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Eighty Acres with a View: How to Make Them Kona-Appropriate?

Oct 24, 2009

KAILUA-KONA, HI – Even with only a little of the vertical construction for the new West Hawaii Civic Center rising from the site for the proposed Honokohau Village, the appeal of the place is evident. So are the challenges.

“The site goes mauka to makai,” said Susan Henderson, design director for the PlaceMakers consulting team. “And there are going to be significant slope issues. So we have to integrate in a very meaningful way access to the neighborhood amenities and transit . . while being mindful of the topography.”

Henderson and other members of the project team, including County planning manager Bobby Jean Leithead Todd and land owner/developer Bob McClean, visited the Honokohau Village site Saturday morning to get a feel for the design opportunities. You can see Susan Henderson’s introductory video tour below or just continue reading for the broader perspective. (Note: For those without the capacity to view videos from these pages, we’ll always deliver the core information from the video in text; so you won’t be missing out on anything.)

The Village site comprises 80 acres, with sections owned by the County, by McClean Honokohau Properties, and by the Department of Hawaiian Homes Land. With all the land owners invited to participate in this week’s charrette, the weeklong public workshop offers an ideal opportunity for the project team to demonstrate how the Kona Community Development Plan (CDP) can be applied to a real place.

By the charrette’s final presentation on Tuesday night, Oct. 27, the team will have drafted a demonstration master plan that should accomplish the two goals of the week: To create a master plan for a CDP-compliant Transportation Oriented-Develolpment (TOD) and to provide a training opportunity for County planners, development teams, and community residents. For an overview of those goals, see the BIG PICTURE story immediately to the right of this column.

There are plenty of opportunities to participate in the charrette in person between now and Tuesday night. Check out the day-by-day schedule, as well as location and directions information for all events leading into the final presentation. For a guide to when to attend if you have limited time, check out our “Interested But Time Strapped” post.

If you can’t be at the charrette in person, you can follow everything on these web pages, which will be updated daily through Tuesday evening’s closing presentation and then thereafter once the team’s finalized recommendations are delivered. And please send us comments or questions by using the format at the bottom of this – and all other – posts.

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  • Big Ideas Become Reality as Kona
    “Charrette” Applies Community Development Goals

    “This is a whole new way of planning,” says Margaret K. Masunaga, deputy director, County of Hawai`i Planning Department. “That’s what makes this so exciting.”

    The immediate focus of this new planning experience in Kona is the Honokohau Village, a 80-acre site that includes the new West Hawai`i Civic Center. But the broader aim is educational.

    As County Planning Director Bobby Jean Leithead Todd explains in this video, this is the first major project to be planned under the award-winning Kona Community Development Plan (CDP), enacted into law in September of 2008. During the multi-day public “charrette," residents and community leaders, developers and builders, and County officials and staff will get to see how new guidelines apply to a real project in a real place.

    “We’ll use this experience to learn from and to teach one another,” says Masunaga, who was hired by Mayor Billy Kenoi and Planning Director Bobby Jean Leithead Todd to oversee Planning Department activities in West Hawai`i. Masunaga is a resident of Captain Cook in South Kona and lives on a Kona coffee farm.

    “By the time we’re finished, we’ll all know exactly what it means when we say ‘TOD’ and what the term implies for development in Kona,” says Masunaga.

    TOD stands for Transit-Oriented Development, a neighborhood development approach encouraged under the new Kona CDP. The transit orientation comes into play when development can be designed to make the most of not only personal automobile travel, but also biking, walking, and transit. A TOD, in fact, maximizes the advantages of mobility choices so that people representing a wide range of ages, abilities, and incomes can share the advantages of living, working, and playing in a compact, walkable community.

    The Kona CDP provides much more than guidance for TODs, of course. It prescribes goals for putting Kona-appropriate development in the right places, in the right scale for those places, and in the right relationships to surroundings. The upcoming Kona charrette will customize Village Design Guidelines described in general in the Kona CDP specifically for the 40-acre, transit-oriented site around the West Hawai`i Civic Center.

    “So we’re not just talking about planning for transit, walking, biking, and cars,” says Masunaga. “We’ll also use the charrette to set standards for Honokohau Village that will include building setbacks and heights, the width of streets and sidewalks, the mix of building types, allowable density ranges, and the placement of public parks and other open space. The result will be a village design that encourages a true neighborhood atmosphere.”

    Conventional planning approaches often complicate community-building goals. “In the not so distant past,” says Masunaga, “we planned subdivisions that were disconnected from one another and where people without access to automobiles were isolated. The disconnections affected all sorts of other things, including infrastructure investment, environmental protection, and public services like police and fire fighting. “

    “One of my dreams,” Masunaga says, “is that my seven-year-old daughter will be able to safely walk just about anywhere she needs to go for her daily needs. That’s not possible in most places in Kona now.

    “Mahalo nui loa to everyone who made the Kona CDP a reality. Now we can implement the policies to guide the Planning Department and the Planning Director on how we want Kona to look like in the next twenty years and into the next generation.”