Puna Community Development Plan Adopted

Puna likely will have the first resident-written Community Deveopment Plan (CDP) in the State of Hawaii after the Hawaii County Council's Planning Committee endorsed the plan without major changes yesterday in Hilo.

About 50 Proponents of the plan staged a fine demonstration in a march on the County building for the benefit of Council members on their way into the Ben Franklin building before the 8:30 a.m. meeting in Hilo. These supporters were ecstatic following the meeting.

In an e-mail to members of the Friends of Puna's future, the group that spearheaded an effort to thwart the changes that would have substantially altered the work of the volunteers who wrote the plan, President Rob Tucker, who moderates the Punaweb forum and is vice president of the Main Street Pahoa Association, said the Planning Committee's vote marked a "cultural shift " in Hawaii County.

According to Hunter Bishop, after the eight-hour meeting Tucker said "I might describe it as a nail in the coffin of the Old Plantation Ways when people were afraid to speak up and the large landowners made the decisions."

The narrow 5-4 votes that squelched dozens of proposed amendments were largely made possible by Council members whose districts are in the process of writing their own CDPs.

Hamakua Councilman Dominic Yagong said he talked to people in his community who said they wouldn't want  their work altered after it was completed.