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The Hawaii Sustainable Community Alliance (HSCA) is the organization responsible for initiating SB 2274.

SB 2274 will make “sustainable living research sites” a permitted use on agricultural and rural land.

It will only apply to lots greater than one acre and less than 15 acres in Maui and Hawaii Counties.

The HSCA board of directors started this process four years ago. We drafted County Resolution #302-12, which was passed by the Hawaii County Council, urging the Hawaii State legislature to permit sustainable living research sites. For the 2013 legislative session, we drafted our initial sustainable living research site bill, HB 111.

Rep. Faye Hanohano introduced the bill in January 2013 and it passed all three House committees. Testimony showed the strong support statewide for including sustainable living as a permitted activity in zoning and land use codes. We also learned a lot about the legislative process and weaknesses in HB 111.

A new revised version, SB 2274, was drafted following meetings and input from three Hawaii County planning directors — Chris Yuen, BJ Leithead Todd and Duane Kanahu — to address concerns raised by the Hawaii and Maui County planning departments in response to our original bill HB 111.

This year with SB 2274 there has been no opposing testimony from government agencies and only three that have submitted comments regarding their concerns. Those concerns have been addressed and the bill has been amended. At the last committee hearing (House Water and Land) there were 94 “support” testimonies, eight “oppose” testimonies and two “comment-only” testimonies.

In the last three weeks, a malign campaign has been waged by Puna residents RJ Hampton and Sheryle “Sativa” Sultan under the guise of an organization called the “Puna Coastal Alliance” (PCA) with an unknown membership and no previous record of any accomplishments or meetings.

The Puna Coastal Alliance has recently circulated e-mails claiming that SB 2274 will “permit construction, roads, geothermal, alternative power plants, parking lots, buildings, mills, and processing plants.”

SB 2274 actually shows (perhaps surprisingly for some) that these are already existing permitted land uses under current Hawaii Revised Statutes, section 205.

The only modification that SB 2274 creates in the current law is to add sustainable living research sites as a permitted land use in some rural and agricultural zoned areas.

At a public meeting at Kalani Honua on March 3, 2014, attended by RJ Hampton and Sativa, SB 2274 was fully explained by HSCA board members and reviewed to show that it clearly does NOT add any of the activities claimed by the Puna Coastal Alliance.

In fact, the following day the Puna Pono Alliance, our local anti-geothermal activists, stated publicly that they “see no new geothermal law at all” in SB 2274.

Knowing this information, Sativa contacted Rep. Faye Hanohano and Rep. Cindy Evans to encourage them to oppose bill SB 2274 on the grounds that it “is not about sustainable living.”

HSCA requests that Rep. Faye Hanohano and others please take a look at this bill for themselves and contact the HSCA if they have any questions, concerns or comments.

This bill has been reviewed by environmental lawyers, state legal staff, planning directors, numerous government agencies, senators and representatives on the four committees it has successfully passed.

This bill will add “sustainable living research sites” as permitted land use under the same process that the county’s planning department has adopted for commercial aquaculture, wind generation, solar, biofuel, geothermal, and numerous other developments (that are already permitted uses on agricultural and rural zoned land).

A long term goal of SB 2274 is to research emergency preparedness and resilience measures to deal with global warming, perhaps the most serious issue facing humankind today.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie said in his 2014 State of the State address, “Today’s climate changes are warning bells signaling the necessity for preparedness now … The Hawaiian Islands are a learning laboratory for scalable, innovative mitigation, adaptation policies and techniques, and providing a model on local and regional collaboration.”

Our laws need review and revision in order to meet the changing needs of our society and to allow for innovation to be compliant and permitted.

On the Big Island and Maui, SB 2274 will allow for the permitting of ecovillages, farms that accommodate interns studying sustainable agriculture, sustainable living educational retreats, the sharing of community resources, non-commercial composting toilets, grey water systems and other research activities that serve to better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable effects of climate change.

I would also like to respond to some comments that were made about me. It has stated that I am a ‘Puna developer’ and that I lead a special interest group that could financially gain from the passage of the bill. This is a gross distortion of the truth.

