 Aloha, I'm Tim Apachele, your host for Moving Hawaii Forward, a show focused on traffic and transportation issues. Today's show title and discussion is Ho'opili, Oahu's Future Traffic Nightmare. Ho'opili is an approved 11,750 unit housing development between EVA and Kapolei. How this project was approved and its traffic impact to communities along H1 is what we're going to take a close look at. With me today is Dr. Keoni Dudley, who's the president of the opposition group, Friends of Makakilo. Keoni, thank you very much for joining us today. I really appreciate you taking the time to come out to the studio and help us with this concept and understand the nature of some of these building communities. So thank you. Good, my pleasure to be here. I really appreciate you bringing me on. Okay. I want to ask you, let's define the nature of what Ho'opili is. What's the size, when was it approved, let's just look at the definition of it. So what is the size of this? Well, it's 1,225 acres. And it is a piece of property that's really between the second city and the first city. It was planned by Campbell Estate in the early days that they knew that we needed the second city out there. And so they started by, first of all, selling off the worst lands. And so they sold the land down by the seashore that was very shallow and coral right beneath it. And then the higher land and the higher land, but they never intended to sell this land. They always intended that it would stay in agriculture. It was the golden triangle. It was the best producing land during pineapple time in the state. And it was just too sacrosanct to sell. As the Campbell Estate finally came to an end, they decided that it would be better for the beneficiaries if they did sell it off. And so they sold it to D.R. Horton in 2006. I was aware of it shortly after that. I began to oppose it very strongly. The Land Use Commission was the first body of government to really be put into a position of saying yes or no. The Land Use Commission at the time, but the Land Use Commission in general is supposed to protect agricultural land. That's their purpose, to make a real decision about is this necessary or is it not. And Governor Abercrombie at the time filled the Land Use Commission with developers. And there's one seat for a Hawaiian. Everybody else was either a union member or a developer or a prominent member of the development community. And I'm talking about vice presidents of major corporations and things like that. I think these guys were determined that they were simply going to get that approved. Now I remember reading that we had Governor Cayetano, Governor John Waihei, and we had, although she didn't provide testimony to a certain extent, Governor Lingo also was opposed to this being developed. Is that correct? Yes, during her time, if we could have had this happen during her time, we definitely would not have the problem we have right now. Okay, okay. So we're looking at, and correct me if I'm on or off on this statistic, but 11,750 homes are planned. That's right. Are these homes or a combination of condominiums or? All kinds of things. Yeah, okay. It's supposed to be a live, work, play community. So there's gonna be all kinds of little businesses and so forth. It's a wonderful concept. It's just not needed and in the wrong place. Okay, so we have a proposed 11,750 units of one type or another. Most of them are gonna be single-family homes, I'm gonna imagine. Yeah. What is our current number of homes approximately in the Eva Plain area? I think it's about 95,000. We have something we can bring up on the screen to show us that. Okay, let's take a look at that. The current homes are 95,072 and by number, by 2030, we will almost double that with 71,000 more homes. We will double the cars by 2032. Okay. Let's take a look at the next screen on this, if we could. And that's just H1. That's really important though, because this is where all of the traffic problem is really centered. If you look at those poles on the right-hand side, you'll see that there are six of them. They're holding up two roadways there. And on the other side, there are six more poles and they are holding up two other roadways on the other side. There's only 70 feet between these poles. Now, it used to be that the rules were that you could have a freeway lane had to be 12 feet wide. And so you could get five times 12 is 60 with a 10 foot margin on the side. They have changed it so that you can now put a roadway through with 10 feet wide. And so this is going to allow us to put one more lane in there. So what would- Potentially, there's no plan for that, right? Well, there actually are plans for it. The governor has kind of set that money aside, the whole project aside, but I think that we're going to move ahead with it rather quickly. And let me ask, when is this going to be constructed in phases or is it going to take place at one time? And what's the estimate date of completion of construction? I have no idea in the world. There's no way to tell when it's going to begin. No way to tell when it will end. But it should take a couple of years once they begin to work with it. The important thing is that there's no more room. So you will never, ever, ever have another freeway lane. That's all there is to it. Right. Well, we have, what's the approximate commute from Ewa to town on average? Is it an hour and 20 minutes? Is it, what's the average commute time? From my place, it's about an hour and 20 minutes. About 20 minutes. Yeah, from the Y and I coast, it's about two hours and 20 minutes, you know? So, okay. So let's look at, let's look at the impact stage one. Okay. So let's hypothetically say we've got 11,007, let's just round down to 11,000. You know, 12, ground up to 12, I don't know. So the developer, D.R. Horton, has made the promise or the projection that in Kapolei, because of this housing development, there's going to be the creation of 7,000 new jobs. We, I've read that there's going to be a combination of a research kind of corridor in there, restaurants, entertainment, things of that nature. But I would say that the predominant employment is going to probably be retail. I don't know if that's