2012: Year of Honolulu Community Planning
02/09/2012
Michael Levine/Civil Beat
Buckle up, because the Honolulu City Council is coming to your neck of the woods to talk about the long-term future of your community.
The ride starts Thursday, continues next week in Kapolei and won't stop for months.
After a quiet year in 2011, the Council is ready to roll in 2012. Of all the key issues facing Honolulu in 2012, perhaps none will take as much of the Council's time and energy as community planning.
The city is due — in some cases, long overdue — for five-year updates to its various Sustainable Communities Plans (SCPs) and Development Plans (DPs), the documents that guide the future of Oahu. There are eight of them in all, and it's possible that six could be reviewed and modernized this year.
"(The Department of Planning and Permitting) said with each succeeding Sustainable Communities Plan that will be coming up for review, they expect it to be more contentious than the previous one," Council Chair Ernie Martin told Civil Beat as he looked forward to 2012. "So you can expect that in terms of the testimony that will be coming out. There will be a significant amount of testimony from the community. I think there will be a lot of emotional testimony."
The main issue that will be debated, repeatedly, is finding a balance between preserving outlying areas' rural character and allowing development touted as job-creating and quality-of-life-improving. That main challenge will manifest itself in a number of ways in different settings.
Some conflicts will focus on industrial uses, others on commercial or hotel developments, and still others on housing communities. Those proposals could displace farming operations or conservation land. The specifics are unique to each plan, but the themes are the same.
