The 91直播 County General Plan is the most important document setting out the county’s priorities and policies for land use, growth and development.
I had the privilege of being county Planning Director in 2005, when the current General Plan was adopted. The General Plan has been going through a comprehensive revision and is now at a crossroads.
The Planning Department submitted a 310-page revision of the General Plan to the County Council in March 2025. It’s not perfect — no plan is — but it contains many valuable policies and actions. It’s the result of years of public hearings and meetings. The council usually refers to it as the 2045 Plan. The council makes the final decision on the General Plan.
On March 4, Ashley Kierkiewicz sent her fellow council members a 71-page proposal that would completely replace the 2045 Plan. The council has been referring to the 71-page draft as the 2026 Plan. It’s received almost no public attention or publicity.
The 2026 Plan consists almost entirely of very broad policies and actions. Individually, they are mostly very good. They fall far short, however, of giving the guidance to future decisions that a General Plan should. Way too much has been taken out.
The 2026 Plan offered to the council so far has no land use maps. Maps are the most crucial part of a General Plan. They guide future rezonings. For example, a new industrial or resort rezoning can take place only where the maps have designated them. Legally, zoning must be done in the context of a long-range plan.
Council member Kierkiewicz told the council on March 10 that she’d be working with the Planning Department to produce new maps. On March 19, she wrote the council that her maps would reduce the 14 land use categories in the Planning Department’s maps to 4 — Urban, Rural, Agricultural and Conservation.
It’s impossible for the land use maps to provide meaningful guidance with just four categories. For example, all of Hilo would presumably be Urban. Unlike the current General Plan or the 2045 Plan, there would be nothing specific to guide where future industrial, resort or commercial zoning could go in that entire area.
The 2026 Plan also has language indicating that the council can override the land use maps in making zoning decisions. This takes away the basic function of the maps. The General Plan land use maps have never been exact, but the General Plan requires that zoning conform to the maps.
There’s not enough space available to describe everything important that’s been taken out of the 2045 Plan. Just to mention a few, though: Every General Plan, from 1971 on, has had a list of natural beauty sites in each district that should be protected. It’s not complete, of course, but it’s better than nothing. This list is gone in the 2026 Plan.
The 2045 Plan has an extensive discussion of how climate change will affect the island: things like sea level rise and more intense storms. The 2026 Plan removes all explicit mention of climate change.
The 2026 Plan has no explicit projections of the population growth that we should expect in the next 20 years. Population growth is a key parameter in planning.
In short, the 2026 Plan would greatly weaken land use planning on our island.
The council will be looking at both plans on Tuesday, April 7, at 9 a.m. If the 2026 Plan is approved by this committee, it will go to the Planning Director and the two Planning Commissions for their review and recommendations.
At this point, even if council member Kierkiewicz comes up with new maps — or maps with changed designations — before the April 7 meeting, neither the council nor the public will have had time to carefully look at them.
At this point, the council should not move forward with the 2026 Plan.
The 2045 Plan, without changes, would make a fine General Plan. It’s natural, though, that council members might want to suggest some changes. Council member Kierkiewicz made some valid criticisms of it in her March 19 letter. Some recommendations are too detailed for a General Plan, and perhaps overly ambitious. Many of her proposed policies and actions could be substituted for parallel ones in the 2045 Plan.
The issues with the 2045 Plan are fixable in a reasonable time frame. We shouldn’t throw out the years of effort put into the General Plan so far, and we have to make sure that it can truly function as our guide to the future.
