third time  police continue director any other questions on this commissioner's  ok twenty seventeen meetings schedule i think all the commissioners have this lovely malva colored piece of paper with all the dates my compliments to caroline who i'm sure  school it says the commission may act to adopt this meeting schedule commissioner robinson wonder if the commissioner would look at changing february fourteenth to maybe february seventh having to be a valentine's day yes i think you know this that too so we can what do we need to do we just make if it's motion then it's a what i'm just trying to figure out the legality of well what do we need to do to if we do and you want to make a change to the meeting schedule is out purely on men meant or is it in motion required or well this is a problem schedule proposed by the department of of course of the commission sets the beatings subject to remove veil ability availability of staff that kind of thing so if there's a consensus that there's going to be a change we can make that decision subject to availability of the meeting room yelling in majority vote here so you can socks i was under anesthesia yesterday so i'd like to see us keep to the same schedule so we know when to expect a meetings to be put on our calendars ahead of time block everything else so it's second is the second and fourth and the commissioner robinson states because of valentine's day perhaps they could bishan will entertain a different date if it's available it's i understand there's different departments and there's different commissions and if that's if it would be a conflict of interest it's a conflict of interest i understand so i'll just be in trouble again it's long as as long as the number four under the directors report the discussion of future mally planning commission agendas so for october eleventh we have to public hearings scheduled and there is an unfinished business item the two public hearings are the first one is transmetal of a proposed bill that would clarify some items in thousand point zero four regarding minister ariel discretionary applications various things these second one it's there's going to be a lot of different things in that those stay tuned for the staff reported it's going to be very important to clarify for that apart and then for the public certain things within that part of the code the second one will be a request for a short term rental home permit permit for the demolition construction of a single family residence on front street and we should stay tuned for that ok the the second item  before we need to decide a day or two from is leona wilson's application i understand there are quite a few people wanting to testify so we're going to choose a larger facilities such as this or perhaps go back to the wire loop through community center the but we need to do two things one is to take the public airing has been closed we have completed the public hearing on that day a couple few weeks earlier the who we need to decide it is going to take some time so we need to decide a day in which we can take it back up and because we are expecting other people to testify in may that may take a good portion of the day so the so we may even want to continue the meeting to another time and date so there are other words in other words where we need to choose two days that the commission can meet  one probably to take testimony the other one to actually take action so even though that and let me explain even though the public hearing is closed the official public airing the public has a right to testify on any agenda item so it won't be official the official public hearing but there will still continue to be testimony on this item until the commission takes final action to question director so if i'm clear on this we're allowing everyone who has testified prior to the opportunity to retest if i again if they so choose they can at it's part of sunshine law open you know open meetings law that's the way it's written so that's what we follow this and making it just gets it's bigger and crazier every meeting and if we could start a little bit earlier and you know i think we'll get the same testifiers i think we'll do it again i think we can wrap up i think the last time we moved we lost  know we probably could deliberative then i think it's that complex issue to work this commission you know so many things to to waive i think we can i mean to you know to think about i think we could probably get it done in one day and that's my feeling that is certainly an option but also to us if we're talking about having on two separate days is that meeting the same as in the same case applies where if we had read the journal the second time we got a lot of testimony again counsel or director i'm sure corporation council will weigh in but the last meeting we had we had turned that meeting that meeting came to at hand so any new meetings on this particular on any agenda item is a new meeting and the public has a right to testify if you recess a meeting let's say i mean just because we're already discussing it let's say testimony takes up  eight hours and the commission if you if you don't want to you know continue on to make decisions the commission could choose to recess the meeting to another determine time and day and i believe it has to be within eight or ten days of that recess and so it's not a new meeting it's a continuation of the same meeting and that's correct so you know other words you're not a you're not a journeying and starting a new meeting if you recess the meeting then you're only allowed one one opportunity to testify because we should have recess then as well no because we couldn't because we needed to end the public hearing right and the other thing that was on the agenda which we could not take up was the motion or the petition to intervene i do have an opinion about that too though i do believe that when we take up the motion to intervene or the petition to intervene the chair would have the discretion to limit the testimony just to the issue of intervention you know but you know then they get into it gets very unwieldy because when when people one thing that we may the chair may want to consider doing is when you have a witness come up to testify ask them you know which matter are you testifying on just so it's clear but the other thing the  have to keep in mind is we have not yet heard the petition to intervene and depending on which way the decision goes on that that may tell us whether we're going to proceed proceed to the hearing of the application itself because one of the things that you know if the intervention is granted then you know you go down one path if it's denied you go down another path so with for the sake of discussion should a motion to intervene be granted then one of the things you're going to think about is what are the to iraq hearings officer or whether you folks are going to hear yourself or whatever the case may be under no can we put need to do put dispose with the intervention first before you can go to the hearing of the application itself well case because before you we had the motion to come up i mean it's on the gender after the actual  item so what we're saying we could have in the motion to intervene be place on the gender before the actual that was it seems like a short cut for us  difference you're required to hold a public hearing which which we did but then now it becomes now the side and becomes another just another agenda item public hearings done but the public has a right to testify on any agenda item i know of that it seems like splitting hairs but when things get appealed a coronary thing there is a very definite difference of information since you're talking about and that gauge that i excuse myself from my given the opportunity to participate in that this question or not at all so you should go read your copy but it's my recollection that because the board or pined that you know you had a financial interest you my writing my memories that you would need to disclose disclose that fact and then refrain from participating in the discussion and and forwarding that's my that's my memory yes you're correct what i'm getting is that admission to what is happening and that i did not discuss at all and that was the intervention and that's a part of the discussion that we're having right now is closed and i've already excuse myself from that what i'm talking about is the intervention that is coming up so make sure i understand your question your what you're asking  is if you have if you did not participate in the public hearing you're asking me you participate in the hearing of the edition to intervene you know actually what i want i petition to intervene will be sickly or what i'm trying to say is what is the interpretation of corporate counsel on the on the intervention that's supposed to be coming up and the board there was a common sort of commission wanted to discuss with me the board's powers duties authority liabilities that sort of thing then we could have we could go into executive session at that time ok so all right now just for clarification the special use and conditional use public hearing is completed the  public hearing portion is is completed this poll next you know my understanding is that the next matter would be the matter of the intervention and for the sake of discussion let's say  the intervention is granted then the commission would have a one set of decisions to make it is denied then i have my presumption is that the commission would go to the hearing of the application itself basically talking about that i just want to clarification about what i had heard and that is because i was not at the commission meeting that the chair close the public hearing on the application only the public hearing portion that's right so that cannot come up again while i am not sure whether you mean come up what do you mean by public hearing all of this is still about this one application so the way i'm hearing question or he got the the intervention is about the obligation so will be planning commission ultimate action whether intervention is granted or not there will be some commission action at some time at some point that all has to do with the application so that these are just different  not we're not discussing the merits or demerits of intervention or the application the only thing on the agenda today is finding a date date time in place for interference you know for the next for the mission meeting which we will take up the intervention and or take action at the hearing that that you may be hearing maybe i can help clarify this commissioner gosh i think for the process sake basic have agenda item for you up for the application that we have a public hearing which already happened before a few weeks ago same time there's a motion to intervene that's also on the gender that we have to take up unfortunately  lack of time we can get to it so we're trying to decide where here if on the date to take up the motion to intervene and as part of did motion to intervene in our discussion right now is october what is it the fourth the second meeting in october which is the twenty fifth twenty fifth if that date is available vailable we can have the meeting and we have items scheduled for that w i'm open to come on maybe a following tuesday or something i mean it whatever is open is look at the dates and then but i mean i think i think if we can get down today that we want to make a commitment we're going to do it in one day the part that i confused on is i guess we made a mistake in adjourning the first meeting rather recessing it so we have to go through the whole public hearing again no no no no no don't know whether it's even possible to recessed the meeting indefinitely without you know having a for a date so the public the public hearing portion is paul however while there is no and then the public hearing is basically the public's right to know what the you know what the application is and to come and testify on it but at every juncture that there are at every meeting that this matter is put on the agenda the public still has a right to comment passed by on the item again even if it's not the public hearing itself they would be testifying on the agenda item and while i have to forgo i i would recommend well first of all when it comes to setting agendas and meeting dates and that kind of thing generally speaking that's the call of the chair the chair has the authority to step agendas and the meetings but  a courtesy to all the as many commissions as possible we we here input as to availability because we all know all in on normal quorum no more meeting and you know so while it's good to have a consensus one thing i want to remind folks of is we commiserate danny you've already indicated that you will continue to recuse yourself commissioner he gosh he may not be participating so we knowing that we're you know we're down to members already i think it's really important we get a consensus on when we do this because there are so many moving parts to scheduling this kind of meeting especially one where we know we're going to use a larger room that may be one  carolyn because she's the one who got to do all the work maybe we have you know maybe we should you know e mail folks like laurie hudson then you know and sandy to make sure you know that you know we know where the you know what it's going to be ok i guess what i'm saying is that perhaps one of the you may want to consider doing it is everybody give their you know feedback as far as availability what time is good to start and if you're ok with it let max have the final say ok based because we've already had people testify and we do have a role in the commission that if you've testified on so many issues you will not be allowed to testify again on the same issue unless you material  correctly is that the only applies to a certain agenda item so we covered the public hearing for the application already they already testify it does only allowed to testify one time but it's only on the same agenda item but were on the petition to intervene so can the same people testify on the previous session can they be allowed to testify again