Keeping the Country Country
Quoted
“The plan was to leave this side alone. Everyone agreed to it. But they keep on violating their own plan…and now we have a planning director who never saw a development he didn’t like.”Cover
Photograph by Laura Chartier
Environment / In late June 2007, longtime Windward Oahu community leaders Creighton and Cathy Mattoon of Punalu’u received invitations from the city and county of Honolulu to join a committee that would execute a legally mandated five-year review of the Koolau Loa Sustainable Communities Plan.
The KSCP was formulated in 1999 as part of former Mayor Jeremy Harris’ effort to devolve some of O’ahu’s governance back to the island’s traditional districts. The invitation letters were signed by Henry Eng, director of the Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP) under then-Mayor Mufi Hannemann.
Little did the Mattoons know that they were being set up, so they accepted the call to duty.
Eng’s letter noted the importance of community involvement in the process and the “substantive input” from the 27 members of the Planning Advisory Committee (PAC), who were described as “community leaders, such as yourself, representing a broad range of interests and affiliations.” The review and revision of the KSCP would require nine scheduled meetings and would be completed in the latter half of 2008.
After nearly two years of meetings, the city told PAC members that it had run out of money, and the PAC was basically left to its own devices, according to the Mattoons. [The Weekly was unable to reach DPP staff for timely comment.]
Left high and dry, a majority of PAC members, including the Mattoons, published their revisions in a document dated June 2009. The DPP accepted and labeled it the “preliminary draft” of the KSCP revision and put it on its website.
The draft had taken an axe to existing zoning that allows five new hotels at Turtle Bay and made no allowance for the controversial and vague plan financed by the Mormon Church to nearly double the urban footprint of Laie town into the neighboring ag-zoned ranchlands of Malaekahana. That project is branded “Envision Laie.”
Sixteen months after the PAC completed its draft, the DPP, now under director David Tanoue, himself a holdover from the Hannemann years, released a “public review draft” revision of the KSCP in October 2010. It explicitly accommodates both Turtle Bay’s resort expansion and the “Envision Laie” project.
Scheduled for review by the city’s Planning Commission in March, the updated plan will then be adopted by a vote of the City Council–or not. If approved, the plan will function as the official advisory roadmap for lawmakers, landowners, developers and the various communities lined up along the bucolic coast from Kaa‘awa to Kawela and known to generations as “da country.”
The Mattoons of Punalu’u
In the Mattoons’ spacious and comfortable Punalu’u living/dining room, the low swoosh of cars passing by outside on rainy Kamehameha Highway is a near constant sound. Their house lot is directly mauka of the beachfront highway, one of a string of little properties hugging the thoroughfare near the mouth of Punalu’u stream that have been in Cathy’s family, the Kauka clan, for generations.
Creighton and Cathy met at Kamehameha Schools. They both graduated in 1950 and married while Creighton, born in Keaukaha near Hilo, was still a student at Stanford. The parents of five grown children, they are now retired, Creighton after 30 years as mental health coordinator for the state correctional system and Cathy after 21 years as an assistant manager at the Turtle Bay golf course. Four of their children are raising their families in Punalu’u. The fifth lives in Kaneohe.
The attractive, vigorous couple sit at their dining-room table among stacks of general plans, community plans, voluminous environmental impact statements and maps, some dating back to the 1970s. Creighton points to a thick stack of papers held together with a big black clip–the PAC draft that the majority of the committee wanted and was ignored by the city.
“When this was finished, [the city] took it, and we thought they were just going to clean it up,” Creighton says. “We waited a whole year. We kept calling to ask what was up. They told us it was taking time, and that they were short-staffed. And then, bingo, they released this one,” he says, reaching for the DPP’s October 2010 public review draft of the KSCP with its lovely cover image of a sunny field of kalo. He taps its cover. “It was jaw-dropping for all of us. The DPP and the developers at Laie and Turtle Bay produced this without the knowledge of our committee, OK?
“Tanoue says it’s legal. It may be legal, but it still violates the principles of planning, because it doesn’t comply with the general plan!” The septuagenarian spits out his words.
