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Dog Fight: Inouye's Enforcer Sabas, Boylan sign on to Hanabusa Campaign
CB: One of Hawaii’s most powerful operatives is throwing her considerable political heft behind U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa’s bid for a slot in the Senate.
Jennifer Sabas, the longtime chief of staff for the late U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, told Civil Beat she will work for the campaign in Hanabusa’s race against U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz. Given Sabas' profile, she is almost certain to play an influential role.
Inouye’s former deputy chief of staff and spokesman, Peter Boylan, has also signed on with the Hanabusa campaign.
Together Sabas and Boylan, who are working on the campaign pro bono, are hoping to bring the dying wish of their former boss to fruition....
Sabas worked for Inouye for 25 years, serving as his chief of staff starting in 1994. She implemented Inouye's vision, but some political insiders described her as something of a backroom enforcer....
Another longtime Inouye friend and political heavyweight who already supports Hanabusa is Walter Dods, a retired Honolulu banker. It was Dods and high-profile attorney Jeff Watanabe who hand-delivered Inouye's "last wish" letterto Gov. Neil Abercrombie.
Dods, the Inouye family, former Gov. George Ariyoshi and other heavy hitters are scheduled to appear at a major campaign event July 2 at the Bishop Museum....
Hart says Hawaii voters should expect a political free for all....“The gloves are off, the rules are gone, and Uncle Dan is not here to give us his preferences,” Hart said. “You’re going to see more dog fights, and that’s why I think everyone will be watching this race closely.”
read ... Can Inouye's Ghost Take Down Sen. Brian Schatz?
Six Weeks Left and Still No Teacher Evaluation Plan
CB: the clock is ticking and the Hawaii Department of Education and Hawaii State Teachers Association may not have enough time to agree on how to finalize the system and implement it statewide by the start of the school year, August 5.
Officials have just six weeks to fine-tune the so-called Educator Effectiveness System and integrate recommendations from a committee that was appointed in early June....
Hawaii teachers ratified a contract in April on the condition that their association be allowed to create a committee to help the Department of Education and Board of Education finalize the new system.
Wil Okabe, the president of the teachers association, called the contract stipulation a “victory” on the part of union negotiators.
Okabe announced that he had appointed four teachers association members to a joint committee in a June 4 video message. He also announced that he was appointing a separate 10-member teachers association advisory group to collect school-level data and to help guide the joint committee. Okabe said the advisory committee is critical for getting teacher input, especially during the summer months.
In the video announcement, Okabe also stressed that the committees would be under intense time pressure to come up with recommendations for the state. “There is a sense of urgency in this,” he said.
Despite that, the committee is only now getting started. And teachers will be back in the classroom preparing for the new school year by July 30, at the latest.
"Teachers are going to be surprised the first day we go back to school,” said Corey Rosenlee, a social studies teacher at James Campbell High School who organized the grassroots Hawaii Teachers Work to the Rules movement. “There are going to be so many questions this year — a lot of growing pains.”
Although the new evaluations won’t affect most teachers’ pay until the 2014-15 school year, they will establish a framework for how the state’s educators will be held accountable for student learning.
The Department of Education, Okabe noted, had already postponed implementation of the evaluation system at multi-track schools from early July to August because the joint committee, which also has four members representing the state, didn’t even have its first meeting until last week.
read ... Still No Plan
Geothermal: OHA Gives Money to Cronies in Grab for $5B
CB: A few weeks ago, a super-majority on the Board of Trustees at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) voted to invest in Hu`ena Power, the development arm of Innovations Development Group (IDG). That vote signaled a step forward in the effort to do more to tap into the legacy Tutu Pele has left us –and to do so responsibly. I was one of the trustees who voted “Yes.”
But I write now, not in my capacity as an OHA trustee, but as a concerned Native Hawaiian and resident of these beautiful-- but remote—islands. I believe that geothermal holds the key to our freedom from enslavement to the tankers that bring fossil fuels to our pristine shores and the corporations that take away more than $5 billion every year in payments for that oil.
