Growth Opportunity Areas

The Growth Opportunity Areas, which grew out of the Mapping the Future workshop, represent a distinctive element of future land use within Kona. All the maps generated by the public were digitized to gain an understanding of the public’s preferences. The composite maps generated to summarize the results disclosed an initial set of preferred growth locations. These locations indicated areas selected by 10 to 13 different groups out of the 20 groups that focused on future development inside the Urban Expansion Areas. A preliminary schematic location map was developed using these selected areas.

During the Open House segment of the How Do We Grow? Charrette Part 1, participants were asked to review those locations on a large-scale map and to comment on their appropriateness based on their knowledge of the terrain, information about existing and proposed roads, environmental constraints, and on the relationship of selected areas to existing and proposed developments.

Finally, in preparation for the second charrette, the areas were mapped (up to that point that areas had been diagrammatically represented as circles). In doing so, everything was kept within a 1/4 mile of existing roads wherever possible, and protected areas and steep slopes were avoided.

The new alignments were presented again to the participants of the first public meeting of the How Do We Grow? Charrette Part 2 for final refinements. The public expanded some of them, combined others and identified open spaces and connections through or around them.

The Environmental Simulation Center generated a development suitability analysis to determine a rough approximation of how much land could actually be developed within those areas. The analysis was based on the following criteria:

• Slopes less than 12%,
• Not in a flood zone,
• Land not already developed,
• Land not already approved for development,
• Land that is not Important Agricultural lands, and
• Not overlapping the habitat of a rare or endangered species with global rank of 3.

The analysis revealed that the Growth OpportunityAreas have a total area of 3,936 acres, of which 3,093 acres (79%) are buildable and 843 (21%) are variously constrained. Based on the preferred development scenario identified in the How Do We Grow? Charrette Part 2, the buildable land in these areas provides a supply of land to accommodate forecast growth. The excess is important because land within the Growth Opportunity Areas may not become available for development or might become available at different times over the next 15 years.

It is important to note that the boundaries of the Growth Opportunity Areas do not represent a second layer of growth boundaries within the designated Urban Expansion Area. Rather, these are areas where incentives should be used to stimulate development. Incentives could include expediting the permitting process, tailoring zoning regulations, and providing public transportation and infrastructure using the County’s bonding capacity for water supply, wastewater, district wide drainage, and roads. A parallel set of disincentives were envisioned to discourage development outside the areas.