New Laie plan to be aired today

The latest vision of Laie’s future will get its first public airing at today’s City Council Planning Committee meeting, and the draft’s author expects the sparks to fly again in a dispute that’s dragged on for years.

Despite the contentiousness, Councilman Ikaika Anderson, who leads the Council’s Planning Committee, said he hopes to strike a compromise between those who want no development in the region and those who want more housing so that the Council can finally move forward with the Koolauloa Sustainable Communities Plan.

“My amendments offer everyone a piece of something rather than all of nothing,” Anderson said Friday. “I’m looking for a middle ground.”

Anderson’s draft allows landowner Hawaii Reserves Inc. to put up 400 more units: 200 additional in an area that borders Malaekahana known as North Laie, and 200 units within the borders of the Brigham Young University- Hawaii campus.

It’s 100 more units than HRI proposed at the end of 2017, but fewer of them would be in the contentious North Laie section. The 2017 proposal had called for 250 units in North Laie and 50 units on the BYUH campus. It also meant scrapping HRI’s original Envision Laie plan of 875 units across 300 acres in Malaekahana and Laie as well as a light industrial area. HRI operates BYUH and the Polynesian Culture Center, which together form Laie’s geographical and cultural hub, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Anderson said his new draft recognizes the desire to leave Malaekahana undeveloped and kept in agricultural use while agreeing to allow more homes as desired by HRI and those who work at the university and the school, but only in Laie.

“It is reasonable to allow 200 residential dwellings within North Laie and another 200 dwellings on the Brigham Young University- Hawaii campus,” he said, adding that both BYUH officials and Laie residents have been asking for more housing.

“There are folks in the community opposed to any additional residential development, and you have others who believe that what’s being proposed is not providing sufficient residential opportunities, so I believe this is a fair compromise,” he said.

But the Defend Oahu Coalition, as well as residents in surrounding areas, said HRI already has approvals to build more housing if it wants and that there’s no need to allow any more.

Joe Wilson, who lives in Waialee across from Velzyland Beach, said communities throughout Koolauloa helped craft the original draft of the plan, which concluded there should be no additional housing in Laie.

The desires of those communities should take priority over the long-term expansion goals of HRI, BYUH and the Polynesian Culture Center, Wilson said. “People in the community are not necessarily opposed to their goals and their ability to build within the existing footprint of Laie,” he said.

Anderson’s latest plan seeks to “carve out ways for agricultural lands to be made available for these development purposes, and many in the community are absolutely opposed to that,” Wilson said.

HRI already has areas where it is allowed to develop, and the claim by its officials that those lands cannot be developed have never been proved, he said.

As for the North Laie lands, Wilson said he and others believe they include lands that are part of Malaekahana or are kuleana lands owned by Native Hawaiians who would see their properties isolated. “This is all somewhat ambiguous.”

HRI officials did not respond Friday to a request for comment on Anderson’s draft.

But Anderson said HRI officials and members of the Laie Community Association, which backed the original Envision Laie plan, are not pleased with his latest draft, either. “HRI is not happy, but the leadership is willing to accept what I offered,” he said.

He said HRI officials initially said they could not put up more than 50 additional housing units on the BYUH campus but later told him that they could.

Wilson said community members are also unhappy that Anderson has been working with HRI without community input. “All of this is just being sprung on us,” he said. Anderson, in response, said he’s met with Wilson when he’s requested.

Marti Townsend, chapter director for the Sierra Club of Hawaii, said her group is closely studying the Koolauloa plan but has yet to come up with a final position on the complex situation.

“We have long maintained that ag land needs to be protected from urban development, and that’s the role of land use regulations, to ensure that the market forces don’t overrun important ag lands … so we shouldn’t take lightly any proposal to build on it,” Townsend said.

“That said, we recognize that (there) may be a need for affordable housing in the country, but the community needs to set the terms of how housing is built in the area, not the developer,” she said, urging community stakeholders to make their views known to Council members.

Council Chairman Ernie Martin, who represents the Koolauloa region, said he will wait until today’s hearing to decide whether he will support Anderson’s proposal.

“We need to acknowledge the demand for housing while also considering the limited infrastructure,” he said. “I would favor a reasonable amount of housing in the Laie ahupuaa but would oppose any efforts to extend towards Malaekahana.”

The Koolauloa plan is supposed to guide any future growth for the area from Kawela Bay to Kaaawa, but it’s the Malaekahana-Laie section that’s drawn the most disagreement. That’s the primary reason the Council has not been able to approve an updated Koolauloa plan since deliberations began in 2013. Each of the island’s eight regional plans is supposed to be updated every five years, but the Koolauloa document has not been amended since 1999.

The Planning Committee began hearing Bill 1 (2017), the third Koolauloa draft submittal, in February 2017.