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Dowsett neighborhoods
cannot handle harmful
effects of development

Eight hundred signatures and 300 yard signs in opposition to the proposed development of a 50-acre parcel on the slopes of Nuuanu are not insignificant. These signatures and yard signs represent the opinion of the vast majority of residents in the Dowsett, Dowsett Highlands and Old Pali Road areas of Nuuanu. I am one of those residents.

My husband and I have lived in Dowsett Highlands for 29 years. We raised our two sons here. The neighborhood, developed in the 1940s and '50s, is stable and beautiful. However, over the years, the natural forces of rain, wind and erosion have altered the ravines, woodlands and steep slopes of the proposed area of development. Heavy rain now brings rivers of water coursing into the streets and down the hills, carrying huge piles of rocks, leaves and branches and causing flooding in houses and on Kimo Drive, a bridge over Nuuanu Stream. And this is without any development. The destabilization caused by development, with its bulldozers altering the terrain and digging up the trees, will only aggravate the existing runoff and flooding problem and increase the potential for falling boulders.

Furthermore, the infrastructure of the neighborhood is old. As a bicyclist and a grandparent, I am particularly concerned about the safety of the streets. Garages were built for one-car families. Today's families and extended families have two, three and even four cars, which are parked on the streets. Most of the streets are narrow and winding and, with cars parked on the street, very congested.

There are no sidewalks, so we stroll with our babies and children, walk our dogs, jog, bicycle, skateboard and speed-walk in the streets. Residents know to drive slowly and we manage, barely. But the streets are maxed out on the number of cars they can safely accommodate. And this, too, is without any development. Nine more households could add 18 more cars; 18 new households could add 36 more cars; 50 more houses could add 100 new cars. Then these cars would have to leave and return. This would slow traffic on Pali Highway as the traffic light at the Nuuanu Pali Drive exit and the traffic light near the Dowsett Avenue exits would have to be synchronized to regulate the additional cars.

The area of the proposed development was zoned residential when Dowsett Highlands was first developed in the 1940s. However, in 1967 the city's Land Use Commission created a detailed land-use map for its General Plan designating the area preservation. That designation got lost in the shuffle of changing governors, mayors and City Council members, but it was important because it reflected an updated and more realistic evaluation of the limits of the terrain and of the infrastructure of a more modern neighborhood.

In 1978, City Councilwoman Marilyn Bornhorst wrote a letter stating that the city should reconsider for approval Bill 118 from 1974, which proposed to rezone to preservation the land designated on the land-use map for uses other than residential. She pointed out that land zoned residential in the '40s would probably not be zoned residential in 1978. Twenty-seven years later, in 2005, the aging infrastructure of the neighborhood and the degenerating changes in the terrain of the proposed development make this even more true.

A development of any size in Dowsett Highlands would exacerbate existing problems and add new ones, and should not be approved by the city's Department of Planning and Permitting.

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