if it's piers to be a different agenda item so i'm hearing that's correct it's a it's a different issue so my my opinion would be that if people are there to if i testifier says i'm here to testify on the issue of intervention i believe that the commission would be required to take their testimony if someone says you know you know there was a chair could if we don't finish in one day have a backup date scheduled so that we can recess to a date certain ok and but what i don't want to see is someone basing an appeal on their on a violation of the sunshine law the problem with the sunshine law violations is it allows a court to set aside or overturn what the commission or board did and so in other as we need to be careful about trying to save time because our efforts to save time might create even a bigger headache and might force us to do it all over again so you know i like the fact that and i'm going to go ahead with that so to limit only testimonials regarding the petition to intervene hopefully that would limit the chair does have the authority to limit testimony to what's on the agenda it's always my recommendation that you err on the side of allowing it is opposed as opposed to being overly restrictive robinson this morning we had a person with testimony that had no agenda item well at all and the same person testified on that agenda item at a previous time and we allow happen so we have we have the intervention which is one we have public airing which is true and we have leona wilson on a ridge which is three is that three opportunities for somebody to testify well you know i suggestion in the future the commission may consider whenever it was almost steps up to the mike to ask them which item are you testifying on and if the  required to alarm to testify but maybe only as to the date and time ok but so so are we saying that they are still in touch if we do that that the same day like you're recommending so then are you saying that they still have two chances to testify that the intervention item as well as the law on a ridge i don't i think so yeah because now we close in on a ridge so then if we don't have public testimony and all we have is agenda testimony then the only thing they could testify on would be the intervention because we already did the law on a ridge we already close and concluded that meaning so it's either public you're i mean i get that that's where we have to clarify especially with time because if people can do two or three times then it's going to be a long time i mean you know you know it's of course you know hindsight is twenty twenty and we should have tried to wrap it up but i have a follow up question is what is that application date of l on december twenty sixth i asked that same question and and i and i mean because you know we always have to do an agenda have to do some research to notice and stuff and that might be something we might want to share with our testifiers you know you can filibuster this as long as you want but the way the county rules ours is you're going to filibuster to automatic approval i think there are aware that concho so on that same vein i do it is just the chair have the ability to say ok when you come up you have to tell me what you're testifying on he can definitely say you don't get three minutes and one second you get three minutes period and you only address the chair those are things that he can do like truly do i mean according to robert's rules and sunshine and everything like that correct the chair will because because the the public is allowed to rule is we are required to allow public testimony in an agenda item and it is discretionary with the chair to allow other testimony it is permissible to say you know ma'am which i don't why are you testifying on all k that's fine go ahead or no you know what we don't have time to depending on what they say the cherokee and allow it or disallow it ok so if he allows i'm here to testify and i may and i get up and i start talking and i go down a rabbit hole  you know stop you know sam sorry you're no longer testifying on  it depends on the note i'm sorry your question about that in or three minutes what the rules say is that you know the chair may allow a reasonable time and it's a general rule of thumb is that three minutes think is specially if you impress upon the people in the gallery that we would hear to the three minutes then i think people will tend to be more likely to shut up after three minutes as opposed to rambling on until they're stopped and i know is that three minutes in the roberts rule no it's it's just been generally accepted that three minutes is reasonable could i reduce the i'm sorry can i reduced take two minutes for testimony you know you could reduce it you could make it a minute if you wanted but then again what you don't want to do is invite a challenge testified on this issue and not repeat the same material again and introduce new material twice i mean is there a way where we can say you have a total of three minutes to testify on on one of the two items or both you know i mean i guess we're trying to get where we can actually vote we have to  understanding is that that's not been the practice of this commission and generally speaking you know the public has meant allowed to testify on different agenda items and would have three minutes on  each so but i you know again i just want to remind us we're only talking about one thing today setting a hearing date into the extent that we need to talk about logistics we can talk about things like public testimony i  mean you know certainly the chair can announce to the people who are here that we have limited time that you know we want to be fishing but we don't want to limit your right to say your piece i know that for example in the legislature they encourage written testimony because you know it saves people from having to fight all who you know that kind of thing so certainly the chair can encourage people to be cognizant of that  certainly can encourage them to say their piece in three minutes on all all items but i don't think it's would be wise to say no you cannot you can you may not testify more than once on different  items again what i don't want to see is our practice or procedure give people reasons to appeal any decision of the of the commission  thank you so what i'm hearing regarding the date here is that in order to get full quorum as many people as possible we probably should consider doing it on the tuesday because that's already set in the schedule instead of trying to find a separate day to come which i'm open to as well that's a good point because we are we want to make sure we have full corm commissioner office and what is my feeling that we shouldn't do the two items at the same day i think we should do the intervention as a last agenda item on our scheduled meeting and hopefully we can wrap it up because i think that's go a very quick deliberation between us and then we can deal with just a lot of region and other but that's just my my my opinion or the intervention is the next item on our where we are going to go straight to that but the parts parting eventually i have to open  correct well i think it depends on the on our decision on the intervention we may not even get to that so i think we should focus on good engine which is the director if the commission vote to grant intervention that will settle it for that particular meeting so will go into selecting hearing officer those kinds of things if petition intervene is denied then the commission would go into deliberations on the merits of the application and may vote at that meeting or may put off voting to another time as well  you could take up both in other words depending on how it goes you could take up just the one item or you could take a both at the same meeting commissioner wants to do i mean i'm seeing that if the eleventh of sorry if the eighth of no fam is taken oh ok so how about twenty second is this room available no no no so how does commissioners feel about either having on the regular schedule tuesday the second or the fourth tuesday of november or keeping it or trying to set a separate date for this with the holidays and all that we're looking at if we know it if we don't get it done there i don't i don't see as making a decision as i think i think you might have to do a little bit sooner than the twenty four sounds like we can't because according getting the other commissioners agreed to a date because we're going to be short two people already and to find a separate day that all of us can make it would be a challenge well on the twenty second i'm on vacation i'm pretty sad for those two tuesdays of the month because i'm going into a lot of different negotiations right so you know available on the twenty second anyway november ok over well seems like we already have agenda items correct or only one of eleventh and the twenty fifth so both of those two tuesdays we already have agenda items so we can change that oh you so the regular week i'm making this assumption she's really good at correcting me when i'm wrong so i'm guessing the regular weeks of commission meetings would be the best time for special meetings because this room probably is available the only dates that they had told me was open was the week over twenty fourth through the twenty we already have  regular meeting on the twenty fifth which has two or three public hearings scheduled already so it sounds like you're looking at the week of twenty fourth twenty eight is there a particular day that you guys who want to look ahead and have a back up day i'm up in the twenty seventh that's a thursday chair i'm definitely open to a special meeting just should we have to recess maybe the ninth of november if ye i mean we might as well because i think we have to have a backup in case we have to recess is that correct or councils i mean it's just like carolyn was you know we don't want to give a double duty i mean while you're checking maybe just this one you know we're going to get it done we're not going to recess a you have to know the location and the time that you're going to me so sure we set up us the recess the second day just in case now more is oh i thought oh it's our twenty fifth or twenty six i mean can we do that the twenty fifth put everything on the agenda since we already are agreeing to come in the next day and i think that and we say twenty five twenty all hungry too so ok so let's put can we do that put the on the two dates twenty fifth and twenty six hopefully as room is available hopefully twenty six well my thought on this is again just purely for the purposes of the planning and counting heads what commissioner hudson would need to do is because i'm going to presume that someone is going to challenge his ability to to hear this matter according to our rules rule twenty guesses twenty five once a challenge is made then the commissioner must disclose whether he has a financial interest and then the commissioner decides whether to participate or not from voting but you can still attend the meeting you just can't participate in a discussion unfolding of the gender item if twenty fifth were already have other items on agenda so you can definitely participate and vote on those beaches it's your decision on specific item exactly we're even greenman on that so we're setting the date of twenty fifth and well which is our regular agenda meeting date and the twenty six chair just so you know on the twenty sixth in the morning i'm a trainer for a class and at nine o'clock so i'm just going to have someone else in my office stand in for me unlike you folks  that's fine with me ok thank you all right so the rector you want to finish your breasts real quick  five i know a number of the commissioners want attended the c p o conference last week on quite and if you wanted to discuss those items on the agenda for you to discuss you know what you learned what you like what you didn't like i know that it is if you want to my suggestion is if you want to put this off that might be a good idea simply because of one one o'clock so any way up to you if you want to discuss it c p o or if you want i do i'd like to discuss it however being that you know we've got a schedule to do it here too it one o'clock i think just for the sake of everybody is you know whether it be you know before mr fenton or after mr that then or next meeting or something like that i think it means i just to discuss what i you know what i was able to experience but i think for the sake of every stomach's i'll not do that now you know i agree so can we direct or put this on the next gen item on that note with direct report is approved the come to the plan departments recommendation for the length of permit time and applicants testimony was different her testimony was one year and they're written testimony and i believe the recommendation was for three i'm just i don't know what that's to do with anything but i want to put that on record ok thank you commissioner i was in at this point going to break for lunch and i guess we have to be back here at one o'clock gender d we have a workshop conducted by mr mark fenton yeah deputy director of public is what we would consider a walkability expert mark has done consultation work in many different areas across the united states and he does his focus on how transportation good community to community design land use planning how all of that is connected to having increased healthy communities increased economic growth and increased environmental sustainability and mark is fresh off of his presentation from each c last week he was on the wall who yesterday talking with i think the state department of transportation and honolulu city and county of honolulu with their department of transportation other elected officials today he's on maui we were on a walk audit this morning in a town around college shopping center and we explored some opportunities and possible new treatment for our public right of ways and here we are at the planning commission providing a presentation tomorrow i believe mark travels to the big island so he's definitely on a whirlwind tour of  the islands so without much further ado of like to