CAN’T SEE THE HYRANTS FOR THE TREES

CAN’T SEE THE HYRANTS FOR THE TREES: Well they’re at it again.

Today’s local paper reports that the Lihu`e business community wants to revive the dead in the water plan to try to make “downtown” a place to hang out instead of a place we all want to bypass and make doing our business there as difficult as possible by closing off streets and redirecting to traffic away from the highway... all so those who work there can have a nice place to eat lunch.

The plan- being given CRP by people calling themselves “Lihu`e Business Association’s Lihu`e Tomorrow Committee“ - has been ridiculed to death by the public and rejected by the Council three times already over the years and was prepared by young Honolulu-dwelling, mainland-trained planning consultants who had no idea of and don’t care how much every Kauaian wants to get in and out of Lihu`e as quickly as possible and get back to our families and the really nice places like the beach and the mauka areas.

The harebrained counterintuitive plan is too close off the street between the “Civic Center"- where the sadministrative offices and Big Save supermarket are- and the county and state buildings. then the plan is to either put all the parking down by the Convention hall and force us to take a bus to pick up a chicken or re-register our cars or to put in a mulit-million dollar underground parking garage to go with the already multimillion dollar boondoggle.

They want to close off the only through street from Hardy to Rice rip out the already scarce parking and put in trees and a pedestrian mall... so people who work there can have a nice place to eat lunch because the park by the historic County building where the council is housed is too crowded with nobody every day (or maybe it’s the homeless who hang out there who offend the workers’ senses enough to kick them out but not to help them find housing)..

We also seem to have found out through the article that the consulting contract was – surprise- corruptly secured by someone with the same name as a former planning director and a prominent architectural development representative.

According to the article “(Councilperson Tim) Bynum said the conflict of interest concern is that PBR Hawaii associate Kimi Yuen was contracted to do the plan for the county and the plan for Grove Farm, one of the largest landowners and most important companies on Kaua`i. “

But the real conflict may be that the only person with that name around here just happens to be Avery Yuen a former planning director who has parlayed that position into being one of the biggest architects in the county who works for all the biggest land owners and developers.. who works, more than occasionally, for Grove Farm

The article doesn’t not say what the two Yuen’s relationship is. Maybe there isn’t one.

But even if there isn’t we can’t imagine why the Lihu`e businesspeople would think there’s anything wrong with a Honolulu company doing a town plan that doesn’t recognize the way things work among the denizens of Kaua`i and thinks that central Lihu`e is a wonderful place where people can hang out and walk around amidst the noise and car-pollution instead of getting in and out as fast as possible. Why would we want to go anywhere else- we all live here just so we can spend our free time simulating city life.

Perhaps when they build it they can make sure to include a hole for us to get sick in.