correct or not, but you have to know. Well, okay. In the first place, we have 70,000 homes, including Ho'opiri already zoned. Okay. And every one of those 70,000 homes, they expect an average of two workers, and some there will be one person, some there will be five workers, but an average of two. The department of planning and permitting has said that for the next 30 years, more than half of the people who are living those homes will come into the city for work. What that means then is that we're going to have 70 more,000 people trying to get into the city. The Ho'opiri project is a part of that problem. Now, we're going to have a new city out there. The Kapolei is at the streets of Kapolei are empty. They're there, but there's nothing there. We expect that we're going to have a city grow up. Will that take care of all the people out there? No, that'll take care of eventually 70,000. That 70,000 more will continue to work in the city. Well, the promise of 7,000 jobs is interesting because if I recall Mayor Mufi Haneman, he promised that there would be the creation of approximately 10,000 jobs with the construction of rail. I think we're at lucky at best to see 1,000. So this 7,000 that's going to somehow divert people from getting on H1 to go to town and somehow magically have those people come and work in Kapolei is, I find that as an interesting argument. And I guess I'm wondering if that argument was used as a basis to obtain the permit. Oh, hard to say. Yeah. I'll tell you, just about every argument was used to obtain the permit. But the truth of the matter is that it would have been obtained no matter what because the situation was greased, you know? And they were the right people were on the land use commission and they came through with a vote of eight to one. Okay, that's a fairly significant number of approval. Then it went to the city. And what we found in the city was that they were bought to, I have a case before the city ethics commission right now, which is going to be heard on the 18th of this month. Interesting, what's the basis of that? Is that non-disclosure or conflict of interest or what was the nature of that basis? The idea is simply that they took so much money from this development community that will profit directly from Ho'opiti. Let me tell you how much. The one person took 43% of their money came from these people specifically. Now that's pretty shocking. This is for their campaign war chest. That's their campaign war chest. But that's the least. It went up to 91%. One person, 91% of his money that got him elected came from people who will profit directly from Ho'opiti. Was that disclosed prior to a formal vote? Are you kidding? Is that your claim to the ethics commission? That should have been a conflict of interest and at least disclosed. That was my claim last month. This month, my claim is that they just simply could not because of the amount of money they took, the percentage of the money. They could not have possibly voted against the project. So let me ask you the question. Do you think the vote that was taken, is it a valid vote? No. Is it a lack of disclosure? Is that your basis? It's not lack of disclosure. It's just simply it was an invalid vote because they knew good and well that they were voting against the people. The terrible things that would happen because of it, traffic being one of them. Well, you've already cited very, very strong motivations for a project of this size to be approved. Let me ask you if you have come across whether the rail project was used as a basis to transport these potential 12,000 people down H1 via the rail. Do you think that was used as a basis? Oh, yes. The terrible thing about the rail is it's been a hoax from the very beginning. You know, the very first step of rail was Parsons Brinkerhof and the city were required to do what's called a farmland conversion impact rating. And Parsons Brinkerhof had one of their officials do that survey. And she had graded the survey in such a way that the rating was so low as far as problems caused by the rail that they were allowed to go through. I went back and got five other independent people to score the same impact rating and they scored it double her numbers plus every single one of them, every single one of them. You know, if honest people would have scored that at the very beginning, there would be no rail going through that farmland. Okay, well, I know that Parsons Brinkerhof was involved with a big dig in Boston. And I know that that was horribly over budget and fraught with problems, both engineering and political. Tell us about some of those percentages. Well, from what I understand, their cost estimations were off somewhere around 80% and there was projected ridership through the tunnels and everything was around 75% off. Now, the same company did work in Seattle on our, you know, I'm from Seattle. We certainly have implemented a light rail system and that thing was horribly over cost and in way, way, way delayed and not too dissimilar to what we're experiencing here right now. And of course, I know Parsons Brinkerhof has been the consultant here. What's fascinating is ridership projections and that's what I'm really wondering if, you know, I think they're projecting 118,000 average riders per week here in our system here in Honolulu, okay? If you go around the country and you look at averages of ridership, you're coming up around 35, 38, maybe 40,000 average ridership. That's a big delta from 118,000. So I guess my question is to you is if it's DR Horton or any future developer that's trying to sway the land commission or the council that, hey, don't worry about logjam and gridlock because this thing's gonna carry 118,000 people on an average base, a weekly average scenario. Whether or not those projections should really be examined and brought to the attention of not only the council or the land commission, but really to the general public to say, you know, these are falsehoods that are being perpetuated and we really need to look at that and stop that. Let's look at real numbers, not gross projections and I don't know if your group is diving into that or not. Yes, yes. Tim, the real truth is that they