SB1319: Sen Chun Oakland falls for Bogus “Road Pollution Filter”

Dear Editor    January 27, 2013

SB 1319, which proposes to require “road pollution filters” caught me by surprise, not being familiar with the term or technology as I’ve owned an automotive service business for 19 years. I had to go look. What I found was nothing short of distressing. A device void of real test data, made by a single company, purported to capture brake dust and tire dust when it is installed in wheel wells.

As a degreed and experienced engineer I can tell you two things. The device is bogus.  Equally so is the breathlessly trumped up speculative application of marine survey data. No causal relationship exists within it.

I could elaborate, but need not. Anyone possessed of a reasonable intellect, at a casual glance, would question how this filter is any different than a mud flap with a paper towel on it. I would personally like to see their fluids model showing how it captures what they claim it does. On more practical level, the bill was lampooned in a national auto repair magazine under the title There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute, the sucker being Hawaii and specifically the individual who brought this forward.

The limit of my distress found only three possible explanations: startling ignorance, delusional pursuit of an agenda, or a free trip somewhere.

Stuart Wilson

Maui

Brake and Front End Magazine: There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute

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Gun Ban Would Destabilize Hawaii’s Ecosystem

Dear Editor,         January 21, 2013

It’s only a politician that can turn a lawful citizen into a criminal with a stroke of a pen.

I see a proposed bill online today that bans a plethora of rifles, in fact wants to confiscate them. I see another that wants training of all gun owners on a biennial basis and if you miss, it leads to confiscation. There is yet another that wants you to prove you own the gun you buy ammunition for.

The AR-15 is the most popular target rifle on the range. Is it because we have a nation of mass murderers? No it is because the AR types are low recoil and accurate. It’s absolutely amazing that anyone could even consider calling these guns “assault weapons”. AR-15’s are extremely popular hunting rifles. They are more than appropriate for all kinds of animals with the varying caliber options available from goats to ground hogs, from big deer to feral hogs. If you have a gun owner next door, he or she has been tested and trained.

Hunting is part of our ecosystem. Shooting is a wholesome, exhilarating pastime, with hunting being a result of accuracy practice and woodsmanship. Without hunters, all of these islands would be overrun with feral pigs. Just imagine the traffic jams they would cause on Bishop Street.

Why do some of our legislators condemn legitimate gun owners? Is there an agenda going on here? Why do they coddle the criminal and persecute the taxpayer? When you look at the police blotter every day, we have criminals being re-arrested time after time after time. Why don’t they do something about that instead?

Tom Lodge

Hawaii Hunting Association

Keaau, Hawaii

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Planned Makaha Beach Park to be Ruined by Bridge Replacement?

Dear Editor,  January 19, 2013

Before you disregard reading this email, please look at the picture of the Makaha Beach Park study coordinated with the leeward community between 1998 and 2002: Picture.

Beautiful plan, isn't it? However, if we sit back and do nothing, the government (local, City and State) is going to ruin an opportunity of the Century and put Makaha Beach at serious risk.

If you are unaware, we are about to make some big mistakes in regards to Makaha Beach Park and Makaha Beach due to the current direction the government has us headed regarding the Makaha Bridges Replacement PROJECT. There are numerous issues at play in this PROJECT that has been in the planning, design and briefing stages for almost 15 years now, but I want to point out the top 3 issues:

1) The originally designed PROJECT was supposed to reroute Farrington Highway Mauka around the beach and beach park, allowing the community and tourists a safe recreation area without a dangerous highway going through its middle. The current, approved plan will only replace the bridges, and the beach park plan shown at the link above will not occur for 50-70 years, if at all.

2) The current approved PROJECT is so environmentally threatening to the area in question; an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) should and must be performed. The Environmental Assessment was superficial and flawed. For more details on this, please go to: www.makaha.us/bridges

3) The PROJECT's temporary route will be dangerous to commuters/bikers/pedestrians, it will be environmentally threatening to the beach, it will be economically disastrous to the community's tourism and the residents' quality of life, and the temporary route has a 40% chance of failure over its 18 month life span (due to it's five-year flood construction standard).

The Waianae Coast Neighborhood Board and a few akami citizens have fought hard over the past year to stop this madness, which is the current Makaha Bridges Project. Virtually all local representatives, the City and County (including the City Council and the previous Major), and the State (including Governor Abercrombie) have ignored our pleas to right this situation. They and we have an opportunity to preserve, protect and enhance Makaha Beach and the Beach Park for the next 100 years by just following the original plan coordinated and approved by the great people of this community.