Cathy jumps in: “If you talk to Tanoue, he’ll tell you, ‘Yes, I did that, I thought it was best.’ He’s open about it, he wrote [Turtle Bay and “Envision Laie”] into the sustainable communities plan, and he stands by it. So we went in and testified against him on that basis when he was being reappointed, and Mayor Carlisle said we were committing character assassination.”
Her eyes and voice both take on the soulfulness of regret. “On our committee, they carefully weighed everything when they invited us to be on it, so everybody was equal, so we all could come together. I didn’t miss a single meeting. Creighton was representing the community, and I represented Hawaiian culture because of my work with the Hawaiian civic clubs and burials and the iwi at Mokapu.”
The Koolauloa community was “advising,” she stresses, “…we were all advising, just like they invited us to do. And then the DPP took it back and rewrote it. Why did they ask for our advice? Well, the reason is that once the Koolauloa Sustainable Communities Plan is out there, it looks like the community wants it–as if it’s a reflection of the entire community, and it isn’t.”
She goes into the kitchen and comes back to the table with mango bread and passion-orange juice, and sits down. Behind her on the wall is a delicately colored painting of a dreamy Hawaiian country road. It’s Kapoho, Creighton tells me, painted by his sister, Lyman.
Country on our minds
The Mattoons are famous for coining the phrase “Keep the Country Country” back in the early 1970s, and I ask them to tell me the story.
It all began, they say, with University of Hawaii Professor Walter Johnson, whose claim to fame was editing the papers of ’50s intellectual star and two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Johnson had a beach house in Punalu’u and was, for a time, the president of the Punalu’u Community Association (PCA), but then he stepped down because some residents thought he was too radical. Creighton says, “He was a thinker, an organizer and a confessed socialist, plain and simple.”
Cathy: “It was he who called us together at his house…”
Creighton: “…his son and daughter were interested in a nuclear-free Pacific and that kind of stuff, but it was Walter who was concerned about Turtle Bay…”
Cathy: “…at that time, the one hotel was already up, and they were beginning to talk about expansion.”
Creighton: “…and then I think we broadened the issue to the whole notion of urbanizing rural areas. But we had no term for it. We had a couple of meetings at his house, and a bunch of us…”
Cathy: “Well, what happened is, we were all sitting around on the floor kicking around names. What were we going to name this? And we kept saying we want to keep it country, it’s important to keep it country, and so I said, ‘Keep the country country.’” She quickly avers that there’s another story floating around, that surfer/kayaker John Gray, who attended several of Johnson’s meetings, had come up with the slogan.
“But in fact,” Cathy says, “it was a team effort, and I said, ‘Well, just say keep the country country, because we know what country is in our minds.’”
Save Something
For 40 years, Creighton and Cathy Mattoon have spent more time on more boards and committees than anybody. Between the PCA and the Ko’olauloa Neighborhood Board, their service is a clutter of activities during overlapping decades. During a 10-year spell when Cathy was president of the Koolauloa Hawaiian Civic Club, Creighton tagged along as the club secretary.
Cathy and longtime compatriot Deedee Letts of Kaa‘awa actually set up the Ko’olauloa Neighborhood Board in 1976.
The Mattoons’ life’s work began because of Cathy’s deep roots in Punalu’u and the couple’s passion, along with their cousins’ passion, for the PCA founded in 1956, according to their supporters. The lush windward hamlet of Punalu’u must be one of most beautiful spots on Oahu; it is certainly one of the island’s best tended–and best defended–rural communities.
“We’ve done strategic planning,” Creighton says about their years with the group, “asking residents what they want, and mainly it’s about preservation, keeping the country country and keeping ag in ag to try to preserve the lifestyle.”
They both talk about good planning practices in other locations.
Cathy recalls her salad days with relish, when “we acquired Sacred Falls because it was going to be a resort in the ’70s, but we managed to get federal funds to make it a park. Same thing at Malaekahana State Park. We acquired both of those and settled the Kahana State Park [plan] at the same time. There was lots of federal money then, so we nailed these places down for public use.”
For the past six years, Creighton tells me, the PCA has been working together with the Punalu’u Watershed Alliance to manage the resources and establish in-stream flow standards for Punalu’u stream.
“So, as far as this community is concerned,” Creighton summarizes wearily, “we’re trying to work with the landowners and at least get a sensible plan for this particular community that’s in keeping with the sustainable communities plan, and in keeping with the general plan and the state plan.”