introduce our speaker for this afternoon mr mark fenton thank you thank you very very much it's a real privilege to join you again you were kind enough to actually to let me visit you i think almost a decade ago i think my last visit was two thousand and eight that i visited with the plant commission and i'm very honored as a guy who served on my local planning board for six years and was chair for a period of that time i understand the challenges and how you're always sort of on the receiving end of whatever went wrong as a commissioner we had an elected board in my town it happens to be an elected not an appointed position and it always see which ever group you satisfy the other group was very unhappy with the decision that you made and you were always trying to tread that line where you made the largest number of people only moderately unhappy with you and i say that with all due respect for the challenge of the job that said if you'll indulge me i have prepared some power point slides but only to guide discussion i welcome you to interrupt but they do they are informed by my good fortune of being at the congress of planning officials last week on saturday i was actually with an architecture conference at manila which was architecture and healthy community design on monday i was lucky enough to be with the state wide obesity task force so that's a lot of public health people but also with city transportation officials in honolulu my point is only in saying that many different levels last night i got to visit with the local community association at one of their community association meetings and then this morning walking with a very mixed group around town looking at both public and private sector people from the development community planning state transportation was represented in the group that walked around  there only all of that by which i tell you that if i hear anything thoughtful or intelligent sounding i guarantee it came from somebody here and any of the stupid ideas you hear are certainly my own in this at the worst stuff you hear will be stuff you've heard from me that i've learned in other places and i mean that w sincerity there are very dedicated people in your communities really thinking about this so having said that you see here are some photos my morning started with coffee right up in my local town we always want to spend our dollars locally so we don't go to the national chain we would fill a local coffee shop i just wanted you to know  that and then the picture in the lower right itself on the walk on it on the walk on it in the morning which was delightful we're very lucky the weather is beautiful and all i'm going to do two seconds of the history of human transportation because it sets a context that picture on the top left is from pompei which was of course the city covered by volcanic ash you can still see there that that was a city designed for the pedestrian because if you see nothing else you probably see a sidewalk on the left side and on the right side and that's across what those stones across the middle were so that people could walk across without stepping in the horse manure or the water that was in the street that was a raised cross walk and then the truck carts all the carts were made to the same size you can see on the carts actually were tracking the stones because they all had to be width to make it between those stones everybody see that talk about pedestrian oriented design so seventy eighty that's rome in the lower right many hundreds of years later still pedestrian oriented design that the famous spanish steps they're called very pedestrian oriented city you would not want to rent a car go visiting rome you want to walk and you know maybe use their bike share system now let's fast forward my son is a student in the bay area at berkeley and therefore i mean set in and out of san francisco often that's highway one hundred one and when you try to get into downtown san francisco from the airport you go right on that every city in america seems to have made there's including honolulu got your elevated expressway right through plus the lovely at great nimitz highway which of course the traffic flows smoothly and quickly all the time pardon me and you know we did this for the last forty or fifty years thinking that was going to give us mobility now the interesting part of this story now let's fast forward just a few more years does anybody know what happened to that elevated expressway  in it was called by the way in downtown san francisco is called the embarcadero the embarcadero highway and what happened was in one thousand nine hundred nine it was a horrible earthquake which damaged it irreparably and the choice was take it down to rebuild it entirely and as i'm sure many of you know stead chose to take it down and make an amazing multi modal corridor or bicycle lanes bicycle lanes on a street car running down the middle bus rapid transit wonderful pedestrian facilities and by the way two wins of two lanes of motor vehicle traffic many people thought it would be the death of the city of san francisco their economic demise would come because traffic would be gridlocked quite the contrary what it did was connect the waterfront to the downtown and is rejuvenate i mean that's an amazingly economically flourishing area of the city and by the way it's not that cars can't move it's just that it's not only designed for cars it's designed for all users show that as an example it's in fact happening all over the country and not just big fancy sort of progressive cities like san francisco i can tell you the city nearest to my hometown rochester new york is doing the same thing though with walkie was constant is done the same thing taken away major highway corridors or sort of arteries to move cars or redesign them so they work for everybody it's happening around the country i think it's a relevant real lesson even for here in other words and you know you might say that these are far more urbanized places on the contrary it's happening all over so i think said that i'll also use one more anecdote from my last visit to maui so some of you may have met this young man when i last was here the he was working at the my beach hotel and he was my shuttle driver isaiah and he gave me my ride and from the airport i took the shuttle i wanted to visit carfree i thought if i'm the pedestrian and bike i better not rent a car and add to the traffic i'm not practicing what i preach so i took the shuttle down and by staying at my beach i could walk to lots of stuff and i could not far from the transit center over at the queen kate center there so i could take the bus up to why luca when i wanted to for the meetings which i did so i lived carfree on my visit thanks to some of my friends in the room who taught me how to use your transit system and here's the point isaiah said he rides his bike to work every back then he did and he said it well and i said how come he said well there's a bike by plane and common and he said there's a they let me store my bike indoors and i can take my shower when i get to work if i'm really sweaty or change up because the hotel accommodation that by the way the cost of gas and having a car on the island pretty prohibitive so both carrots and sticks induced him to choose the healthier choices all of this is a setup to tell you i think health can be the underlying argument for all of the kind of work you're doing now and your general plan says you want to do more of i think it's commendable and and i'll remind you in fact that part of health is actually the sponsor of my visit and i'll tell you the whole story in one slide the whole story goes like this we're told we should exercise we should be physically active it's good for us so we all think oh s transportation is very sedentary that's from a picture in the lower right there is from elementary to over on quite where we did a walk audit the line of cars there is representative of the line of cars dropping off children at schools all across the country all across the state so we should be active but we're not and simply telling people to exercise doesn't work you might get into for the moment you're in your face but all the research in the field says just telling people that your size isn't working however building environments that encourage physical activity does work and that research is pretty compelling and i'll  share with you very very briefly but the bottom line is building places where it's convenient and cost effective and more inviting to walk and bike and safe and take transit you will do it people do it and last but not least the things you do to make that happen yield a triple benefit not just public health more physically active population but also economic health and environmental health increasingly we're hearing the terms people prosperity and planet the triple bottom line for healthy design ok and i want to elaborate that and share a little bit of that with you if you'll allow me using examples from here so having said that here's the short version of the health story thirty twenty three sixty five we're told we should be active for thirty minutes a day that kids need at least sixty minutes a day we're told it doesn't have to be exercise a walk ten minutes to the bus in the morning ten minutes for errands at lunch ten minutes back to the bus in the evening would reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease type two diabetes clinical depression cancer all of those benefits from just getting thirty minutes of walking a day that's the good news the bad news is fewer th twenty percent of americans actually meet those guidelines and it leads to three hundred sixty five thousand premature deaths annually the only thing that kills more americans prematurely and tobacco about four hundred fifty thousand deaths a year second is physically and active lifestyles  nutrition so the bottom line is if you wanted to lower health care costs in this country you can argue about whether a single payer system or a market based system or you know all of that none of it matters if we don't help people be more physically active eat a better diet and smoke less we're going to get crushed by health care costs and anybody who works in the field wherever they are on the political spent everybody agrees with that they say we've got it just so i just offer that as a context so i think that what do we know builds environments where people do be more active simply for things it's not that complicated the research tells us a mix of land uses so having where we live and work and shop and play and learn and prey close together versus far apart encourages us to walk between destinations from school to work to the home to the post office to recreation there is to be a good network of facilities connecting those destinations think sidewalks bicycle lanes multiuse pathways like your north shore path third when i get to my destination it should reward me rather than punish me for showing up without a car so think districts like the area around here where as a  trian you don't feel out of place you feel like these sidewalks are inviting me to the store front and last but not least safe inviting and functional for everybody young and old people of all abilities and disabilities somebody in a wheelchair or somebody pushing the stroller so the website there at the bottom just is a website that shows you where that research is summarized the surgeon general of the united states you need to know put out a call to action last fall and it's called this the surgeon general's call to promote walking and walkable communities and it essentially says this we can encourage people to walk and be healthy but unless we build more walkable communities it will make no difference we have to change the environment to there are three hundred fifty thousand to fit paper cited and of that we now have enough research to say with certainty the environment matters this is not mark fenton biker pedestrian advocate shooting off from you know from shooting from the hip estimating that walking is a nice thing to do i think it's important to know that as an elected official that was important to me that i had an evidence base when i made the case for this in my community the difficulty with everything i just said is this the things that influence this happen at three different scales it's at the macro scale of land use planning right where we put things so in your general plan for example you looked at where we can grow food and you actually made recommendations around urban both growth boundaries you said look we're going to preserve our arable land and we're going to say the development should happen in these kinds of clusters which by the way you rightly declare will be more walkable and bike of all in transit friendly and then you lay out a transit map that says and then we can connect those a right that they can be connected and they don't have to be big wide highways if we build a good transit system to do that so many of the right things are said in your planning documents around your intent to build what we would call a healthy community that's the macro scale the land use scale where we put the mezzo scale and i'm an engineer by training by the way you need to know that's what i studied in university and brings that contest that's why i want to always know where is the evidence that the engineers know that the evidence says we can build places bikes transit cars can co exist where we can design safe crosswalks and how roundabouts work to reduce collisions and maintain smooth air flows how a simple thing like the picture in the lower right a curb extension where you let the sidewalk bump out at the intersection is actually not just better for the who can see the cars better for the car because they can see the pedestrian actually more comfortable i'm not surprised by a pedestrian stepping out from behind a parked vehicle many of the things we recommend to do to improve bike and pedestrian makes it better for drivers as well more efficient safer fewer surprises more predictable an example would be this treatment this is a four lane road and this is kind of a fairly recent innovation in the