Ethics Ruling: Sen Josh Green Secretly Living in Honolulu Since 2005
Election Office Admits ‘Mistakes Were Made’
$500M: Obama Raids Zika Budget to Finance UN Climate Change Fund
Hawaii GOP Chair Comments on Party Convention
Connecting the dots between Jones Act and EL FARO sinking
HART to Shift Rail to Nimitz?
SA: Rail board members are now openly questioning whether narrow Dillingham Boulevard would be the best path on which to build the island’s transit system heading into town, as the project faces huge costs and the community braces for the impacts of building through that crowded corridor.
“Whoever planned this had to have known they would have problems with this,” Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation Board Chairwoman Colleen Hanabusa said during a special public meeting Tuesday to discuss the costly overhead utility line clearance problems that are helping to significantly drive up costs for the project.
Hanabusa suggested Nimitz Highway as an alternative. Rail officials previously selected Dillingham Boulevard in part because the state Department of Transportation was planning to extend the airport viaduct farther Diamond Head along Nimitz Highway, HART Deputy Director Brennon Morioka told Hanabusa and other members of the board’s Project Oversight committee.
Morioka served as the DOT director when the state agency was looking at extending the viaduct along Nimitz Highway. Asked by Hanabusa whether he would have picked the busy Dillingham Boulevard corridor to run rail’s elevated guideway, Morioka said that he didn’t want to “second-guess” the decision by his predecessors at HART. After the meeting he said that board members have instructed him to look into the idea of running rail along Nimitz Highway — and whether it’s a viable alternative — before the board’s next special meeting, to be held June 8.
read … Dillingham
Supreme Court seems poised to order changes at the Office of Elections
ILind: The plaintiff’s contend the methods and procedures for printing and handling ballots are in fact agency rules that should have been adopted pursuant to the state’s Administrative Procedures Act. They sought a ruling that elections officials be required to go through the public rule-making process before applying them in future elections….
if the Green Party and others want rules, election officials argued, they should first file a petition spelling out their proposed rules for the Office of Elections to consider. They argued that, without exhausting that potential administrative remedy, the plaintiffs’ lawsuit should be rejected.
A Maui judge ruled in favor of the Office of Elections in 2014 and that decision was affirmed by the Intermediate Court of Appeals in a December 2015 opinion.
However, the attorney representing the Office of Elections at the May 18 Supreme Court hearing ran into an unusual barrage of critical questions from all five Supreme Court justices in what Honolulu attorney and law blogger Robert Thomas called “as close to a feeding frenzy as you might witness in the usually decorous air of the state’s high court.”
Related: Election Office Admits ‘Mistakes Were Made’
read … Poised
Who Raised Money During Session?
CB: …Data.Hawaii.gov has made available the entire list of legislators who raised cash from the middle of January to early May this year, which can be searched and sorted to one’s liking.
More than 60 campaign fundraisers were held by state senators and representatives, several of them holding more than one.
Favorite fundraising haunts included Mandalay, Jade Dynasty and the Hawaii State Arts Museum.
Most were held during cocktail hour.
And contributions ranged from $25 to $2,000….
read … Bought n Paid For
Bloomberg: If Iwase Can Stall the PUC beyond June 3, NextEra More Likely to Walk Away
B: NextEra Energy Inc.’s proposed $4.3 billion takeover of Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. is looking increasingly less likely as the company gets a new chance to buy the largest power distributor in Texas, analysts said.
This month’s collapse of a deal for the Oncor Electric unit of Energy Future Holdings Corp. may prompt NextEra, North America’s largest generator of wind and solar power, to dump the Hawaii deal for a second pass at Oncor. NextEra can exit the 18-month-old deal after June 3 by paying the utility and bank owner about $95 million, Hawaiian Electric Chief Financial Officer James Ajello told investors May 4. Hawaiian utility regulators haven’t scheduled a vote on the 18-month-old offer, which has come under criticism in the state….
read … June 3
700 Comments on DoE Strategic Plan
CB: The Department of Education is asking for public input as it undergoes a review of its multi-year strategic plan — a document that lays out goals for public education in Hawaii.
