West Hawaii development permit requests are piling up after the Leeward Planning Commission has been unable to meet for six months straight.
The commission exists to, among other things, review applications for land use permits by property owners and developers on the Kona side of the island. However, a variety of issues has led the commission to cancel each of its monthly meetings since September.
“In September, October and November, the sole applicant we had on the agenda requested a deferral,” said county Planning Program Manager Maija Jackson. “For the December meeting, we had three applicants, but two out of the five commissioners couldn’t make it and we lost quorum.”
The commission can have up to seven members and requires that at least four commissioners be present for a quorum. But with only five commissioners currently serving, there isn’t much leeway if members are absent.
Commission Chair Barbara DeFranco said that if two people can’t attend, then the whole meeting must be called off, which is made more complicated by the need to avoid conflicts of interest. Commissioners must recuse themselves in the event of a conflict of interest, which becomes a de facto absence that could break quorum.
“If there’s a conflict of interest, and I need to recuse myself, then everyone else needs to be there,” DeFranco said. “But we’re all involved in the community. We know a lot of these people, so it’s hard to avoid conflicts.”
Jackson said the number of people on the panel has been low since early 2023, when one commissioner’s term ran out with no immediate replacement on top of an already vacant seat.
“It’s a volunteer position, and it’s hard to get people to commit to that,” DeFranco said.
While the January meeting also was cancelled due to two commissioners being absent, the February meeting was cancelled after the commission attempted to publish a legal notice about the upcoming meeting in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. Unfortunately, the newspaper was, at the time, undergoing technical problems that prevented the notice from being received, leading to yet another cancellation. (The technical problems have since been resolved.)
After these repeated cancellations, the commission now faces a pileup of unaddressed permits once it eventually does meet. Jackson said a special meeting of the commission has been scheduled for Feb. 29 to tackle that backlog — with five items on the agenda, DeFranco guessed that the meeting will take all day.
Fortunately, Jackson said the commission’s woes could end soon: After Mayor Mitch Roth put out a call for applicants to fill various county board and commission seats in January, at least one candidate has been nominated — Roger Kaiwi, who will be evaluated by the Hawaii County Council starting Tuesday.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.