traffic engineering world only in the last five or six years has it been broadly did a road like this is actually problematic for cars you that was going to be a disaster for the businesses along the corridor not many actually it was a handful of business owners who were really upset but they were the ones that showed up at all the planning meetings you can imagine and i know you don't have people like that here but in my planning committee we had the guy we call the caveman he was the citizen against virtually everything he would just show up at every meeting and scream about whatever he thought was wrong so he would have just blown a gasket over the notion of going from four lanes to three can't carry as many cars right now what is the evidence tell us that actually they've reduced collisions because you move the turning vehicles out of the through lane the through lanes maintain flow and you get space for bicycle lanes and center crossing islands for pedestrians so that you actually shift some people out of cars because now it's safer to walk and bike they put transit pull out stops there that's what the crosswalk takes you to and all of a sudden that road actually works better for all for users not just bikes and pads but in fact initially for motor vehicles it's important to know that because when we look at the kinds of roads we've sort of designed over the last forty years we've always thought more lanes move more cars faster better efficiency now the evidence suggests otherwise and then you have some of these kinds of roads here where and i'm not saying this is necessarily the road that needs a forty three reduction but sometimes it's just about where we put the paint so if you were to ask me mark super costly to do this we're finding communities that say well in fact when we're going to repave this road anyway when it's due for a repaving project or any road of this type we might ask the question is it appropriate for a modified treatment maybe it's a lane reduction maybe not  maybe it's just adding bicycle lanes and these are the kinds of roads that we're having these conversations around and only i pulled this out of my last visit i think i was down in key hay among other places that we visited on that last tour and you know we talked about how it is just been our natural because the guidelines always told us to probably to overdesign roads here's the problem there's still a third scale the macro scale as land use the mesoscale is the engineering and at the micro scale we think about actual details of site design so it's whether it's the quality of those transit stops or whether buildings are at the street or set back or we have trees or on ngs or benches a bicycle rack all of those things matter and do influence whether somebody chooses to walk or bike or take transit or not so again it happens at three scales meaning we have to coordinate the thinking of everybody from architects and landscape architects that are designing a site to the engineers that are designing and engineering the corridors to the planners and yourselves as you're permit ing you know land land use decisions and so on and  i don't mean to make your life more miserable but you know in the positions you hold you know this well you have a lot of influence over those decisions and can influence it all three scales that was one of the beauties of my joy of serving on the planning commission that we had an opportunity to speak to all three and i think that's very commendable you're well aware of the complete streets policy at the state and county levels and it is one of the things that i can think can guide how we think about this thinking about always accommodating all four users of the good news is for example young man from state d o t was on the walk with us and he was the one who was recounting that they're being reminded the traffic engineers to think always about all four modes now both from state guidance and federal guidance you know the federal guidance also says very much always think about all four modes don't just design a road to perform best for cars because sometimes we can move people out of cars if it works for the other modes here's a goofy example of sort of subtle redesign i couldn't help but be up in my luca and this is triggered by what i saw  hood when we were over in co i that's diagonal parking and many people would say you know it's problematic you have it in the way local town area there you know the pull in parking the difficulty is that you know you worry about people backing into traffic and further you really don't like to encourage people to ride a bicycle behind that even though i see a lot of bike activity in the neighborhood here because it's sort of compact disc it's is a short but i'm worried that some he's going to back in there could be a small honda civic right next to that s u v and they won't see it you know i'm not going to see until they're out they're not going to see me if i'm on my bicycle right furthermore you know the business is like the density of parking there but frankly when you open the back car doors kids tend to go back into the street the doors are between them on the sidewalk and when i go to put something in the trunk of the back of the vehicle i'm in the street so you tending to put pedestrians in the street bad for bikes bad for drivers there is a solution and it's a crazy one and everybody will sort of think i'm insane to suggest this but you could turn those cars around make the angle of the stripes the other direction and recommend that people pull in backwards to diagonal parking so back in reverse diagonal parking now think about it for a moment before you say this is insane open the car doors where do the kids go back to the sidewalk because the doors between them in the street go put something in the trunk my mom is seventy eight she's not out in the street she's at the sidewalk putting it in the trunk and when i pull out i'm indeed looking at the traffic and possibly the bicyclist to i'm not going to hit now so here's the problem and this is the point i want to make whether you actually restrict biochar or not it's not the central question the central question is do we allow the people's intuition guide the conversation because many people will say this isn't saying nobody can back in the park and we have a lot of older drivers they can't back and now my answer to that is if you've got people who can't back into an empty parking space they sure as heck should be backing into an active travel lane which is what you're asking them to do right now right if they don't have the skill but i would argue furthermore that the evidence tells us the collisions are less severe and less frequent and less costly i should say and further the really crazy thing is they've already done it on the this is not i don't want to show you pictures of insane communist enclaves like seattle or bought portland oregon or boulder colorado you know where all the socialists live i can show you neighbor island now you might say well that's kind of a communist enclave to mark but i hope not i hope you would say what gr engineering right in front of that wilcox elementary school where we know teachers are literally taking graded papers and projects out of the backs of their cars they're doing it under the sidewalk now because that's precisely where that is that's hardly street it's been redesigned and there you know the engineer michael moore would tell you i would not have struck the bicycle lane there if that was diagonal front in parking but because i know drivers are looking outward now as they pull out i'm happy to put that bike lane there because it's good engineering and i will say that some people are not going to mention names we're interested in doing that this is before these printing we happened i happen to be here when you would just lay down the tape but hadn't hit it here and yet to the and we were talking could we just peel this up and change the angle right now now we didn't do it i want to go on the record to say it did not happen but it was attempting moment for some of us out of put that out there the good news is these are not massive any reversible things and more important it's part of an ongoing process of learning we can learn from our neighbors over a quieter house is working are you having collisions are people understanding how it works out a back in and can inform whether you guys might choose to do it here i will say this that there are good guidance out there now the national association of city transportation officials have publications the urban street design guide the urban bike wa design guide the transit street design guide that show very innovative treatments and here's the good news anything in these books and these guide books are on the ground somewhere because the national association of city transportation officials essentially collecting their own best practices this is important they have coming soon a fourth document there rural street design guide so not all of this is just to relevant to relevant to our luke but also you say mark we have more rural areas on the island here you know lower density smaller yes we should look at what the guidelines what the recommendations on roadway treatments there and there are recommendations and treatments for those places which leads to the question how do we make the case to the skeptic who doesn't care about thirty minutes of physical activity a day or something like that and i would offer that since my last visit there is a body of research that i think you should be well aware of and and it is compelling and it essentially makes the economic argument member the triple bottom line that i alluded to and you're seeing these of studies pop up studies that look at things like the walk score of neighborhoods and the housing values places with higher housing values now i'm sorry places with higher walk score so walk score is a measure of the number of destinations within proximity of an address so you put in any address at this web site walk score dot com in north america by the way australia england and  new zealand to any address and it will give you a score from zero to one hundred of how many destinations are within walking distance so you get a higher score for having more church park playground coffee shop restaurant hardware store pharmacy grocery right that would give you a high score having none of those things only housing nearby would give you a low score and what you see is places with higher walk scores tend to have higher home values as with tending the pub a few compare comparable homes i can't compare a eleven hundred square foot bungalow to a thirty five square hundred square foot suburban house match houses by size you'll see higher value associated with higher walk score this is important because it says there's a trend that there's a growing interest in this indeed these two documents i think are compelling the one on the left as the question in two thousand ten what's the next generation of home buyers looking for and it asks it's every year it's actually published twice a year it's called on common ground and what it essentially says is increasingly people want to be able to walk a kid to school hop on their bike and get on a trail walk to a corner store a coffee shop they don't have to  start their car for every trip it does not say they want to ride their bike thirty five miles to and from work every day that there's not what nobody's making the case everybody wants to turn into a hardcore bicyclists what it says is they want transportation choices and they don't have to start their car for every trip this is not a publication of the sierra club it's the national association of realtors who query their members what are homebuyers asking you for if you look at the research it's being driven by not just millennial who have some of the lowest rates of car ownership and car drivers licensure in the country so now there's the peak of drivers licenses in the sixteen to twenty four year old set was back in one thousand nine hundred three it has dropped in only something like sixty five percent of kids in that age range even have a driver's license it's also driven by emptiness baby boomers like me who say i would love to live in that neighborhood where i can walk to the coffee shop the corner store the cool little brewpub and by the way the neighborhood plaza has the occasional music festival or you know arts festival and things like that i'm not telling you anything you don't know i think it's just important to know the evidence supports you know if this is stuff you're aware of the magazine on the right of the national association of homebuilders their cover story in this issue was walkability why we care and you should too homebuilders don't care that you get your thirty minutes  physical activity that day that's not their job their job is to drive the last nail and sell the house they're saying walkability sells it's important realtors and builders tell me something because i say boy they've got their finger on the pulse of the market and i know it because this is a path near my hometown in upstate new york i grew up in western new york state rural country farm country but along the erie canal they have a beautiful pay trail they've built on the towpath it's a bike path you know think like your north shore path or like the quiet sure path right along it's only a silly canal but it's a beautiful bike ride the picture in the lower left is a realty sign for a new housing subdivision that was going in called the woods and the words immediately under the would says on canal path it doesn't say every house has a fireplace or jacuzzi bathtubs it says on the canal path the thing they think is going to sell the homes in that subdivision is proximity to the trail that's what the realtor saying not mark fenton bike and pedestrian advocate those are people i want to listen to and the last two i'll share with you are these two documents the one on the left is called protected bike lanes mean business it's a summary of the research that has the data like this that i was sharing a moment ago but it's basically saying this communities are investing in protected