Author Archives: Brandon Roberts

how he feels

to shut the valves on the company’s water supply.

Challenges and changes ahead for 2008 MoPC

By Bra

The next order of business was the prohibition of superstores in Maui County, which quickly devolved into a square footage argument. The Maui County Planning Board had designated a superstore as anything above 90,000 square feet. One question is whether a square footage designation is a good qualifier for a superstore?

Maui currently has 5 stores that meet the square footage, the largest being 142,000 square feet. The MoPC, after multiple motions came and went, could not agree on a size cap for Molokai and therefore the prior size designation remained.

The MoPC did add an attachment to the Planning Board measure that Maui can do what Maui wants but Molokai will have no part in superstore development.                   

The fear is a behemoth store coming to Molokai and wiping out long-standing family businesses. However, Commissioner Lance Dunbar does not think Molokai presently has anything to worry about because the economic incentive does not exist on Molokai. One thing is clear though, if a superstore did find a home on Molokai, many businesses would lose a home on Molokai.

Last, but not least

With the two previous items consuming the Commission’s time and energy, some important issues on the agenda were left unattended.           

One missed item of great interest was a presentation by Doug Tom of the Hawaii Coastal Zone Management Program. Tom had a federal mandate to make this presentation to the MoPC, but was unable to do so. The MoPC hopes to reschedule this presentation as soon as possible.

The MoPC just made the January 10^th deadline for recommendations to the 2030 General Plan. They submitted 20 to 30 recommendations, but these were not board actions, rather attachments to the General Plan.

Vanderbilt said his main concerns were, “consistency problems within the General Plan and the use of antiquated data to forecast from.” The data gathered is from the 2000 census.

The inaugural MoPC meeting was a stalemate.  The lack of commissioner attendance led to no action and most items from the January 9 meeting will be transferred over to the next meeting.

Meeting provides face to face communication between locals and state.

By Brandon Roberts

Locals like Vanda Hanakahi believe in the ‘Aha Moku, a traditional system of resource management. Other attendees concur that local resource management should carry more weight than State or County agencies like the CZM.

The CZM coordinates state and county resource management. Douglas Tom, program manager for the Hawaii CZM, came to Molokai as an initial step in implementing the ‘Aha Moku by listening to local concerns.

While some community members asked for change, Tom argued that“if the CZM is to change then the law must change.” Tom recommended amending or rewriting planning laws.

“Resource management is really about managing human activities and that is the difficulty” said Tom after community members administered criticism toward the CZM.

The same attendants who argued for the ‘Aha Moku also discussed the benefits of Special Management Area (SMA). The SMA is a permit process that maintains grassroots control of development. The SMA refers applicants to the Molokai Planning Commission (MoPC) who then has the final say as to permit approval or denial for local developments.

“The SMA is double edged” said cultural advocate Kauwila Hanchett, “it offers another layer of protection, but creates more bureaucracy”.

“The community is the first line of defense”, said Malia Akutagawa, current island director for the Molokai Rural Development Project.

There were also calls from some to make all of Molokai a SMA zone with the hope of retaining local control over Molokai’s destiny which could be bolstered by the recent creation of the ‘Aha Moku advisory council.

The ‘Aha Moku, like hula, has its birthplace on Molokai and is now being implemented as an advisory role to the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) with the passing of the ‘Aha Moku bill (Act 212) this past legislative session.