Speaking loud and clear with their ballots, Kaua‘i voters last week told county government that they want the General Plan to be more than a guiding document collecting dust on shelves. By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters said “Yes” to
Speaking loud and clear with their ballots, Kaua‘i voters last week told county government that they want the General Plan to be more than a guiding document collecting dust on shelves.
By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters said “Yes” to a County Charter amendment that will limit the development of hotels, timeshares and vacation rentals to a prescribed growth rate.
As newly elected officials prepare to implement the law, expected to go into effect Dec. 4, questions continue to arise over the “devil in the details.” While the intent of responsible growth remains clear, concerns have been voiced publicly and privately over legal and logistical aspects.
“A lot of people are tired of irresponsible government,” said Carl Imparato, one of some 100 residents who worked to put the amendment on the ballot through a citizens’ petition and then campaigned behind it. “They want the plan to be more than a vision; they want it to be a reality.”
The amendment, which passed 14,065 votes in favor to 7,871 against, says the current General Plan, completed in 2000 after a lengthy community review process, recommends a rate of increase in the number of “transient accommodation units” to be no greater than 1.5 percent annually.
However, over the past eight years some 4,000 additional tourist units have been constructed or approved, far exceeding the 1,000 projected for that period, according to the petitioners.
North Shore resident Keone Kealoha, a petitioner, has called this pace unsustainable. He said it creates enormous impacts on the island’s rural character by overwhelming the county’s infrastructure, natural resources, affordable housing, parks and beaches.
The amendment would change the way that any zoning, use, subdivision or variance permit for more than one transient accommodation unit — defined as “an accommodation unit or a portion thereof in a hotel, timeshare facility, resort condominium, fractional ownership facility, vacation rental unit or other similarly used dwelling that is rented or used by one or more persons for whom such accommodation unit is not the person’s primary residence under the Internal Revenue Code” — is granted. It provides two vehicles for approving such permits.
If the Kaua‘i County Council passes an ordinance that limits the Planning Commission’s authority to approve transient vacation units to a limited number of annual permits, the commission can continue to be responsible for the approvals of permits for such development, according to county documents.
If the council decides to not pass such an ordinance, the seven-member legislative body would be responsible for approving such development but only upon a finding that it is consistent with the General Plan and only with the approval of five members.
Derek Kawakami, a first-time candidate elected to the council last week, said he has not yet weighed the pros and cons of the council keeping the permitting power versus returning it to the commission with tighter restrictions.
“It’s going to be challenging, but I think we can all collaborate and figure out how we’re going to address it,” he said.
Planning Commission Chair Steven Weinstein declined to speculate on how the amendment will impact the seven-member permitting body, which is appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the council.
The General Plan is due for its next update, as required by law every decade, in 2010. This presents one of the challenges officials and petitioners said they see on the horizon for the amendment.
Another, Imparato said, is to ensure the county does not sue itself like it did over the ‘Ohana Amendment voters passed two years ago for property tax relief. While the state Supreme Court found that amendment unconstitutional last year, officials and petitioners said yesterday that they were unaware of any pending legal challenges to the General Plan amendment.
County officials said they must quickly move to calculate the number of approvals that will be allowed annually under the new law. County documents say the growth range is to be set by the 2020 projections of overall demand for visitor units contained in the 2000 General Plan, or within the growth ranges of future general plans adopted by the council.
“The next General Plan has the potential to say ‘allow unlimited tourism development,’” Imparato said. “The citizenry has to get involved in the new General Plan. This is not a game. This General Plan really means something.”
Council chair Jay Furfaro, who was the top vote-getter Nov. 4, said yesterday that the county must first determine what applications are in the Planning Department, what building permits are where and then get interpretations on what to do with the existing pieces and what the growth rate number is in the General Plan.
He intends to offer himself as chair of the next council, which will be sworn in Dec. 1. But he said the next Planning Committee, to be organized at the council’s first meeting on Dec. 10, will lead the discussion on the charter amendment’s implementation.
The council could decide to limit the rate of growth by establishing a specific number of permits that can be approved annually, or every few years, Imparato said. But then, the question will become how they are approved.
Should the county approve permits for tourist units on a first-come, first-served basis? Or, Imparato said, should the proposed projects be stacked up against each other “like a beauty contest?”
The latter is more complicated, he said, but has the potential for coming up with the best results.
Working in the county’s favor is the commission’s agenda looks clear of any major tourism projects, Imparato said.
“It is fortuitous that we have some time right now to do it right,” he said.
The legislation fails to provide any deadlines for passing ordinances to carry out the “terms and intent of this amendment.”
The amendment easily passed in every county precinct, including Ni‘ihau where not a single voter said “No.”
“It’s not like this is a North Shore phenomenon or an Eastside concern; it’s an islandwide awareness that we need to have balanced, responsible growth,” Imparato said.
But he said he was surprised by the amount of support, given the two handicaps going into the election.
As opposed to appearing on the ballot in the form of a simple question like the other proposed charter amendments, it was printed in its entirety. Imparato said without these “shackles,” it probably would have passed by a three-to-one margin.
He said he also thought the recent economic crisis would have hurt the amendment’s chance at passage.
“A gut reaction is we need more development, but we have 3,000 units that have been approved and not been built yet,” Imparato said. “It takes some thinking to worry about building too much of a monoeconomy … or killing the goose that laid the golden egg.”
Ultimately, the petitioners said their hand was forced.
“The only thing to be done was for the citizens to say we want to see the General Plan made useful and complied with in this respect. We were forced down this path by eight years of the Planning Commission acting like the General Plan didn’t exist and the County Council not doing anything about it,” Imparato said. “It was the effort of scores of people working on it. But the devil is in the details and that’s the next step we have to take.”
For more information, visit www.kauai.gov
• Nathan Eagle, staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 224) or neagle@kauaipubco.com
