Looking back over the last six or seven years, it seems to me that Kaua‘i doesn’t need a county mayor or a planning or public works department, as much as Kapa‘a and Koloa towns do. Since 2000 when The Kaua‘i
Looking back over the last six or seven years, it seems to me that Kaua‘i doesn’t need a county mayor or a planning or public works department, as much as Kapa‘a and Koloa towns do.
Since 2000 when The Kaua‘i General Plan was last revised, our county government has largely ignored the public will. The core of the General Plan was to protect and enhance the rural lifestyle of Kaua‘i. Our county government has failed to protect our island from greedy speculators, ag-land subdivisions and visitor industry intrusion into our neighborhoods.
They have not addressed GMO herbicide spraying near schools or saved the monkeypod trees of Koloa.
Towns like Koloa would have done much better with their own mayor and local government services, rather than the current county government.
Why? Accountability!
Certainly, if the Koloa monkeypod trees were threatened, the community would have had better leverage with the Knudsen Trust if it was dealing with the Koloa Planning Department.
This article advocates that Kaua‘i begin the process, through the Charter Commission, to create local governance by townships (municipal corporations), centered around our largest population centers and extending to the boundaries of regional watershed districts.
It’s been a year already
Previous articles in this series have examined sustainability and better environmental land management. The reason for the concentration of these themes goes back to the premise of the first TGI Island Breath column on March 25, 2007, titled “Ho‘okahi Kaua‘i,” which identified the solitude, separateness and oneness of Kaua‘i. I wrote then that we are a very isolated place now, and I think the future will make it even more so.
Back then light sweet crude oil was selling for as little as $56 dollars a barrel, half the recent peak of $112 a barrel.
At about that time, another effort began: the Eco-Roundtable on Feb. 13, 2007 — the first of several gatherings organized by Malama Kaua‘i.
These meetings brought together many of the ecological, conservationist and progressive organizations on the island, including Apollo Kaua‘i, the Kaua‘i Farm Bureau, Kaua‘i Taro Growers Association, National Tropical Botanical Gardens, Save our Seas, the Waipa Foundation, the Sierra Club and many more.
In response to the concerns expressed at the first Eco-Roundtable, Jonathan Jay and I began an effort to produce base maps of Kaua‘i for sustainability planning. We studied maps of the Hawaiian Islands going back to 1837. We tried to resolve conflicting ahupua‘a and moku district information for Kaua‘i. We began delineating a district map for Kaua‘i that respected the environment and the Hawaiian culture, while attending to the current state of island development and population distribution.
We presented our first results at the May 2007 Eco-Roundtable meeting. In determining what might be Kaua‘i districts we held to three principles as “given.”
We would:
• Not use modern “unnatural” property lines as ahupua‘a boundaries.
• Conform district boundaries to natural watershed features.
• Honor the five widely accepted moku boundaries of Kaua‘i.
Kaua‘i okana districts
There was some controversy using these principles, but it allowed us to make variations of districts that emphasized different objectives without violating the cultural and environmental concerns that motivated us in the first place. The early results of those efforts were published in June of 2007 in two articles in this TGI column.
We are now using the terminology of ‘okana and not moku, kalana or ahupua‘a for these districts. The ‘okana are made up of moku and ahupua‘a. In the online Hawaiian Dictionary www.wehewehe.org, ‘okana means “a district or subdistrict, usually comprising several ahupua‘a.”
The results were eight ‘okana or districts: Kona West (Polihale to Waimea), Kona Central (Makaweli to Numila), Kona East (Kalaheo to Maha‘ulepu), Puna South (Kipu Kai to Nukoli‘i), Puna North (Wailua to Kealia), Ko‘olau (Anahola to Kilauea), Halelea (Kahiliwai to Ke‘e Beach), and Na Pali (Ke‘e Beach to Polihale).
How others divide their land
On the Mainland, some states don’t use the term “county” at all. Alaska is subdivided into bureaus. Louisiana is broken up by parishes.
In Massachusetts, counties exist as little more than lines on a map, as there are no real county government services. In neighboring Connecticut, there are only towns.
New York, like Hawai‘i, has counties, but the counties are divided in a variety of ways. I lived for 10 years in New York’s Chautauqua County, which is rural, a bit larger than Kaua‘i, and has a population of about 140,000. Chautauqua has 27 townships and two incorporated cities.
Each town has its own supervisor (mayor) and four member board of supervisors (council). Each town also has its own highway supervisor, police officers, magistrate, town clerk, assessor, and even a town historian.
Of the several places I have lived, I found the Connecticut and Chautauqua township models the best for local governance.
District council representation
The upcoming 2008 election will be a time to evaluate Kaua‘i County Charter amendments. Jay has been trying to formulate a new charter amendment that would transform our seven-person County Council to district representation based on the cultural and natural divisions we hoped to achieve with our map project. The plan is that each of the seven populated districts (not counting the Na Pali District) will have a council representative.
Jay’s strategy has been to keep a seven person county council and make the least charter change necessary to obtain a better representation of island issues.
Due to a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the need for one-person, one-vote in all elected representative governing bodies (except the U.S. Senate), the representation of unequally populated districts is complicated. You can see the current version of this charter amendment effort at http://ponokauai.org.
I applaud this effort and hope it is approved this year. It is a step in the right direction, but I think it is leading to something more.”
Creating our own townships
After experiencing a number of other systems and living in Hawai‘i for almost a decade, I propose the following path to better local government, which could become a charter amendment in our 2010 Kaua‘i election.
My proposal is to use the same seven ‘okana for townships as Jonathan and I have proposed for council districts as township boundaries. But the townships would not include the Na Pali Coast and the central conservation district (including the Alakai Swamp). Those two areas would be held in common and not part of any municipality.
These ‘okana townships would include all the populated areas of the island and all the major population areas would be contained discreetly within the ‘okana, without spreading across borders.
Each municipality would have its own mayor, town council, town planning department and public works department. There would be a town hall in each ‘okana, a public works garage, town transfer station and county/state office. You wouldn’t have to go to Lihu‘e to renew a driver’s license or pick up a form — you could take care of it in your town.
If district representation shows up on the ballot this year, we will know this is an important issue to Kaua‘i residents. It would certainly make moving toward district townships easier. But even if such an amendment didn’t pass, I would still strongly recommend we begin governing by locally with a 2010 charter amendment that would set up municipal corporations as townships.
A new council
In this township proposal there would still be a council to deliberate islandwide issues such as mass transit, energy distribution and ocean resources. But this new council would be larger than the current seven people. The new total would be determined by designating one representative for the least populated district and increasing proportionally from there for each successive district, with one representative for every 3,600 people.
Based on today’s population within the proposed districts, the council would have closer to 20 members.
Part of the reason for this expansion is to meet the one-person, one-vote requirement, but it would also be a better deliberative body.
It seems to me that this governing system would do well in a worse-case economic future and other expected adversities, but would also serve well, in the best of times, to preserve and strengthen Hawaiian culture and the importance of community values.
• Juan Wilson is a resident of Hanapepe and writes a bi-weekly column for The Garden Island. Juan is an architect-planner and the editor of www.IslandBreath.org