One of my passions is grassroots community development and I have served the Puna community in many ways in this capacity for over 30 years. I was an executive director of a nonprofit for 20 years and, since 2007, I have been the unpaid volunteer president of the board of Hawaii’s Volcano Circus, the 501c3 that operates Seaview Performing Arts Center for Education (SPACE). The mission of our organization, since SPACE opened, has been “to creatively promote local sustainable community in Puna Makai.”

If we gain financially in any way from the passage of SB 2274, it will be for the benefit of the Puna people we serve.

I live at Bellyacres, an artistic ecovillage which is a land trust.

I do not own any property at all, not even the house I built and live in. I am a pioneer in sustainable living research.

For the last 27 years l have helped reclaim and redevelop a former Hawaiian homestead. Approximately 75 to 85 percent of the food I eat comes from the Big Island, much of it from the land I live on.

My home is powered 100 percent by solar energy, my water comes from a catchment system and is heated by solar. My home was built with labor from a multitude of community friends, very little money, a heap of recycled lumber, recycled windows and other materials I gathered for cheap or free.

Living communally at “Bellyacres” ecovillage, my family can live on a very low budget. We eat the food we grow and food purchased from the weekly farmers market that we host. We have no mortgage or utility payments, and are limited to telephone, internet, a little propane and gas. This low overhead reduces the impacts that global or local economic turbulence will have on the quality of our lives. We also have the additional benefits of a supportive community of around 20 adults and 10 children.

Our 11 acres are manicured by horses, not gas-powered mowers or weed wackers. Our chickens are our bug controllers and fertilizers, as well as egg producers. We make fertile, composted soil with worms and horse manure instead of importing chemical fertilizers. We drive solar-powered golf carts instead of tractors. We build with lumber harvested from our own land, share tools and equipment and appliances like washing machines, dry our laundry in the wind, never have to lock our doors and can leave our keys in our vehicles. We always have a neighbor to provide help when we need it and we have a village to raise our children.

In 2007 we built a 6,000-square-foot community center that hosts a public Charter School, a farmers market and a performance arts program, all for about $350,000.

By comparison it recently cost the County of Hawaii $150,000 to build a keiki playground in Po’ho’iki.

Our county and the State of Hawaii need models for more sustainable living and affordable methods of infrastructure design and construction as we enter a period in history that necessitates serious changes in our budgetary plans and our lifestyles. We also need models of low carbon footprint lifestyles.

Bellyacres has been visited by Mayor Billy Kenoi, Council Chairman Dominic Yagong, at least six county council members and three state senators over the last decade.

There is consensus that we have a quality living situation. Sen. Daniel Inouye, Sen. Daniel Akaka, Sen. Brian Shatz and many other politicians have publicly praised the accomplishments of our ecovillage over three decades. Gov. Neil Abercrombie acknowledged “Bellyacres” in February 2012 for encouraging “renewable non-petroleum energy, sustainable cultivation, resource reprocessing, and numerous services to the public.”

Like many similar organizations, Bellyacres is practicing sustainable initiatives that are currently not legally permitted activities. SB 2274 seeks to remedy this anomaly.

2014 has seen the formation of President Barack Obama’s Commission for Climate Change and Gov. Abercrombie’s request for recommendations for initiatives to improve climate change preparedness and resilience here in Hawaii.

A majority of our population now believe that it is a probability that one day in the foreseeable future, commercial trade between our islands and the rest of the world will be seriously, maybe catastrophically disrupted.

It behooves us, for the sake of our communities, for the sake of our families and for the sake of our children to prepare for such an eventuality.

Our legislature has recognized this in the passage of the and recent events suggest that we may not have until 2050 to implement this plan in Hawaii. Now is the time to give the state and county visions of sustainability a life that are more than just words — through passage of SB 2274.

About the author: Graham Ellis is a Big Island resident who has been a community development pioneer for 32 years. He is chairman of Hawaii Sustainable Community Alliance, chairman of Hawaii’s Volcano Circus, the founder of Bellyacres Ecovillage and a ringleader of the HICCUP youth circus.

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