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This week lobbyists for David Murdoch, the billionaire owner of Castle & Cooke, are trying to muscle the City Council’s zoning committee into approving construction of Koa Ridge, a mega-suburb of up to 5,000 homes and half-a-million square feet of commercial space on the second-most productive food farm in the state.
Word in the corridors of Honolulu Hale is that the plutocrat’s minions will get their way.
It would be a travesty.
In 2002 the Council passed the Oahu General Plan and the Central Oahu Sustainable Communities Plan. Murdoch’s men lobbied hard and, at the last minute, managed to include Koa Ridge in those plans.
But the ordinance required the plans to be reexamined every five years. That never happened.
Now, finally, the Department of Planning and Permitting has started a review, but it won’t be finished for a few more months.
Folks in Central Oahu must be given the right to discuss the review before Murdoch’s sprawl is even considered. Zoning is supposed to follow planning, not the other way around. And the review probably will change the plans.
Why? Because since 2002, the people of Oahu have voted to invest $5.2 billion in a railway designed to protect disappearing prime farmlands — like Koa Ridge — by concentrating all major development within a half mile of new train stations, and to prevent worsening traffic on the most congested freeway in the nation.
Undermining that huge investment, by building a giant new suburb, miles from the nearest station, that will dump thousands of cars onto the freeway, would be an insult to every taxpayer on the island.
In its outlook for 2030, the federally funded Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization estimated that developments planned for Central Oahu would add so much traffic that the 20-mile rush hour commute from Mililani to Ala Moana would take two hours — each way. Every driver on the north side of the island would be frozen in place.
Once the new H-2 freeway traffic hits the merge, every driver from the west side would be backed-up — trapped on the nation’s longest car park. Cars would be bumper-to-bumper all the way to Makakilo; the state Department of Transportation has said as much.
Paving this stunningly beautiful and productive upland farm with a new suburb would forever destroy the green corridor that separates Pearlridge from Mililani. Tourists would see unbroken urbanization from Waikiki to the North Shore, then hit the nightmare on the Kamehameha Highway. Word will spread: "It’s just endless city, then a crowded country road. Crawl and stop, crawl and stop."
Bye-bye tourism.
In the decade since Koa Ridge was manhandled into the Central Oahu Sustainable Communities Plan, we’ve learned that we grow only 8 percent of the food we eat. Voters are worried.
That’s why, just one year ago, the City Council instructed its Agricultural Development Task Force to consider designating and protecting Koa Ridge as Important Agricultural Land. Now, it’s rushing to approve paving over that same land before the task force has even reported its findings?
What the heck?
Finally, the state Land Use Commission decision to reclassify the ag land at Koa Ridge is still being litigated in court.
Does the Council not have the decency to hear the result of that lawsuit first?
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