• Walton made great point about county plan Walton made great point about county plan What a fine article Anne Walton wrote in the Forum section of TGI Jun 25, “Imagine creating a sustainable future for Kauai.” From her amazing credentials
• Walton made great point about county plan
Walton made great point about county plan
What a fine article Anne Walton wrote in the Forum section of TGI Jun 25, “Imagine creating a sustainable future for Kauai.”
From her amazing credentials listed in her article in the field of planning — coastal and marine resource planner for NOAA for 20 years; trained communities and professionals in 32 countries how to use place-based models, tools and processes for developing management plans, marine spatial plans and climate adaptation plans and is now in Italy showing 18 communities how to better plan.
And Kauai is lucky enough to have this very learned person who lives here and volunteers her knowledge and experiences to our local government so that Kauai can be a better place for all of us to live.
She and the Kauai Community Coalition a committee made up of citizens who simply want what is best for the growth of Kauai, worked long and hard to put a plan in place that satisfied our future goals. And, remember one very important point, these people are all volunteers picked by no one so the only dog they have in this fight is for the betterment of our Island.
With politics guiding our General Plans we have spent millions of dollars over the years getting information from planners and designers who tell those in power what they want to hear, unlike what Ms Walton and KCC has presented to them.
All past plans and the current one that our administrators are proposing are a disaster as our roads, traffic, low income housing (truly affordable for those who need it!) homeless people, our overdevelopment without putting proper infrastructure in place to handle it, not getting our fair share of TAT tax that we deserve, and being taxed more and more for services we are not receiving.
It is truly a breath of fresh air to see an experienced woman like Anne Walton step up to the plate and volunteer her time and efforts to make Kauai a better place for all of us. But it is also regrettable to see those who are running our government basically disregard the 40 pages of input that she and the KCC worked on for a year but our representatives have presented a plan that put us in the hole we are in and will keep us there.
One can only speculate that the reason our elected and appointed officials do not listen to what experienced people like Ms Walton suggest is that (1) they already have their minds made up before public hearings and (2) it would be embarrassing to have unpaid people suggesting a workable plan whereas they have already spent millions on listening to words they wanted to hear.
In regards to our government’s plan, Ms Walton so truthfully said, ” Most of all this is a plan that does not even focus on putting out the smoldering fires created in the past (emphasis added), most of them identified in the 2000 General Plan and exasperated by the passing decades in which they have been addressed.”
Thank you Anne Walton for everything you are trying to do for Kauai.
Glenn Mickens, Kapaa