bike facilities separate from the roadway are seeing and hance retail activity along those corridors we're seeing that businesses in those communities use it as a recruitment and retention tool in other words they recruit business is to those communities and those businesses recruit employees because these are the things people want this is where they want to live in communities that have these attributes so that summarizes the research in the one on the right is a specific study of a series of streets that had these treatments in new york city where they actually took off and ready for this and took lanes away and dedicated them to bus rapid transit or shared bus and bike lanes or protected bicycle lanes like the crazy new bike lane they've put over on south king street in honolulu if you seen it where it's a separated bike lane that's taken one entire car lane away and what they found was the retail activity and therefore tax revenue on those streets went up compared to comparable streets and compared to the rest of the borough often because people were more willing to and invited to shop on those streets and a wider range of consumers not just people who could drive but people who could walk or bike or take transit now become patrons on that street further questions are often asked of me yeah but how can somebody on a bike buy as much as somebody in their car they don't actually their purchase per visit is less but they visit more often because it's a far more humane and inviting street so they're there more regularly and they're hitting more stores on a visit because i cannot cross the street without taking my life into my hands i can now walk up the street it's inviting these are pretty good reasons for us to consider these purely from an economics if you have no altruism at all from an economic standpoint this should guide how we think about designing streets for functionality and it's cities like tucson arizona which is very much invested in it's part of their economic redevelopment model to be pedestrian bike and transit oriented the business in the lower left there has given up to parking car parking spaces in front of the store to make a bicycle parking corral knowing full well that they want those concerns not that they don't want car drivers to but they say one or two cars spots to give me fifteen bicycle parking spaces i'll take that trade any day right because that that many more potential customers winter park florida and again i choose to communities that are just in warm weather environments comparable climates you know to you guys same thing that picture in the lower left is actually a valet bicycle parking that they set up when they have their art festival and increasingly at their farmer's market now because so many because they've invested in bike infrastructure and the culture there is shifting around bicycling so they said let's have a valid bike parking year because enough of the visitors will come by this travel mode which i think is brilliant but you know you know in my visits to places like one hina and arguably and luke you know you see bicyclists and lots of bicycles around these places even without lots of intentional treatment for them because the scale of the distances are right and the traffic speeds are slow enough so you know both of these communities any time i've been here lots of pictures of people on bikes by the way again often those photos are not of hardcore serious lycra wearing five thousand dollars bicycle riding and they're wonderful people i like like that that's fine but that's not who i am get capturing pictures of and capturing pictures of regular people who are getting to and from work or shopping or getting a kid from school right and that's really who you want to help and from a public health standpoint we know there's a huge benefit to give that person safe opportunity to ride mark this sounds all like it's about the cities it's about the developed areas what about more rural parts of the island there is really really good research on this is a great publication from the environmental protection agency that looks of the benefits both environmental and economic of using the same smart growth principles even in small towns and rural areas and effectively takeaway message is this if you tend to make your investments more proximate to the existing infrastructure to those village centers so that at least some trips not every trip but some trips can be on foot or by bike to the school to the shopping area to the post office branch you not only constrain your roadway design costs because you don't have to build this giant network out to sprawl and housing and so on but you help rejuvenating the economic energy of those village in town centers so it can be a guiding principle again manifest in your general plan that says help to try to direct the investment toward the community centers because you begs the question do we want to build more places that look like the picture on the left low density housing you know a classic set back you know sprawl type retail and on the mall in the big box and you know these giant roadways that have to accommodate traffic between these disparate locations or do we want to build the more compact designs like these and by the way these photos are from down in key hey where they're a little glimpses of this kind of design right where walkability unbreakability is not totally abandoned you know there are pictures of you know subdivisions with actual sidewalks and the houses up at the street in front porches and you know there's the little transit shuttle there's a bike on the front of that trolley down there it's got a bike rack on the front or at least it did back then please tell me it still does mike yeah ok good so so to summarise there's an echo a compelling economic argument when i talk about the triple bottom line and much of this evidence is this my last visit to you the fact that there's a market demand now we have evidence about the market demand the market performance of these sort of environments they perform better economically that developers are increasingly interested in building them and of course we get the quantifiable health benefits this summary is important because it says it's not just nice to do for public health we should but we have plenty of other arguments to do it as well that i think should bring in a broad array of partners so this conclude by sort of using the little case study here when we look at the evidence across the country we you know mark you do this all over the country the centers for disease control is funded your work in literally cities large and small urban and rural what are themes themes are i see the communities working from the top down and the bottom up i see them building demonstration and pilot projects but their goal is to move toward a policy where this is the new normal that is accommodating all users is the new normal so top down well that's the mayor over in a quiet signing there complete streets ordinance on the lower left that's us on our walk at it this morning so yes i want leaders from from boards like yours and elected and appointed officials and also residents and community neighbor neighborhood level stakeholders involved in things like these walk audits and on the right that's the new design on hardy street those are all example so let's go back to my crazy idea about bakken angle park and how do we ever get that gap in here she just got restrike actually no i don't recommend that what i recommend is you do what this little town villa rekha georgia did where they wanted to put it in because they were very concerned that people driving their  backing out so there is the conventional pole and park and are going to back out and get this is a state highway so it has truck traffic on it occasionally and they're weighed somebody's afraid some he's going to get creamed in their car backing out but furthermore it's not encouraging to bicycling and you end up with the  the street so that we set up a trial area right here that's actually a police cruiser we put a couple of cars here created back in parking and made a big event out of it we said everybody in town store owners businesses anybody is skeptical come downtown and we have the health people actually helped organize it and you know defense they like to give out t shirts and water bottles you know their exercise program so they made t shirts that that's the police chief in the lower right holding his i backed into downtown villa rekha t shirt that's honest to god what it says it's got a little diagram of back in parking everybody who came big chevy suburban or whatever that vehicle that's the mayor he was the first guy to do a group the biggest darn vehicle he could possibly find to prove yes you can back even one of these in here and he did successfully as did dozens of other people that day and the media was there taking pictures so if you were to say to me mark how would we actually approach this back in part maybe do a little demonstration or trial when you're having a festival up in a while loop when the traffic is going to slow or maybe get a music thing going on or own knows what a farmer's market number of communities i've worked and we just do a trial where we just temporarily you know mark it off with paint or cones or something it's all washable and it gets people to think differently about it so and i've done this in by the way cities big and small all over the country that's an example another would be in whitefish montana where on walk to school week they we had done a walkout actually and i said many kids walk in bike or ride their bikes to this school a lot of kids live within biking distance they said yeah they're so close but they won't their parents say the traffic on the road of the parents driving to school is so bad they can't so what do they do they redesigned protected bike lane that's a bike lane where their actual those cones are there and they said we're going to do this for a day was it ever overly wide road i looked at it and we talked to the engineers we said we could take eight feet away to make a little bike lane and they said absolutely is plenty of room so they did look at the number of bikes at the school in the lower left their parents were totally willing to let them ride once they had a protected by facility another town in montana montana got a great health department sort of initiating these projects actually built a temporary mini circle around of out of hay bales look at the picture in the lower right there that's at their farmer's market so they set up the hay bale roundabout so people could learn how many circle works and on the lower left is their valley bike park and they had tons of bikes showing up because again they created a pretty protected bicycle lane and it worked it induce people to try the other  modes in billings montana in two thousand and eight they were launching a safe routes to school program they wanted to cross walk here the parents said our kids have to cross radio to get to the middle school on the other side and hearing department that we do not have the money to do a big fancy crosswalk i know you want curb extensions and all that stuff we said how about  some curbing material stuck in the ground paint signage make it visible make it safe but do the cheap route and could we do the inexpensive cross what now look at this cross why don't you look closely kids started walking and that's two thousand and eight i just visited back earlier this spring in two thousand fifteen this road came up for repaving it was not a special project nobody went into special money it was due to be repaved so they're going to be out there doing the work anyway and when they did they created that because they had proven to themselves the value of the cross walk so they made a permanent curb extension signage high visibility crosswalk there the work that we do with demonstrations and trials and so on can become the inducement to the permanent change we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good you've heard it before so is that the perfect design bicycle and everything is it mean we shouldn't do this no of course not we should do this if we can make it safer and perform better now maybe it will inform how and where we do this in the future and so this is a great example let me close up by telling you about our walk on it this morning so we were down in town and it was really cool i've been here before as i said i've stayed right across the street well there are lots of actually retail activities there it's a really kind of a mixed use area already but it's fair to say there's an awful lot of surface parking and you know the buildings are set back from the road as we did our walk around you felt like it certainly isn't a pedestrian friendly environment it's a protest and survivable environment but there's nothing inducing you to say oh that's all good let's go stroll and shop there it's and i'm not knocking it i'm just saying you know sort of now in the twenty first century we might think about what the next generation and we had a range of participants in the walk and i know this is an area that's been talked about for redevelopment and it's the kind of place where initially you might use some of these lower cost simple tools so we decided t even some way finding and with there now so i know where shops are and how to get to the library branch it's not far away in fact if you think about where we were standing here a moment ago we started and ended the burger king you're within walking distance of the high school the college library branch  the hospital the beach hotels and all of the retail it's in there and probably leave the many churches we saw and reasonably high density residential on the market side right so and then you go down by though the waterfront it's the i mean it's just compelling how much when the why the y m c a might from the why i was there all of that is within walking distance of this location this location right here where i'm taking these photos so the point is what might we do now well some way finding have you guys seen these signs in the top left up in my local town the ones that say