Posted on: Tuesday, April 24, 2001
Vision process evolving to match planning law
Mayor Jeremy Harris' efforts to get O'ahu's communities thinking about their future took an interesting — and productive — turn last weekend.
For some time now, Harris has been engaged in a "visioning" process by which he brings community members together to think about the future of their neighborhoods. This produces ideas that can eventually find their way into the city planning process.
But to make the process real, Harris has redirected up to $2 million out of the city's development budget to each of 19 visioning teams to spend on their own projects.
This has produced some interesting plans, but it has also raised concerns that the traditional system of governance in Honolulu was being side-tracked. After all, O'ahu already has a political system of nine councilmanic districts, a city planning department, a Planning Commission and a network of neighborhood boards.
If that system isn't working, shouldn't it be reformed rather than layering a new system on top?
In a move back toward the existing system, Harris has announced that he will seek to grant control of up to $1 million in capital improvement spending to each of O'ahu's 32 neighborhood boards. That should directly stimulate interest in the neighborhood board process and shift the decision-making in the direction of popularly elected advisory groups.
In addition, Harris has urged the existing vision groups to begin thinking beyond their own communities to a regional level. That is, improvement projects don't always easily fall into neat neighborhood categories.
If the vision teams get with this program, there will be more useful overlap with the existing, and lawful, city planning process.
Ultimately, the real accomplishment of the vision teams and the placement of capital spending into the hands of neighborhood boards is the degree to which it stimulates and rewards citizen involvement.
That involvement should inform and support sound island-wide planning, not replace it.
