Authorizing Koa Ridge would undermine reason for building rail

As a planning model, suburban sprawl is dead — but like Dracula, the monstrous Koa Ridge project keeps crawling back from the grave. It’s time the Land Use Commission (LUC) finally drove a stake through its heart.

As the Star-Advertiser noted, billionaire developer David Murdock cannot mitigate the traffic in his outdated scheme ("Tie Koa Ridge OK to farm site pledge," Our View, April 12). He wants to take the second-most productive piece of food-growing farmland on Oahu and plant it with 5,000 homes and 500,000 square feet of commercial space — adding probably 10,000 cars to our freeways, already among the most congested in America. Traffic at the merge would grind to a halt; H1 would become the longest car park in the Pacific.

This newspaper editorialized that, despite such shortcomings, the LUC should OK Murdock’s mega-sprawl if he conserves land elsewhere — citing state Agriculture Director Russell Kokubun’s comment: "There is much land to be used for agriculture."

Unlike the previous administration, the Abercrombie team is fast building a record of such irresponsible statements; it hasn’t met a farm it doesn’t want to pave. But if we’re going to arrest the course of the last 50 years, which has left us growing just 8 percent of the food we eat, we cannot afford to lose one more acre of food-growing farmland.

At a recent LUC hearing on the other monster-sprawl scheme, Ho‘opili, agricultural economist Bruce Plasch — testifying for billionaire developer Donald Horton — identified 10,900 acres currently available for farming.

Professor Hector Valenzuela, a vegetable crops specialist at UH, testified at that same hearing that "of these 10,900 acres, about 7,750 are located on the North Shore and currently do not have access to the potable irrigation water needed for the production of short-term crops. This means that only about 3,150 acres of high quality land are currently ‘available’ on Oahu."

In other words, Koa Ridge represents about 25 percent of the land currently available for growing food. To allow Mr. Murdock to pave it with another suburb would be insane.

There’s no legal presumption that Murdock has a right to reclassify his ag land as urban, and the LUC should not grant him the right.

Oahu needs new homes. But Koa Ridge is a stupid way to build them that flies in the face of modern planning. It’s miles from the rail project, where we’re investing $5 billion to relieve future congestion and to create a corridor of high-density housing to avoid more sprawl projects like … Koa Ridge. To permit this scheme to proceed will undermine the entire premise of our once-in-a-generation investment.

And this paper’s excuse for supporting Murdock’s sprawl is factually incorrect: Koa Ridge is not one of "the last big master-planned housing projects that were mapped into directed-growth plans a generation ago." The scheme was added to the growth plan only in 2001, following intense Murdock lobbying.

Besides, plans can and should change. The decades-old Koa Ridge sprawl model has led to: hundreds of thousands of hours of productivity and family time lost to gridlock; all $11 billion tourism dollars we make annually being spent importing food and fuel; tourist complaints that sprawl is destroying Hawaii’s beauty; and our lifestyle becoming hostage to supply disruptions and oil spikes.

The alternative — growing more food — would create thousands of jobs and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into our economy. Hundreds of farmers are begging for a chance to farm that land.

So maybe it’s time to tear up the master plan and opt for a model that meets today’s needs. Let’s build smart-growth projects within the urban corridor and keep the country country. Put the 5,000 homes where they belong: in the city. And kill Koa Ridge.