are saying they're going to have 28,000 people every morning and every afternoon come from one way or the other. The problem with that is that that means that every single car will be so jammed full there will be absolutely no room for anybody else. 28,000 total. Okay, let's look at this slide here. So this is really fascinating. So we've got 71,000 new commuters, okay? The morning capacity for a new zipper lane and we just got a new zipper lane was 3,000, okay? The capacity for that one freeway lane that I talked about is 9,000. When and if it's built. Yeah, okay. So what we've got then is 59,000 more people that we've got to get into the city. Now we find that the rail is saying the cramped full they can do 28,000, 29,000 people. What does that leave us? That leaves us 30,000 people trying to get into the city who have absolutely no way to get there. Well, let's look at the 29 because even if you went with the average from some of the cities that have a similar system, a light rail system you're probably maybe around 38,000. So really now your delta is 20,000. That's still a lot of more cars to be contended with on a very narrow corridor. And there's no ancillary streets that are going to get you from town, from Eva. And it's H1. It's H1. It's H1. There's just no room. That area, I mean, when you come to look at that area there's just no room on either side to do anything. And there's no room to go up. There's no room to go anywhere. I mean, you know. And the problem is that our city is so corrupted and our mayor is so corrupted. Okay, hold that thought. Hold that thought because that's a serious, that's a serious statement. And I'm told, hold that thought. We're going to take a break. Okay. And this is Tim Appichella, I'm your host for Hawaii, Moving Hawaii Forward and we'll be right back after this break. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, Hawaii's leading digital media platform for civic engagement, raising public awareness on tech, energy, diversification and globalism. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi and you can catch me on Mondays at 11 on Think Tech Hawaii. Stacy to the rescue. See you then. Aloha. Let's work together, program on the Think Tech Hawaii broadcast network Mondays at two o'clock PM, movers and shakers and great ideas. Join us. We'll see you then. Aloha. Aloha, my name is Danelia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. We are the co-host of Keys to Success, which is live on Think Tech live streaming network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Appachele. We're back from our break. I'm with Dr. Keone Dudley and he's president of Friends of Makakilo and we're talking about Ho'opili and some of the traffic impacts that are facing, well, we'll be facing the H1 Corridor. Thank you for coming to that show and I wanna touch base on kind of where we left things before the commercial break. And that is, we're talking about the approval process on how this thing got its permits, first from the land use commission and then from the council. And you mentioned that things may not be on the up and up. Well, they just aren't. The mayor was bought by Pacific Resource Partners, which is a consortium of union and contractors. First off, let's talk about what mayor? Mayor Caldwell, he was elected with three and a half million dollars from them. That allowed him to get in and take over. He's going to do anything that the people, the real people want him to do. He doesn't care about us any more than a man and a man. The problem that we were talking about was the narrow area for things to come through. There is no way for any more roads. There is no way for any more anything. But the whole city government is planning that they're going to put 70,000 people out there. 70,000 homes and 70,000 people are going to need to come into the city. There is no way to do it. There's no way to do it. And yet they're coming up with the Oahu General Plan. And what does that say? That says, we got 70,000 houses out here and everybody is happy, you know? It's just not gonna happen. I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here because with this project, we're looking at maybe what? 2.1 persons per household, maybe 2.2. It's hard to get a real firm number on just how many people will occupy each unit. But we're looking at roughly 12,000 units. Now, you can argue that there are a number of people right now going on H1 from Ewa down to town and that if there is the creation of 7,000 jobs and if the creation of 7,000 jobs entails entertainment and restaurants and some of the lower paying jobs, you could argue that people that are now from Ewa going to town will actually say, hey, if I can just quit my job here in town and find something in Kapolei, that's great. I've just shortened my commute. So you could have a subtraction of some of those numbers that are now gonna try to realign their commute. But it won't be that many. So we're still looking at a sizable number of new vehicles on the roadway to go to town to pay for those houses that they just moved into. Yeah, yeah. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. Yeah, we're gonna hit another slide here. Let's get to the definition of where this project lies in conjunction to H1. Okay, well, that's the H1 coming across the red shirt there. And the red shirt is the Ho'opili project. On the right of that is Waipahu town, below that is Evertown and the whole Ewa plain, which is pretty much filled with houses right now. On the left-hand side is the city of Kapolei and Makakilo up above it, okay? So I wanna talk about your organization that you represent. You're the president of Friends of Makakilo. Right. Tell me about it. Tell me about the organization. Tell me about your role. Tell me about what you've been trying to do to get the awareness of this issue before the public. Okay. We are a community organization. We got started about 2006. We just began with concerns about Makakilo itself. We still only have one road in, one road out. And we, you know, we were at that time getting more and more houses. And so we had a community meeting. Out of that came a group of people who wanted to work together and we formed