I came to that position long before I became an OHA trustee and before that vote to invest in Hu`ena Power was taken. Too often our civic square, locally and nationally, is dominated by the loud voices of a dissenting minority. Those of us who believe in the critical importance of geothermal --and other forms of renewable energy -- to Hawaii’s future need to speak out. We need to and make sure that the interests of the majority are not thwarted by the often ill-informed, anonymous antics of a minority.
I have attended some of the many community meetings that the Innovations Development Group has held over the past two years to canvass public opinion and share their model for community-based geothermal development.
I am encouraged by the fact that this Native Hawaiian-led company have lived through what the community experienced when geothermal was not done right the first time. They fought for the community. They have represented the community’s interests and they know how important it is to stay in dialogue with the community.
read ... Money
Tax credits: "Basically nobody really understands"
SA: Burned by high-technology tax incentives that many tax policy experts thought were too generous and ripe for abuse, state lawmakers have chosen to resurrect a pared-down research and development credit to reward scientific experimentation.
The 20 percent income tax credit would apply to research spending from 2013 through 2019 and would cost the state about $3.2 million a year. Companies would have to claim a similar federal tax credit to qualify and would have to increase research spending over time to enjoy the full amount.
Companies that take advantage of the tax credit would also have to file detailed annual surveys with the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism so the state can track the effects on job creation, new patents or intellectual property and commercial applications.
High-tech tax incentives, which included a research and development credit, cost the state $1 billion through the past decade and were criticized by the state auditor and tax policy experts as deficient. The auditor concluded in a report last year that the state was unable to measure or ensure the effectiveness of the credits, which ran from 1999 through 2010....
Rep. Isaac Choy D, Manoa-Punahou-Moiliili), an accountant and a former chairman of the Tax Review Commission who has become a resource for other lawmakers on tax policy, said the state's previous research and development tax credit was too generous.
Choy said the intent behind the federal tax credit is to provide an incentive for companies to increase research spending, not to award tax breaks for base amounts of research spending from previous years, as the old state tax credit did. He acknowledged that aligning the state's tax credit to the federal tax code will significantly limit the potential tax break.
"It's better than a poke in the eye," he said.
Lowell Kalapa, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, questions whether Hawaii has sufficient talent in the academic and high-tech sectors to take advantage of such tax incentives. "Before you put the cart and fill it up with gold, make sure you've got a horse to pull it," he said.
Kalapa has told lawmakers that using tax credits as incentives for targeted economic growth is often poor policy, mostly because the effectiveness of such incentives has been difficult to document. The two tax credits that survived last session were the expansion of film production tax credits — which he attributes to Hollywood allure — and the research and development tax credit, "which basically nobody really understands."
read ... Tax credit small but 'better than a poke in the eye,' lawmaker says
Public Utilities Commission Order to Transfer Money to Green Energy Scammers
CB: For a generation, as the commission wrote blank check after blank check to the energy industry, it felt like they might never run out of ink.
The problem was that those checks were written from an account that is ultimately paid for by you and me.
But now, after all hope seemed long exhausted, the PUC has found its courage.
Tired of the same old HECO excuses for still-soaring electric rates and a reluctance to ween itself off of oil, the PUC blasted Hawaiian Electric Co. in a decision in May on a rate case concerning the utility's Maui subsidiary. The commission laid into HECO for failing to pursue every avenue to bring down costs and it ordered the company to return $8 million to customers.
On the same day, commissioners said they would revisit a legislative decision that guarantees HECO a minimum level of profit at the same time the company works to decrease energy use. The PUC says the "decoupling" program isn’t working the way that it was intended to, and launched an investigation....
After all, MECO is simply wasting a substantial amount of wind energy every year. Why? It’s current generation system can't integrate the outside energy efficiently. The commission says the utility should have prepared better to integrate new renewable energy producers all along. (Why the 'waste'? Because wind energy is controlled by the wind, not by demand. It is useless garbage electricity which is not there when you might need it and is there when you don't.)
The commission says that using the wind energy that is already available through existing systems could halve the electric rate, and spare the equivalent of nearly $7 million worth of imported oil.
By not using this energy generated by wind, the commission says, MECO is wasting more than 15,600 megawatt-hours of energy annually. That’s enough to power almost 1,800 homes, based on national consumption averages.
SA: Solar firms warm up buyers with trips, iPads
read ... The Public Utilities Commission Finally Generates Some Sparks
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