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The ink wasn’t even dry on the original boundaries for the state’s land use districts when requests for changes started rolling in. And the flow hasn’t stopped for nearly 50 years.

Responding to a FOIA request I filed a few weeks ago, the Land Use Commission last week provided me with a that have been filed since 1962. It’s 18 pages long.

In , I asked the LUC to include for each petition the date; petitioner/owner; size of parcel; original district; proposed district; result of petition. Not all of that data was available for every docket, but I’ll be working to fill in those gaps.

I previously uncovered that more than 80,000 acres has been converted to the Urban District, and reported that the pending application to move more than 750 more acres out of agriculture to make way for the proposed Koa Ridge community in Central Oahu highlights the state’s ad hoc approach.

I hope you see where I’m going with this. An important question that needs to be answered is what could those lands have been used for if they had remained agricultural? I’ll be looking at different land rating systems and investigating how much land we need to accomplish food and energy self-sufficiency.

This document is just a starting point for my research and for our common understanding. I hope you’ll give it a look and let me know what you see. Join the conversation about it and other land use issues.