Kam Expressway?
The city’s unilateral KSCP action has Creighton questioning the big-picture stuff.“Do we really want to urbanize the whole island?” he asks. “And if so, when are we going to widen Kam Highway? It’s a monumental job that would entail wiping out a lot of property along this highway, including ours. It will wipe out communities, businesses. In most instances you can’t widen toward the ocean because there’s no room.
“The whole idea is ridiculous,” he continues, “but that’s where all this is heading.”
Creighton recites the other “planning crimes” against the island and its people–how growth was supposed to be steered to Kapolei and the Ewa plain to conserve the ag lands of central and north Oahu, but now there’s Koa Ridge, with “Envision Laie,” Turtle Bay and more in the pipeline (see sidebar).
“The plan was to leave this side alone,” he says almost plaintively. “Everyone agreed to it. But they keep on violating their own plan…and now we have a planning director who never saw a development he didn’t like.”
Cathy offers, “There’s a mindset that says growth is inevitable, that it’s going to happen anyway, so we should accept it. But I don’t think we can accept the idea that we will grow and grow and grow until we sink ourselves. Who’s going to want to come here if we look just like everywhere else?”
Sidebar: Big Plans for Kam Highway
Choon James served on the city’s Planning Advisory Committee for the KSCP with the Mattoons and 20 other community leaders. A Laie-based realtor born and raised in Singapore, she graduated from Brigham Young University Hawaii in 1979 and is a past president of the BYU-Hawaii Alumni Association. She offers to drive me around Laie and Kahuku to show me various plots of privately owned, mostly ag-zoned land along Kam Highway targeted by their owners for development, as well as a few fallow spots where affordable housing is supposed to be built.
On the mauka edge of the BYU campus in Laie is 250 acres of hilly scrub owned by the Mormon Church and approved for housing and/or light industrial uses in the 1999 KSCP. Yet the land remains vacant.
Gunstock Ranch is familiar to most as the verdant pastureland between Kahuku and Laie as seen from the highway. We take a bumpy road mauka up into the ranch’s rolling hills until we get to an ocean vista. If anything says country, this land does. The 900-acre chunk of the Malaekahana ahupuaa, currently zoned ag, was purchased by the Mormon Church between 2003 and 2007. It’s where the church wants to “envision Laie” and build a new town complete with a regional commercial center, tech park, offices, churches and about 900 affordable and market-price houses and apartments.
We return to Kam Highway north. Past the ranch and just before Kahuku, Choon points out a 400-acre parcel along Malaekahana stream owned by Malaekahana West LLC, whose representatives have talked about building 300 homes.
In Kahuku proper, Choon rattles them off: There’s an 18-lot subdivision along the highway between St. Roch Catholic Church and Kahuku Fire Station. Close to the Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck, Phase 4 of an affordable housing project with 150 homes has been on the drawing board since 1986. On the mauka side of Kahuku Elementary School, the old Managers’ Ridge site is ripe for needed affordable housing.
We return to the north corner of the island, past the wind turbines and shrimp shacks, until Choon points to “hundred of acres” of mauka hillside opposite Turtle Bay owned by Florida-based developer Continental Pacific. According to CP’s website, “These parcels overlooking Turtle Bay Resort and the Pacific Ocean will make beautiful farm lots.”
We turn makai down a old paved road just before the Turtle Bay Golf Course. Close to the beach, a sign reads, “Makai Ranch.” Choon tells me there are two parcels sharing the driveway: a 40-acre beachfront lot and another oceanfront spread next door of approximately 165 acres. Both landowners are connected to Continental Pacific, Choon says.
“These owners must have big ideas too, just like the Mormon Church and Turtle Bay, so where does it stop?” she wonders as we gaze at the priceless waterfront real estate.
“You know, we expect that because they’re the city, and because they’re paid by taxpayers, we expect them to intelligently and rationally plan. But, like we say, it’s the Department of Permitting and Permitting…there’s no planning there!”
We laugh, but then Choon gets serious: “We talk about being in a canoe, but who is at the helm? At this point today, it’s the private developers who are at the helm and not the city. And that is not right.” -C.S.
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