For those who haven't been informed, the Makaha Bridges Replacement PROJECT is approved, finaled, rubber stamped and ready to go to bid and construction. Without a super-human effort by the people, voicing their concerns on a monumental level, this PROJECT is unstoppable. Ex-City Councilman Tom Berg was able to delay the construction start by one year; he achieved this in July by pleading our case to the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization (OMPO) - so there is still hope, if we act now - the clock is ticking. Thanks for staying with me on this and continuing to read; there's just a bit more to share.

The one-year delay was intended to allow members of the community one more chance to make their case. The community spoke loud and clear at the Jan 8, 2013 neighborhood board meeting and the Board unanimously passed a resolution urging the City and State to listen to our needs and concerns. This resolution can be viewed at the link above.

We hope this issue will be placed on the agenda at the next OMPO meeting and we hope we can convince them to Champion our cause and turn this State PROJECT into a joint City& County and State of Hawaii combined parks improvement and highway construction project. With both parties contributing funding and support, everybody wins (especially the environment) and probably at the same cost if not less.

What can you do? Make multiple phone calls and emails to your local reps, the City and County Council, DPP, the Major, the Governor, the State DOT, OMPO. And please, pass this email and word around to others; please don't wait until construction begins and you see first hand the misfortune that awaits. Many of our political reps are not in solidarity with the community on this issue; do not let them off the hook - they work for you, not the Major, the Governor, nor private landowners who appear to benefit from the current PROJECT.

A Malama Makaha Beach effort is underway, we need your support, and we need a volunteer web page designer (for www.malamamakaha.com) and volunteer social media guru. Notice, I did not ask for money - that is not needed unless the people have to go to court and get an injunction to have an EIS performed for the project. Please pray that we're successful with the OMPO Board. And please visit us to sign a petition and obtain more information at the next Waianae Coast Neighborhood Board meeting on Feb 5, 2013 at 7:00 pm and at the upcoming 36th Annual Buffalo's Surfing Classic on Feb 18, 19, 20, 26 and 27, 2013.

Mahalo nui loa,

Al Frenzel

Makaha, Oahu

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Hawaii’s Den of Thieves

Dear Editor,

The following is based on testimony I presented to the Hawaii County Planning Council, January 8, 2013

Aloha Council Members,

I come to speak not just for myself but for my entire ‘ohana. The haole [European] side of our ‘ohana has been on the Big Island since 1840. The kanaka side of my family has been here for over a thousand years, since the first magician seafarers navigated their way across the vast Pacific on bamboo rafts to our beautiful islands. We are many hundreds of people not only on the Big Island but on every Hawaiian island.

As you know the present state of government in Hawaii is an international disgrace. Not long ago Money magazine rated Hawaii as the most politically corrupt of the 50 states – even worse, it said, than Russia. Things have got much worse since then.

Recently our Governor, Neil Abercrombie, and the majority of the Hawaii Legislature passed a bill, Act 55, that allows the Governor and a few of his friends to sell off our Hawaii public lands to their corporate friends at wholesale prices – with no environmental or public review. Millions of acres among the most unique and precious lands not only in Hawaii, not only in the United States, but in the entire world.

That’s nothing new for Governor Abercrombie or the Legislature. They have set new lows in the betrayal of the public trust, in their scorn for democracy and for the people of our state. Another example is the Governor’s determination to impose a enormous energy development on the magnificent islands of Molokai and Lanai, in order to pay off his corporate contributors in the energy and investment banking business.

Molokai, rated by National Geographic as the sixth most beautiful island in the world, and by Yahoo Travel and MSNBC as one of the 10 most beautiful islands in the world, will become a huge industrial zone to feed unnecessary electricity to Honolulu, which can generate all its own simply with rooftop solar. Lanai, owned by mega-tycoon Larry Ellison, is equally and stunningly beautiful.

These projects imposed on us by our politicians and their corporate friends are of such a stunning evil there is no way to comprehend them – a sort of Holocaust of Hawaii’s environment and the culture of our people.

Act 55, because it voids environmental, cultural, fiscal and social review, cannot be stopped by the public no matter how horrible it is. Hawaii has become like the old Soviet Union, where people had no voice, and the commissars in Moscow would decide to flood whole regions and chase out thousands of people to build dams and send the power to Moscow, where by the time it got there you couldn’t fry an egg with it.

Government in Hawaii is dirty politics behind closed doors. The corporations come to Hawaii with money and the politicians give them what they want. It is government by and for the corporations, not by and for the people.

It is time for us, the people, to take Hawaii back.

Sincerely,

Mike Bond

Molokai, HI

A former Big Island resident now living on Molokai, Mike Bond is a best-selling novelist, war and human rights journalist, environmental and political activist and international energy expert. His latest novel, SAVING PARADISE, is an eco-thriller that focuses on political/ corporate corruption in Hawaii (www.MikeBondBooks.com).