it's a six minute walk to dining and foreman has already seen those so those were sponsored by the health department and there's a simple low cost way finding get them at this website it's very short money and on the right are two different treatments of curb extensions that might be used intersection paint and a little flexible bollard totally reversible on the lower left i'm showing you a small rural town let's you think again this is only about the urban settings on the island here that has trouble getting people to walk from their retail district which is in the distance there in the picture to their post office in town all here because there's a wide open parking lot here they spent money on just temporary planters and curbing material to make a walkway across the front of that parking lot so you can park once and walk back and forth my point is there are low cost treatments when we finished the walk at it there were some of the ideas that came from the group on the walk and those who were with me can affirm this that would have cost hundreds of dollars at the most and i mean that's no exaggeration right some things you could do with paint and signs and plantings and things like that but the other end of the spectrum is sort of the big picture of the picture on the lower le a concept development plan that you shared with me back thousand and two in a way if you look at a m d s website you know they've talked about the picture in the top right as an example of what might be done there by the way grant from a and b and jeremy two of the folks you know who do work there were kind enough to join the walk and sh of the concepts in fact grant is telling us the picture in the lower right there that's us on the walk out he was sharing and i had not been aware of this i didn't know this is true that that was historically colley town had a fairly dense network grid network of streets and small almost c sized bungalow homes that there was a fairly densely populated residential area and the town was there you're very close to the ocean and so on and you know one can't help but imagine a redevelopment plan that goes back to that historic heritage of what that grade was and the mix of uses right residential but also the services for those residents and so on it's a very compelling picture admittedly you would also have some new modern infrastructure but it could be done in an architectural style that very much restricts respects the historic style i mean it could be really compelling redevelopment there but it was so cool to think about the grid that was there once and you can still see it in some of the alleyways and connection points when you walk it so i commend you to do that if you have the opportunity to just stroll around there and think about what was there historically you know and some  on the walk with us said oh you know my mom and my grandma you know sort of they could recall their time there but and a modern example just to say can developers make money doing this because it's a fair question it doesn't go if the private sector doesn't it can't be a party to it so i'm in winter park florida back to that community i told you about a moment ago this was an underperforming mall that was a classic box small right big parking lots out front building set back the boxes they were having trouble since they did to tear up the zoning ordinance to let this happen but they did they rewrote the zoning didn't overlay district that allowed them to reduce dramatically the parking requirements create facing sets of buildings that were two stories so that now instead of just a bunch of big boxes they actually have a series of what i would call parking boulevards roadways with multi story buildings next to them that have retail or office space and on the second floor housing and offices and so on in the picture in the lower left you're not going to leave this that's actually a cheesecake factory so national food chain right you know restaurant chain and their apartments above that and i was sort of blown away by they said to my wife my god that's they've kind of gone too far who wants to live upstairs from the cheesecake factory and she said me i would live upstairs from the cheesecake factory and she said if there was a brew pub next door you would be willing to live there too you're commenting on what the long term health impacts of that would be and all that and use the bike share program but indeed you know old guys like me would be interested in the walkability you know the in graded green space the mix of retail housing services i make a quick point about as we talked about the roadway corridor there calm on avenue arguably is a challenging road i know it's got a bike lane stripe on it but on the top right i think we're crossing mahogany there and you notice the bicyclists is coming off the sidewalk they're not trying to ride in the road like a car and even know where there is in fact a bicycle in the cyclists is up on the sidewalk we are learning that not only so many cyclists will use and on protected bicycle facility in fact i'm going to give you a quick to john this is this came up in the conversation there what would you do to get more people to bike even if you did this redevelopment this is sort of a ten a kind of a conceptual graphic of the number of potential bicyclists out there and if that the low at the left is the people who say no way no i'll never ride my bike to the store to work you know the right of the people are already doing it what we call the strong and confident you'll notice that there's a big chunk in the middle who we would call interested but concerned and indeed recent research suggests to us that you can you can kind of quantify those numbers that the hard core cyclists who already out there know how to ride in the street like a vehicle but sixty seven percent at the left end there's about a third of people who say i'm really not going to be a ride in the street person ever but in the middle there's this sixty percent that are interested but concerned if you gave them a more protective facilities of the picture on the right is a serious cyclist column on a fancy bike riding on the bicycle lane there but that's a challenging place for the kinds of folks i showed the pictures of before right regular people maybe not as experienced or just simply not as confident but if we could put a create protected facility separated facilities then we might have more success so here's a picture of like the crazy idea for avenue how about if we took that road and redesigned it all the way from the airport past the ship the facility where the boats come in the cruise ship facility right through the causeway down all the way up the  weather you could imagine that would if that became a ball of fire that had lain dedicated to buses and high occupancy vehicles and you had high frequency transit service running i mean like literally low headways fifteen twenty minutes so when people got off a cruise ship bang jump on one boom you're right downtown and you're spending your money on the island not driving a car when i land at the airport i'm not compelled to rent a car because there's a shuttle and i can just zip into wherever i want to be in the neck and stay there and i can use a bike to get around oh how cool that we go a step further if and when i made my reservation to visit they actually asked me and would you like to ride a bicycle we could have it waiting for you at your hotel just take the shuttle in from down because then you get all the benefit of me as a visitor spending my dollars and none of my greenhouse gas footprint and my traffic congestion that's a visitor you want to see here to build the infrastructure if you want it now the problem is that bike lane and protected bus lane that's chicago and you say it's never going to happen on the islands man always going to crazy stuff like that here chicago maybe but nothing except that go to honolulu that's the dedicated bike lane over there where they've a separated bike lane and that's actually a bicycle signal i don't know if on the lower right you can see the lower right picture there that's an actual bike saying that's the one that tells the graphics they get the green light they get actually you know a little lead on some of the intersections to get across at some of the intersections so they don't get hit by a ri turning car or a left turn a car i mean they're using state of the art design that's in hawaii just want to make sure they're not boulder colorado not the netherlands so there's some evidence to suggest maybe it's time to sort of think about these kinds of treatments here i only offer this because we found ourselves at the end of this walk around sort of having compelling thoughts about how you know the scale of change and where you could go and i think there is nowhere in the world i want to see it happen more because if these places can't be a model of sustainability health and economic vibrancy then i don't know where can i mean i really want to be that model at a time when the world needs examples and certainly there as the united states that we need to model on my last point i'm going t this story because some of the people of the eight c p o conference asked me to and i'm really going to be embarrassed if i offend anybody because they said no no no people will appreciate this story we will occasionally have people when we make these recommendations say you know this is all great venting but nobody's going to walk there nobody go right on the silly bike lanes nobody's going to go on your dumb trail on the north shore it's far away doesn't connect anything who's going to use it and then once they will show you the evidence there are people that ready to use it now here's the research and they say yeah well i would never use it i'd never go there they often use the first person and the final line of defense i think this is crazy because i'd never walk or bike there that's exactly the argument against that trail on the lower left that's the american river challenge sacramento california at one point some of the hard right of way to get it they they had to put the underneath that practically under right next to that elevated expressway in the lower right as a trail in my little home town of scituate massachusetts where one of the select board members that's our town council essentially said exactly this nobody is going to i can't believe we're spending money on this trail i've never walked there nobody's going to walk there and i have now come up with a script a response for that answer and i offer it to you as a board you may use it or perhaps modify it to your intent and i apologize if this is in any way offensive but my answer when somebody says well i wouldn't walk there my script is just shut up as my responses shut up stop talking because frankly you don't have to you know if that guy right there every day or even some days of the week he's one less car you're competing with on that highway he's one less car that you're competing with for a parking space downtown when you drive further more he's reducing his greenhouse gas footprint which we should care about since we're on an island we're going to be underwater soon at the rate we're going and he's reducing his air quality impacts and his storm water impacts of the rubber tire dust from his car that gets washed into the water supply and because we're all in the same big public health insurance buyer you know collective health insurance piles in other words are we're all getting in the system now when he doesn't have a heart attack your insurance premium doesn't go up so whether you walk there or not does not matter if he dies you benefit by all of those collective benefits so stop talking and i get my apologies if i had offend anybody but as a guy who sat on this side of the board you know the same side as you guys are know how hard it is people raj with that sort of a do you know common sense tells me i'm going to say the evidence tells me that everything i just said is true and that we get enough collective benefit that we don't have to ask for this stuff just for the cyclists what we have to do it for the bike that we have for many years sort of beg for the crumbs at the edge of the table for the bicyclists that esther in the transit right are no more we know that we all collectively benefit every time we shift by somebody into those modes even for the people who still have to drive or choose to drive the collective benefit is there so you don't have to  my answer if somebody says i'd never walk or bike there on the north shore path use the transit system with these silly bike racks on the front right on the trail walking downtown i would say you don't have to for it because everybody who does benefits all of us and the reason i will conclude with a thing that i've said for many years and i may have said it to some of you before so my apologies for my redundancy but i'm sticking with this point the reason that this is so critically important that i am a froth at the mouth raving lunatic is quite frankly not for myself and not even for any of you who see many of you like very nice people who have known for some years i'm doing it for my kids who are no longer three and five is pictured here but actually eighteen and twenty years old which tells you how long i've been working on this because here's what we know they are part of the first generation that's going to have statistically shorter life expectancies then their parents now because of the now because of avian flu or ebola their life expectancies will likely be statistically as a as a generation two years shorter than ours because of the diseases of sedentary lifestyles poor nutrition and tobacco use in other words we've built an environment that creates shortened life expectancies by design and we know we can do better because we know these tools work we're using them we're using the here you're already using some of these tools we need to use them universally they should be the guiding principles of every permit we grant of every new development occurs and i know that's challenging and i hold again i can't tell you how much i respect the challenges that are before