as the Friends of Makakilo. And we eventually, and let me just tell you that right now we're about 500, 600 people strong. We stay in touch through communications by email primarily. I send out material about once a week and people respond. We're having a big meeting tonight about Ho'opili right now, as a matter of fact. Tell me about that. The, it's the project about important agricultural lands. The constitution was revised in 1978 and required that we preserve important agricultural lands and that each county eventually name what are the important agricultural lands for that county. Now in 2012, when they finally got around to doing this, they told the Department of Planning and Permitting, the city council did, to include Ho'opili and Core Ridge in the study. Now the committee and the company that is doing the project and the Department of Planning and Permitting are having two community meetings specifically to let people know where these important agricultural lands are and to get their affirmation. Those, the maps don't include Ho'opili nor do they include Core Ridge. And there are reasons for that. But we're just saying that, we still have major things in the hopper about Ho'opili that could win. And that until they do win, we don't want these maps finalized. What percent did Ho'opili represent as far as percentage of ag land? I really can't tell you that. I heard something like a 32, was that, oh, is it 32% or somewhere around 30 to 32? As far as these maps are concerned, I think it's probably maybe about three to 5% because the maps are of all the important ag land on this island. But Ho'opili right now is currently producing 32% of the food that is produced on Oahu for the local market. So when we lose Ho'opili, we lose one third of our farmland that's currently producing food for us. Isn't DR Horton actually going to provide some ag land in their Ho'opili development? Yes, they are. They're going to allow people to put little farms in their backyard. In their backyard? Yeah, and they've got even some gullies that, you know. And that's to address the 32% of food production that's currently taking place? Besides that, they also arranged so that the farmers at Ho'opili would be able to farm land up near Oahu. The problem with that is that the land up near Oahu is covered with clouds most of the time. It's very rainy. It's very wet. And you can't produce very many good crops up there in the first place. Okay, so the food production mitigation is not exactly the ideal situation for practicality versus to get the permit. It was only two weeks ago that the head of the Department of Agriculture said, no, we haven't gotten any plans and we haven't succeeded at all in doubling our food production. Okay. So we have a development is almost 12,000 units. What's behind that? What more are on the horizon and to what degree is your organization going to put a line in the sand and say, that's enough? Well, I think we put the line in the sand, you know? We just simply have to do something on this island, you know? What is that line in the sand? Define that line. The line is we have reached the carrying capacity of the island. We have reached the carrying capacity. We don't have room in transportation anymore. We don't have the water to support more people. And as far as the beauty of the island is concerned, are we gonna pave over this island or are we going to stop? As far as tourism is concerned, you know? We've got so many tourists right now on our beaches. Is the room enough for us? Is the room enough for the future of the people? You know? I mean, there are major problems right now. We're putting up- So this is a breaking point of how many people could live on this island. That's right. That's right. You know? We've got rising seas. We've got a problem of the water on top of the sea water is going to in a few years start coming through the surface in Kakaako, Alamoana, Mo'ili, Ili, all around the island. We're building these huge, monstrous buildings for very rich people. They're all gonna move away. We're gonna be stuck with these buildings standing up in the middle of a swamp, you know? It's time for us to stop and say, what are we doing? Let me throw a quote where I don't have the direct quote, but let me throw a concept that Mayor Caldwell threw out there and to address the approval of Coa Ridge was a 4,000 unit development. And that was in order to obtain affordable housing, you need to increase the housing supply. Now, in my world, this is such a desirable place to live. It's still paradise in many people's eyes around the world, not just on mainland. And you can develop every square yard of real estate here on this island and you'll still have the demand outstrip the supply and by definition, you will not obtain affordable housing. And so if that's his main econ 101 supply and demand argument for the approval of permit after permit after permit, that needs to be challenged. You're right. And you know, people don't think, you know, they hear that and they say, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the truth of the matter is that it's not people who need affordable housing who are gonna be moving into these houses. That's correct. I mean, the houses that we know right now that our population is increasing, one quarter of the increase comes from people moving in. And those 7,000 led jobs are not gonna support the people that are moving in to appeal. That's right. They're just not gonna, they're gonna be the people that will take those 7,000 jobs if those 7,000 jobs even pan out. And the truth of the matter is, let's take a look at 12,000 houses. We've got 7,000 jobs. That means there are 5,000 houses where there are no jobs available. You know, I mean, we're just creating more problems. Just creating more problems. Well, I want you to come back on this show because I want you to give us updates as you move forward with your goal and your strategies against the conversion of valuable ag land to residential developments. So I hope you commit to coming back and would love to see you back here. Beautiful. Thank you. This is Tim Apachella, moving Hawaii forward and we'll see you next Tuesday at 12 noon. Thank you.