ISLAND VOICES
Home rule isn't always the best way

Kelly Pomeroy is a school library assistant who lives on Kohala Ranch on the Big Island.

Gov. Linda Lingle favors home rule and wants to eliminate the Land Use Commission. Peter Young, chairman of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, says, "The counties, and the people who live in them, are the ones closest to the land, so they should be making those kinds of decisions."

The problem with home rule is that, in practice, it is actually less democratic. I've sat in too many hearings where overwhelming public sentiment is ignored while the developer is shamelessly catered to.

The case I'm most familiar with is a proposed urban development at Kohala Ranch on the Big Island that would put a 1,490-dwelling urban area in the middle of a gate-guarded subdivision whose roads don't meet standards for dedication to the county even as agricultural roads. Impacts on the narrow, winding Kohala Mountain Road would be excessive. The evidence indicates there will not be enough water, and if this resurrects the Kohala Pipeline project, it could open up much of leeward Kohala to development.

Most lot owners who have expressed an opinion have favored a greatly scaled-down project, and over 1,200 signatures were collected in North Kohala opposing the project.

If the people who live closest to the land should be making the decisions, then why has the opinion of Kohala residents been ignored? The county General Plan provides that no rezoning may take place unless it serves the public welfare; you'd never know it from what gets approved.

Should grass-roots democracy always prevail? Probably not. There is sometimes a greater good. I wonder how many of our national parks would not exist if local residents had the final say. Or what would happen to our civil liberties if local mobs held sway.

So how do we protect the interests of the community from greed and corruption? Where the local track record looks more like feudalism than democracy, the solution is certainly not to hold up "home rule" as a sacred cow. Instead of removing one of the checks and balances on county government, we should be adding more — such as easy availability of ballot initiatives for land-use planning.