you every time you do it through this process but if nothing else be reminded that there are people in both the public and private sector that want to see this happen there are allies use than make those best examples and let them flourish so much that that's what everybody wants to emulate so privileged to to offer this presentation i hope it wasn't too long and rambling and i hope the focus point helps you as you think about your work going forward and mr chairman thank you very very much for the opportunity happy to take questions or chat with people after as you as you all wish the thanks so much it seems like much of america and you know will speak specifically to maui is or congress suburb you know community you know i mean it seems to be like what's the what are some of your solutions or thoughts about you know just the fact that we live in the burbs we're really seeing interesting stuff happen as communities try to retrofit the burbs in other words rather than give up on them and say small nuclear device take  again and rebuild from i mean that's not going to happen and in fact there's a range of models right we could we could explore in detail some of the things all i gave was a taste but we're seeing some compelling examples of how people are repurpose in the suburbs through updating zoning ordinances and you know some of it's really simple stuff like allowing for excess retooling so many people would argue we can't bring transit to suburbia because the densities are too low and when we see communities they would if we put in an accessory dwelling unit ordinance and thought thought and we're careful about things like requiring the owner occupancy so you don't just end up with sort of your rental properties and so on and then in doing you know sort of net doubling the density but also diversifying the economic strata that are in a neighborhood right because if i have an apartment back of my house a couple of things happen you know three different income levels can live in that neighborhood the person who can buy the house outright the one who could buy it if there was a little rental income to help them with the mortgage and then there's the person who's renting the apartment over the garage or in the basement or whatever and now we end up seeing three and come up there in the little cottage you know out in the back the the inlaw flat so then we've diversified the income streams and we've increased density now we might bring transit into a neighborhood like that that's an element of how one might regift we might put in place an overlay zone that allows for little retail clusters to be created because historically residential neighborhoods often the simplest thing they had was a corner where there was a little neighborhood park and a coffee shop and a little grocery store and you know maybe one other service they need a laundromat or something like that we could zone that back in and then let that happen as a natural occurrence over time as there's demand for it or even sort of target stuff like that during through redevelopment opportunities on the retail i gave an example of that but sometimes it doesn't have to be as glamorous as that big giant redevelopment it's just the strip mall where the thing is old enough now and literally the physical infrastructure is old enough so we talked about that down by the shopping center mean some of that infrastructure is really old underground it's going to be need to work being worked on anyway when you do and then maybe that mall comes down and we do simple things like simply bring it to the street orientation and put parking behind so sometimes it's not an entire sort of blow it up and it acknowledges there's going to be a range of styles and not everything will be ultra urban i think that's an important point because a lot of what we've done and by the way some people say i like to be in a residential only neighborhood i like cul de sacs and dead ends what they're really saying usually is i like slow traffic that's not going to blow through and run my kids over and you can do that with the grid network if you use modern traffic calming treatments like many roundabout circles and things some of what you've done you know we see some of that here on the island so it's across the board i think we have to chip away at that kind of retrofitting and then you know the physicians mantra is do no harm first do no harm but thought making the other stuff anymore you know sort of that the easy answer is no more of this stuff that is only automobile oriented let's at least get that right your plan says you don't want to so manifest that in every permitting decision don't do a subdivision without a sidewalk i mean it's just we should never do that if we really are sincere about that right i mean you know it's got to we've got to build the bike that had pedestrian facilities right in so we'll do no harm and then let's start to chip away at the retrofit because you have an active population i mean the people i met there's some there's some force behind this movement so it doesn't have to just be the board there advocacy groups you have a nutrition and physical activity coalition through the the hawaii public health institute and the department of health you know you have you have a newly formed metropolitan planning organization this is important the m p o here could have a huge influence on how federal transportation dollars are spent quick side note the nashville m p o so years ago surveyed the residents and asked the question is the metropolitan planning or ization and sprawling nashville tennessee i mean some of the worst traffic in the country is that it's an urban center that's really suburbia you know it's the model suburban style sprawl developed they said to residents if we have money to spend on transportation rank order the following more bicycle and pedestrian facilities transit more another lane if we keep doing that that justified them in changing how they do the scoring at the m p o for every road project that comes before them when they're deciding what they're going to give the federal money to because they only have a finite pot of dollars they make sixty of the one hundred points score for pedestrian bicycle and transit facilities in the next iteration they're going to move that number up to eighty out of one hundred points so effectively they've changed the m p o scoresheet and other metropolitan porters asians around the country are looking at them because they have a decade's worth well five years worth of data now it was a decade ago that they started this process and it shows they've shifted the style of projects they're now getting have better bicycle pedestrian and transit facilities they also move cars better but often because they're shifting people out of the motor vehicle mode so if you don't do anything else partner up with the m p o and rethink how you're going to spend your transportation dollars over the coming years because that's a really important piece of whether you encourage more of that suburban style development or refrain it restrain it basically so i know that's not a complete and i mean you wish to give me all the details on the suburban thing but i think there's a model there i think we have ideas concrete ideas director there but you probably were i just wanted to add our subdivision code does require sidewalks but in certain cases when you have projects that go through that expedited exemption process that to one each that is a vehicle for which you can get exemption unfortunately i mean there have been instances where the exemptions have been requested and have been granted even if the department still states you know tells council members you know we don't support the exemption you do not grant that exemption it still happens so there's always that and it happens i'll make a comment on that if i may only that as a board member i can tell you you know one of the and i said this  the community association meeting last night the one of the best ways to help your boards out your commissions and boards is to show up at meetings and give them the cover to do the right thing you know there is if you're if the developer is really pushing harder you're working with a you know let's say it's an affordable housing develop and they say look we've got if we're going to hit affordability we can't spend all this money on things like sidewalks and when these bicycle racks and these are all quote unquote amenities now i don't believe there are many i think there functional attributes of the pedestrian and bicycle realm transit stops why should i spend on that my answer would be you should because in the end the performance for all of the residents is going to be much higher and because we know it's healthy design but i'd go a step further and say if we had a bunch of people lined up at the mike to give support to the board it can be easier for me to make that vote in the face of you know the counter argument so one of my calls to action to anybody watching listening participating today is you know show up and give the board support for the outcomes that you want because it helped me a lot when you know if i had people giving testimony in support of a decision it's much easier for me to and to talk to my peers on the board and say it feels to me like this is where the sentiment is i'm not going to grant that waiver for a sidewalk if it's clear everybody acknowledges this is an important piece of good design we're going out to r f p to have someone you know a consulting firm with hopefully with national experience do an audit of arizona in code and so and tell us where our fifty year old simple euclidean code you know has problems i mean we know where some of them are but this is one of the places we're going to be looking out for in inclusion into the things he's talking about it's not you know the subdivision code is different but the things that we can ask for and require and permit in our zoning code is things we're going to be looking for as a part of this audit and requesting recommendations and as a part of this are of p well not only is not going to be done in isolation there is going to be reaching out to the public for input to the community groups to other departments what works for them what doesn't work for them etc so i suspect we'll be getting quite a bit of feedback just on this one particular aspect to make sure you just worry about motor vehicle performance because that's how the code is written you're still stuck so great great addition  i live right you know thirty five minutes away from my office let's just say you know society i'm not going to spend two hours on the bus right to get to the office so that you mean woodward sort of sort of something that we can do is in unity so there's a lot of good research in that field that you know that about what needs to happen as far as frequencies you know headways waiting times the coffs differential time wise you know when will i shift over to transit how much longer can it be before i had to say it's worth it for me to drive other costs differentials like the cost of parking you know are you capturing the true cost of parking or can you park for free down here if you don't and that's an artifice right there's some cost to providing a parking space or that land has value so he's maintaining that parking place so when we provide free ball on site you know whatever we're subsidizing the automobile and that decision now i'm not saying make everybody pay for parking although we have seen communities create parking authority that over time think about the cost of parking and build it and try to get it more market market rated and then attach that to their transit efforts right which is they say plus some parking revenue is actually supporting transit frequency because if you get a half hour one hour headways on the bus who's going to use it right the people only the people who have to absolutely is a last resort so frequently buses end up being the transportation of last resort i mean i've literally had people say i assume that somebody driving the bus they had a dui crash their car but there's some some reason they can't be driving right which is tragic and it's also real in cities all across the country it's not even you know untrue having said it i used it when i was here last time and you know these walk out it's that we just did today i would recommend a series of walk bike and but transit audits where people get out and use the systems and talk to the people who are using those systems to ask what would it take for this to be comfortable and something you would use more frequently and ask the question of yourself so that two hour differential you know to hour and a half because it would take you thirty minutes you take it two hours on the bus thirty minutes drive so there's a ninety minute difference that's too big right you're never going to but if there were other higher frequency if there was maybe a rapid transit a no an express line in from your part of the island to here that only made two or three stop with elvis and now it's a forty five minute ride you might say and if you had to pay for parking down here because that's what the market would declares appropriate based on the land value you might say on the days that i don't need the car for something else even if it's only two days a week i'm going to take the bus realize if you did that two days a week that's a forty percent reduction in your motor vehicle impact right two out of five forty percent that you would be many people would call that massive success if you got that across any number of the folks that are using regular transfer a twenty percent one day a week so we don't have to turn everybody into an every day transit rider to get huge benefits if we can start to piece together those sorts of successes so what are examples of tools being used one of the very powerful ones inclusionary passes so you say every student at the university many college towns do this already you're trant your id acts as a transit pass it's included in your student fees and therefore what happens to the transit authority they get this regular stream of income because one of the