Late last year, as it became clear that the Hawai`i County Council would not be re-designating or rezoning Kealakehe-Honokohau as a resort area any time soon, Jacoby Development Inc. (JDI) decided to back away from the R-word.
JDI documents all but dropped the word from its descriptions of the project and stopped referring to its proposed hotel and timeshare areas as “resort development parcels,” and started calling them “hotel development parcels.”
JDI representatives testified before the County Council late last year in support of a bill that amended the county General Plan to re-designate the Open areas of Honokohau as an Urban Expansion area, not a Resort area.
And on November 17, JDI submitted to the state a proposed Master Development Plan for its Kona Kai Ola marina project, which indicates that it will be seeking general commercial (CG), not resort-hotel (V) zoning, for its three hotels and all but two of its eight timeshare parcels. (Timeshares 7 and 8, totaling 40 acres and including 450 units, are proposed to be built on Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which are exempt from zoning code requirements under a memorandum of agreement between the DHHL and the county. The rest is to be built on land owned by the Department of Land and Natural Resources.)
Hawai`i County Planning Director Chris Yuen, however, argues that while hotels and timeshares are permitted uses within the CG zone, those being proposed by JDI do not meet CG zoning requirements. First of all, he wrote in an email to Environment Hawai`i, the county code states that CG zoning is intended for “an area suitable for commercial uses and services on a broad basis to serve as the central shopping or principal downtown area for a city or region.”
Yuen also refers to a section of the code that states that no CG district shall be established “until there is a demonstrated need for such action and no two CGs district shall be established in such relationship to each other that they cannot act as one center and yet are too close together to serve two distinct regions.”
An area in the CG zone “is supposed to be the main shopping area of a region,” he said. “[It is] not the proper zoning for an area that is primarily a resort/timeshare location. By past practice of the Planning Department, CG zoning should go in ‘High Density Urban’ in the LUPAG (Hawai`i County General Plan’s Land Use Pattern Allocation Guide) map.
“Now, it is true that hotels and timeshares are a permitted use in CG zoning. I am saying that whatever you zone it, this project is a ‘major resort’ as defined in the General Plan (GP) and that it has to be listed as such in the GP, and mapped as a Resort or Resort Node in the LUPAG, to be allowed,” Yuen wrote.
A major resort is defined in the General Plan as a self-contained resort area that includes facilities such as sewer, water, roads, employee housing, and recreational facilities, etc. Major resort areas have as many as 3,000 visitor units, a minimum resort acreage of 90 acres, a minimum of 50 acres of recreation areas, participate in on-site or off-site housing programs, and have an employee housing-to-visitor unit ratio of 1-to-2 or less.
Kona Kai Ola includes 700 hotel and 1,803 timeshare units on 211 acres, a 45-acre marina, 68 acres of parks, 51 acres of commercial space, lagoons and a nine-acre interactive marine park, a marine science center, 93 acres of roads and open space, 23 acres of community uses, and support facilities. The hotels and timeshares make up about 40 percent of the proposed 530-acre project. If built, it would nearly double the hotel and timeshare inventory in the entire district of North Kona. Its own draft environmental impact statement adds, “this sort of concentration of timeshare units in one place currently exists nowhere else in Hawai`i…”
Yuen made similar arguments regarding the project’s need for a Resort Node designation – not an Urban Expansion designation – in an August 16, 2006, letter to the Hawai`i County Council. That same day, however, JDI representative David Tarnas sent an email Environment Hawai`i stating that the company believed hotel and time share units were appropriate in an Urban Expansion area under certain circumstances.
Last month, he explained why he believes Kona Kai Ola fits within the CG zone. Kona Kai Ola “responds to long-term County plans for the area, including the 1990 Keahole to Kailua Development Plan, which selected the project site as the community’s preferred location for ‘a new, distinct regional center” as well as a ‘Harbor Complex’ expanding on Honokohau Harbor, a connector road to Kailua Village and a shoreline park.
Tarnas points out that the development plan notes: “(1) Kailua Village cannot accommodate the 100 to 200 acres of new civic/commercial space that will be required over the next 20 years; (2) development of lands immediately adjacent to Kailua Village for civic/commercial uses will result in a very large urban area and extreme traffic congestion, and seriously impact the character of Kailua Village; (3) a new, physically separate regional center should thus be developed near but not adjacent to Kailua Village; (4) the construction of the proposed Queen Ka`ahumanu/Kealakehe interchange will provide good vehicular access to this center. There also appears to be a general consensus in the community that a ‘separate but nearby new regional center should be developed, with an emphasis on good access and ample room for future expansion.”
The Kona Kai Ola commercial village centered around the new marina will complement not compete with — Kailua-Kona community and businesses, he says.
How or whether JDI will amend its proposed Master Development Plan remains to be seen. The plan must receive preliminary approval from the Board of Land and Natural Resources or its chair, incorporate any changes responding to comments received during the environmental review process and receive final approval by the Land Board and the Hawaiian Homes Commission.
The comment period for the draft environmental impact statement, which was issued last December, ends on February 6, and the deadline for the Land Board or its chair to decide on the proposed MDP is February 18, although that deadline may be extended, according to DLNR staff.
Even if the plan is approved by both the BLNR and DHHL, the Hawai`i County Council may still be a significant barrier when JDI applies for a zoning change at Hokohau-Kealakehe from Open to General Commercial. Last December, the Hawai`i County Council resolved to place a moratorium rezoning land in West Hawai`i.
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 17, Number 8 February 2007
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