So far more than 700 people have completed the DOE-supported online survey, which is being conducted by the nonprofit Hope Street Group. Others are submitting posts weighing in on everything from classroom conditions to early childhood education and class sizes.
The strategic plan review coincides with state and national changes that could have a real impact on local classrooms.
Late last year federal lawmakers voted to replace the much-loathed No Child Left Behind Act with a new law, dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act, aimed at giving more autonomy and flexibility back to state and local school districts.
SA: Craft meaningful teacher evaluations
read … ESSA
25% of Hawaii Emergency Room Admissions Related to Methamphetamines
HPR: 45 times a day, Hawaii’s largest emergency room admits a patient with an issue related to crystal methamphetamine—one of four patients it treats. Several decades ago, Hawai‘i was the first place in the United States that crystal meth landed---and today it’s a problem that stretches across three generations. Users are not just toothless addicts, but also high-functioning individuals whose chronic health problems turn up years later as heart and kidney issues. Many wind up in prisons and jails.
Meth has become deeply embedded in local culture in Hawaii-- it has sunk roots into the community. Workplace testing consistently shows usage rates in the state at four times the national average. Stories of individuals illustrate the lure of the drug and the destructive path it can cut through families and community….
read … Hawaii's New Ice Age: Crystal Meth in the Islands
HMSA to Pay Doctors to not See You
CB: Physicians generally don’t get paid for assistance rendered over the phone or through email. Hawaii’s biggest insurer is about to change that.
read … What If Doctors Helped Patients Without Office Visits?
Pesticide Report Calls For Monitoring, Cites Lack of Evidence behind anti-Pesticide Hysteria
KE: The final report of the Joint Fact Finding group is asserting that extensive monitoring must be done before any claims can be made about the impact of agricultural pesticides on west Kauai.
It's a sharp departure from the draft, which maintained there was no evidence linking pesticide use with any health or environmental impacts. But though the final report makes a stronger call for monitoring and identifies pesticides as a priority for state funding, it offers no strong or new data to support that stance.
Instead, it tells us that pesticides can be harmful, and agriculture uses them. Therefore, the state and county must embark on extensive and expensive monitoring to ferret them out — even though the studies that have been conducted have found no indication that harmful levels of pesticides are migrating from the coffee and seed fields.
Other than changing its “no evidence of harm” stance — and adding some outtake quotes strategically selected to highlight alarming assertions — little has changed between the draft and the final, despite hundreds of public comments.
(This is what happens when a mediator is picked to write a scientific report.)
Wired: The Controversial Race to Breed Climate-Adapted Super Coral
read … Musings: Final JFFG Report
Trying to Spin the High Cost of UPW-Controlled Prisons
CB: The state’s for-profit contractor,Corrections Corporation of America, houses about 1,400 prisoners in Arizona for roughly half of what it would cost in Hawaii.
Under the current contract, the state pays CCA a per-diem rate of $70.49 per prisoner — an arrangement that amounted to just under $31 million in fiscal year 2015.
By contrast, it costs an average of $137 a day to house an inmate at the (UPW controlled) Halawa Correctional Facility, the state’s medium-security prison, which has an inmate population comparable to that of CCA’s Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona….
In the end, though, the per-capita cost of incarceration at Saguaro still seems likely to come out less than what it would cost to house the prisoners in Hawaii — even if all the extra expenses were added up.
That’s largely because payroll and other operating costs are so high at the state’s four prisons. At Halawa, for instance, such costs amounted to $93 out of the $137 daily rate for housing each prisoner — a far cry from the per-diem rate of $70.49 that CCA charges.
The main reason is down to the prisons’ outdated design, which requires more correctional officers to manage the facilities than at Saguaro.
Halawa, which holds about 1,100 prisoners, is managed by 410 correctional officers. By contrast, Saguaro only has 297 full-time employees.
(But if we spin it enough, we can make the UPW prison look competitive.)
read … Selective Calculations
OHA Shakedown: From Mauna Kea to Midway
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