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The Village Plan Takes Shape: Planner Previews Monday’s “Pin-Up”

Oct 26, 2009

KAILUA-KONA, HI – Hours before the Monday-night “pin-up” of work-in-progress for the Honokohau Village TOD, PlaceMakers lead designer Geoff Dyer offered a peek at the team’s thinking so far. The idea is to provide a mixed-use neighborhood, closely integrated with the emerging West Hawaii Civic Center, where people can live, work, and play without relying exclusively on automobile travel.

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By Tuesday evening, when the weeklong charrrette concludes, the PlaceMakers’ master plan will be refined for a final time, based on feedback from County officials, developer teams, and community members who’ve visited the studio over the week. To see where the design effort began, check out the introductory narration of PlaceMakers project principal Susan Henderson earlier in the week. And to get an overview of the project, read the Big Picture post to the immediate right.

The fleshed out Honokonau Village master plan that emerges on Tuesday is, of course, a demonstration plan. It’s a way for the three partners in the process – the County, the community, and the PlaceMakers consulting team – to collaborate on the application of key components of the Kona Community Development Plan (CDP) to a real place. The charrette, like the CDP process itself, has been a true community effort, with the work-in-progress design explained by Geoff Dyer above the result of dozens of reviews and revisions.

An eventual, implementable plan must pass muster with the community, the County, and development teams responsible for making the investment to realize the project. For a view of the County’s perspective, listen to the County’s director of planning talk about the project. And for a developer’s outlook, check this video from Bob McClean, whose company owns a substantial section of the Honokohau Village site.

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Don’t forget Tuesday night’s final aloha presentation at 6:30 p.m. Location and directions are on the Location tab in the toolbar above. And if you can’t make the presentation in person, you can catch up on all the essentials here on the website – plus comment on what you see.

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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.”