university pays a fixed fee for every student you might do with faculty and staff as well now that's a predictable income stream to the transit authority that can say well now we can do some enhanced service around the university can't you know college campus getting people to and from what if we went to the hospital and said the same thing let's do an inclusion of things all i d s of hospital employees we've seen hospitals do this i'm not making any of this up in other words these are ideas that are in use so now every hospital employees id automatically acts as a transit pass and we've reduced the barrier like do i have the fare how much is it and again now that transit entity has this predictable income stream then we could go to other partner organization san jose county county employees their employee id acts as a transit pass and there are many people who choose to commute by bus at least some days of the week because it's there anyway it's you know it's already paid for basically it's on my i pad imagine partnering with  some of the major hotels first did it for employees but then also said you're a good hear your room key that says a transit pass now the next generation of that is over in honolulu we're talking about do that inclusionary thing you know your when you're only transit and also make it be the pass for the bike share system so they're putting in a bike share over there that they're building that plan now so knobs and becomes your universal card right and including that with institutions who have employees who could become the first users you've now diversified the user group created predictable income streams to the transit authority because now they know we're going about x amount every year from that from the university from the hospital from the oh by the way the high school many schools are doing this at least for their upper class kids your student id again boom automatic transit bass so just think about four or five partner groups that you could create a meaningful population of users that creates a meaningful stream of income to the transit authority that can then say well every one of those institutions i just named by the way is sort of along this primary quarter we just talked about right it's in this clustered area so at least we could enhance service year with a couple of express signs out to residential clusters those are the kinds of i think innovative things that you want to get to  next because you're absolutely right it is that's you if you don't do the transit piece you never really solve this problem because people live longer than walking bike distances so i need another option if you really want to help me get out of my car at least sometimes you get not every trip but sometimes community association last night i mean what are your thoughts on that very exciting i mean these are the kinds of things that communities across the country are doing i won't make specific comment on you know change this curve radius at this intersection or that kind of but philosophically you know it's really built on these principles that we're talking about increasingly we've finding these town and village centers are economic engines and they can and should be right there very desirable again you know that some of that data that i showed that suggest people want to live in these but they also become hobbs for economic activity and attractors the real interesting thing is that in modern economy businesses can kind of locate anywhere now so we're seeing communities of this size for example say when kids are graduating from college here you know creative thoughtful kids and some kids have a startup idea that's a community computer because they can go anywhere with it right they could go to silicon valley they could go to greater boston which is where i live they could also start right here if you had the kind of housing and the kind of cool hip and inviting sort of scen that would make them want to stay right here right and people are having success doing that actually i mean i was in kent ohio what does kent ohio have to offer i mean it's a nice town please oh my gosh i hope nobody heard that in an offensive way it's a great little town but it's just the middle of a highly you know small town college town kent state university is there they're actually building micro units these literally two hundred fifty square foot many apartments with the goal of keeping college students who graduate from there right there in town and be them being part of the backbone of the continuing economic revitalization of their main street district which by the way has an outdoor store and a brew pub and coffee shops and you're all the things you'd expect if you can have a young and vibrant population there as well as by the way they're bringing the drug store downtown because now enough people are living downtown again right so you don't have to drive out to the big food land or see safeway out on the you know it's a case with what they want within walking distance so they have used it as part of their economic revitalization very very explicitly so that may sound like a rambling answer that's what i look at down should be that's kind of the vision that's what it should be right that's what the level of success that you want that plan to have and it should not be about the car the car is not going to be the thing bre and people driving to that town center is not what's going to make it an economically vibrant area it's people living there or living close enough to use the other three modes walk bike and transit to get there that's because you can really fire that engine up is that is that you know sort of in line with kind of what you know that you're  for him to be here we look forward to working with him in the future can hear y sorry about that i'm so nice i'm with nutrition and physical activity coalition county coroner just real quick because you are going up those questions one in twenty four people on maui use the bus and i just think that's an interesting fact and i thought it was actually commissioners were in a five regarding the congress opining officials now that some of the members who attended had some comments on it i'll start out by saying i thought it was a great conference  very informative it was a lot fewer breakout sessions and so that sort of concentrated everybody's focus a lot more than being scattered all over the place and but the quality of the speakers the quality of the information i thought was very good and very inspiring commissioner kind of chilly yeah i have to agree with director and they each year you know being my first conference there kind of went into it a little bit wet behind there's no knowing what to expect but the diversity of things that even though maybe your experience there was less but the diversity of what i could have gone to a not was pretty broad and so i tended to focused on going to the affordable housing stuff it's a sort of my focus my passion and learned a lot and one of the biggest things that i learned was how much better quiets handling it than we are here on maui they've done a few different things mindset and and just get things done their leveraging their money and they've built i think it was something like seven hundred fifty five units in the last two years they've  gotten the low income tax credits there's three i guess and out per year here in hawaii they've gotten one each of the last two years which is unheard of one year they get they got two of them and so they just it was you know  in lightning and encouraging to say ok you know it still can be done we can get a lot more formal housing bill here on maui if we just sort of you know take the right approach and  and really just make it make it a real big priority and so i think that that was one of the biggest things i took away and i guess i'll just leave it at that then for now no need to wax poetic more than that so thank you concerns me because when we were flying back to the island what i noticed was that all of the fields and now that were once green you are now turning brown as you're approaching the island makes a difference and it's mostly a matter of attitude of getting the people of all of the departments together and working together with the private sector in order to make things happen because it is a priority and that was  i thought was interesting i was attending the same session that lawrence was there and the person from the private sector that had worked on these partnerships i asked him what are the top three impediments  affordable housing from the private sector perspective and the response was number one is land have land available very shortly we're going to have thirty six thousand acres of land coming out of our ears  that will be available if we provide the proper incentives second was soft money which is the tax credit lawrence was referring to and the third item that they talked about was a just happen an open bracing attitude and a cooperative attitude in government from our side in order to make things happen a commitment to make things happen and i thought that that was the lightning fifth comment that i had was that my perspective was that unregulated for vacation rentals is a problem statewide not only on the side and it was a  three of the four speakers that made presentations at the conference are fantastic you heard one of them here today and the other the other two were just as engaging  entertainment and tours were extraordinary i've seen parts of co i now that i've never seen in sixty four years of being in the islands and that was enlightening to me  bob transportation i think one of the things that i got back was that it makes sense to build housing workforce housing close to centers of employment so the closer you put the work with the hous studies but it's very very productive and i thought you did a great job on the program and it will give you a background of all the speakers will circulate this to everyone that didn't have a chance to go and i'd also like to encourage all of the commissioners to take advantage of the opportunity to attend when it comes along thank you commission on the thanks for the feedback from its well they could pretty much put everybody already said it was a great experience it's my fifth the last time i guess along with commissioner danny as we are coming off our last year on the last term on the commission i'm going to miss i think you know it's how the educational and very much a lightman to learn a lot about things outside of all we have to deal with every day but it's very important for us know about and i think co i did a great job putting everything together hi it was beautiful you know i had to call the commission on these point i think they there was as good even better didn't tell us here in terms of how they took care of their customer service and everything else that's support so yeah great and if you ever get a chance to go on a tour the nepali coast by boat oh yeah i believe so she partnered with someone from quiet county and she has helped produce eighty five hundred affordable units around the country and she just plain said she's never going to do work  impossibly perfect that they have people like that they walk away from the whole thing right yeah and i think that after hearing the three of you speak as well the that's the other part too i guess that i do want to say that was really interesting is is breaking down silos you know that term is used a few different times that you know we have our little piece that we do and then this you know department has their little piece or whatever it is is to you know break down those silos to be able to work in a common goal say for the good you know don't let you know it's a what is it  perfection get in the way good or something like that where and that was another thing that i thought was sort of across the board it the conference of just saying we don't have to just worry about just our own little piece but it's the community the all serving the community and wanting the community be a better place and and that's why we do we do and you know hopefully that we can try to make it easier to do business here on maui by you know breaking down the silos and working with each other and cooperation in public private partnerships and all of those things and understanding that i think that oftentimes sides that feel like they're opposed to the same goal they just want to get there from a different way and so i think that that's the sort of a big thing that we all need to focus on as a community is just to say listen you know we all really want you know ultimately the same thing we want to be a better place then you know when we got here whenever that was so it was just want to add that as well know meeting and fascinating but i think for this particular one was a lot more pertinent to what we do and i like i like how they set  you know as as well as co i did their package on affordable housing i think struck me at the end of all of it was that it was a demonstration of how well government can produce government hous g in the end it wasn't in the end it produced only a certain amount of housing that can fill a very real need but it will never be able to to meet the demand and that needs to be met for the future my personal perspective is that the private sector will always do a better spot or faster cheaper more efficiently and in greater quantities then government will ever be able to do even in partnership with others and a lot of the function of that comes from groups like this like the commission the community plans that we're already working on identifying the areas where we want to see things happen and or towards breathing life into those plans making them happen and that's the task i think we could suffer the housing overnight if we wanted to if you could change the zoning of all of kahlua to six story everybody would build six stories the one that will would be a millionaire without realizing it you could have those communities designed in a manner that would become sustainable walkable transit friendly etc etc so part of the problem is ourselves and we need to recognize that before we know how to move forward