The Workshop

The Mapping the Future Workshop was conducted in February 2006. The workshop was a four-hour activity attended by over 350 residents organized into 32 facilitated small groups. It consisted of two segments: Critical Questions and Mapping the Future.

Critical Questions

This exercise was designed to address questions related to policy and implementation issues as raised by the structured interviews and ideas generated at the public meetings. During the critical questions segment of the workshop small groups were randomly assigned to address one of 12 topics: housing choice; housing affordability; agriculture; transportation and land use; congestion; parks, recreation, and open space; protection of the environment; hazard mitigation; protection of ancestral and historic sites; community character; retail; and tourism. The critical questions represented the start of a discussion of policy issues for the Community Development Plan. They dealt with big picture questions to frame and inform the more specific deliberations of the Community Development Plan. (See Appendix B: Critical Questions Results Summary from Kona Community Development Plan: Public Involvement Summary.)

Mapping the Future

The purpose of this exercise was to initiate a dialogue on regional character, cultural priorities, environmental protection issues, and preferred locations for future growth. The Mapping the Future segment of the workshop asked participants to address three issues:

To define criteria for the protection of ancestral and historic sites;
To define criteria for the protection of land for environmental and open space reasons; and
To address the issue of land consumption in Kona.

Using the Base Maps generated for the workshop, participants first considered and mapped historic sites and specific geographical and environmental features that should be protected. Then, they recommended appropriate locations where future growth could occur based on cultural and geographic constraints and based on land available within areas defined by the County General Plan as expansion areas. The Mapping the Future segment enabled participants to begin to deal with the issue of future growth – balancing future growth with the imperative of respecting ancestral cultural resources and protecting the unique environmental features of the Kona region. (See Appendix C: Respected areas and Protected Areas Results Summary, and Appendix D Mapping the Future Exercise Results Summary from Kona Community Development Plan: Public Involvement Summary)

The Mapping the Future exercise also involved an intuitive simulation of the process of land consumption and growth in Kona over the next 15 years. In this "game" participants, working in small groups of 10, were given a number of "chips" each representing an area of 40 acres. The total number of chips (139) represent the amount of land needed to accommodate expected population growth if current development trends were to continue (5,521 additional acres). The amount of land needed for future development was projected based on actual land consumption for the period 1995 to 2005. It therefore takes into account the second home phenomenon and assumes that the trend will continue. Participants were able to place chips in areas where they wanted future growth to occur. They could select unprotected, undeveloped lands, such as existing open space or agricultural lands. They could select developed land areas, indicating a desire for redevelopment, infill development, or increasing intensity of development in existing communities. They could also indicate intensity of development by doubling or tripling chips in particular areas.

The picture on the left shows the chip placement indicating the land development preferences from one table at the workshop. The image on the right shows the digitized version of that same area. Each table’s maps with chips were digitized and overlaid with each other in a GIS to show where there was consensus about where growth should occur.