Halt to vision team spending proposed
By Treena Shapiro
Advertiser Staff Writer
City Council members may suspend spending for O'ahu's 19 vision teams and 32 neighborhood boards for two years or restrict their projects to road maintenance over the next five years.
City administration officials say either move will cripple the vision teams that each receive $1 million a year for their community-based planning programs.
For the elected neighborhood boards, officials oppose a two-year spending moratorium. They are less concerned about the road maintenance restriction, because the boards are limited to those improvements for the $500,000 they reach each year.
Council members, who are pushing for the restrictions, say they want to focus the spending on necessary projects rather than giving the groups a lump sum.
Hawai'i Kai neighborhood board chairman Charlie Rodgers said the restrictions are unnecessary because the City Council has always had final say on whether to approve a project. "All they're trying to do is limit citizen participation," he said.
But Councilwoman Barbara Marshall said the system needs fixing.
"We talk about it like it's their money," she said. "It's not their money. It's part of the city budget."
Marshall's comments came during a hearing yesterday before the council Budget Committee on the proposal to restrict the projects to road maintenance for five years. The committee postponed making a decision until July 23 when the two-year moratorium on spending for vision teams and neighborhood board projects will also be discussed.
City Councilman Charles Djou proposed the moratorium, while six of the nine council members signed the resolution to limit projects to road maintenance, although the six are not bound to vote for the proposal.
Participation may suffer
The vision team program began in 1998 and included non-elected community members who decided how the city should spend money on construction projects in their areas, such as landscaping, putting utility lines underground, canoe halau, skateboard parks and gateway signs. The allotment had been $2 million but was cut to $1 million this year.
The neighborhood board system was established in 1972. In 2001, each board was given $1 million, but the amount was reduced to $500,000 this year and limited to road maintenance projects. Neighborhood boards have proposed improvements to parks and other recreational facilities.
Eric Crispin, city director of planning and permitting, said the administration agrees that road resurfacing is important and pointed out that the City Council cut $10 million from the $40 million proposed for road improvements in the administration's budget. Having neighborhood boards limited their spending to road maintenance would not be much of a problem, he said.
But such restrictions for vision teams "would have a devastating effect on the community vision groups, if not kill community-based planning altogether." He said the purpose of the team was having communities "express their aspirations for what their communities should be and should look like generations from now."
Manoa Neighborhood Board Chairman Tom Heinrich, who is also a vision team member, wondered why the neighborhood boards were asked to prioritize road resurfacing projects when such improvements should be included in the administration's operating budget.
A similar restriction on vision teams would deter people from participating. "If we're only talking roadway conditions, I don't think you'll get many to participate," he said.
Roads need work
On the other hand, Heinrich said he thinks people would still participate in the vision team process even without money, as long as it does not mean the projects will grind to a halt. "If everyone is encouraged to take a broader view in developing a neighborhood plan, I can see only positives coming from that," he said.
Councilman Romy Cachola, who introduced the plan to limit projects to road maintenance, called it a preventive measure that would protect the city from legal action because of the condition of its roads. In five years, "we will be able to repair most, if not all, of those roads that need repair," he said.
But Council Chairman Gary Okino disagreed. "I think that fixing roadways is not a vision kind of thing," he said.
He suggested a moratorium might be more effective. "There's too much of a rush to have them decide on projects without doing the education first," he said. "That's what's causing all of these problems, all of these projects that we really don't have to be doing at this time."
Okino and other council members pointed to a Sunday Advertiser story on how vision teams have approved more than $2 million in community identification signs as examples of unnecessary projects.
Nu'uanu vision team member Westley Chun, a civil engineer who championed the $576,000 project to install stone walls and other landscaping along the Pali Highway, took issue with the suggestion that the community was not involved with the plans to make the signs.
His vision group made presentations at neighborhood board meetings and held quarterly community meetings, in addition to monthly vision meetings. They also sent newsletters to Nu'uanu residents who have to use the Pali to get to their homes.
Paula Kurashige, a Nu'uanu/Punchbowl Neighborhood Board and area vision team member suggested in the article that usually only about a dozen residents take part in vision meetings and in the case of the Nu'uanu sign, it was not necessarily what everyone in the community wanted.
Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8070.
