Waiahole Valley Strategic Plan
The November 2022 Reconciliation Report for the Waiāhole Valley Agricultural Park was commissioned by the Hawai’i Housing Finance and Development Corporation (HHFDC) and prepared by Townscape, Inc. to resolve conflicting recommendations between a 2019 consultant-driven strategic plan (the SMS Plan) and a subsequent community-authored counterproposal (the WWCA Plan). The state-owned valley had experienced friction regarding critical issues such as imminent lease rent renegotiations, agricultural lot underutilization, infrastructure maintenance, and state-mandated cesspool-to-septic conversions. Townscape’s community-based reconciliation process, though heavily disrupted by statewide COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on in-person gatherings throughout 2020 and 2021, focused on analyzing and harmonizing the differing stakeholder proposals. The final report delivers compromised guidance to the HHFDC Board, offering alternative strategies such as rejecting commercial “market rent” escalations in favor of localized agency cost-recovery, forming a joint “Lease Advisory Panel” to handle enforcement disputes collaboratively, and exploring community-managed frameworks for farming cooperatives and historic agricultural irrigation systems.
