WaPo: Hawaii Going Wrong Way on GMOs
The Worst of Both: The Rise of High-Cost, Low-Capacity Rail Transit
Hawaii Congressional Delegation How They Voted June 2, 2014
Capitol Rally for Religious Freedom June 28
Hawaii: 1,000 Veterans Wait Months for VA Care
CB: Hawaii offers a good window into the problem.
To access medical care in the VA system, a veteran first registers with the administration. A doctor at our local VA here recently told me there are currently about 1,000 veterans who have registered on this gateway “wait list.” It only takes a few months at most for each of them to get their initial exam.
From there, veterans are assigned a primary care physician, or PCP. It is this step — waiting to be assigned a doctor— where much of the delay occurs. Some veterans wait years on this list, because primary care doctors are busy caring for other veterans and there just aren’t enough openings for new patients.
Although there are other serious problems at the VA, the basic problem with access to care is this bottleneck.
As Explained: Rationing Health Care by Making Patients Waste Time
read ... VA Waiting List
Sen Kim, Babes Against Biotech Team Up to Protest UH Presidential Selection
ILind: ...in an email circulating in UH circles yesterday, Senator Donna Mercado Kim said her petition calling on the BOR to reopen the search process has “stalled” after gathering some 400 signatures.
Kim, in an email to Laura Marie Herrmann, wrote:
Unless hundreds of additional people sign the petition I started which is stalled in the four hundreds, or people show up in
mass at the Regents meeting tomorrow, I doubt there will be a change of enough Regents to support a renewed search.
Herrmann’s profile at LinkedIn identifies her as executive director of Frequency 660 LLC, based in Haiku, with this description: “Crowd Sourced Media Productions.”
Herrmann then forwarded the information to others:
I just got this response from Senator Kim’s office re: The re-opening of the search for UH President. Sounds like we need to PHYSICALLY show up at the meeting of the Board of Regents tomorrow to make that happen. I’m in conversation now with Nomi Carmona, president of Babes Against Biotech, to help organize that through social media networks.
In a later email, Herrmann added:
People need to MARCH in, get their attention and strongly request that the
search be re-opened and the Board’s decision deferred until a more suitable list
of candidates is presented.
So if there are protesters at today’s BOR meeting, would it be fair to say they were encouraged by Sen. Kim?
read ... Just another babe...
Improving Teacher Quality and the Definition of Insanity
CB: The new teacher evaluation system may or may not ever truly work, but more importantly, it does not address the major flaw in our state: we can filter out our teachers all we want, but we have little incentive to bring in high quality teachers to replace the ones who are leaving.
In order to truly elevate the quality of teachers in Hawaii, we need to focus on recruiting and retaining the best educators in our teacher workforce, not on increasing the effectiveness of whichever warm bodies we can find.
If you ask any sort of business leader whether they would spend more time recruiting the best team or taking the first people that apply and improving them, the answer would obviously be “recruiting.”
Yet this is not the approach that we are taking by spending time and money on the evaluation system. Right now the average teacher’s salary in Hawaii is anywhere from 20 to 90 percent lower than in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — all of which have lower costs of living.
read ... Evaluations
More Homeless in Waikiki Than Ever Before
KHON: The homeless situation may not be as obvious in the daytime, but it becomes more evident at night.
“The homeless are just laying in the sidewalk, everywhere,” Waikiki resident Amy Vasquez said, “and you have a lot of people visiting from all around the world and it doesn’t make our community look very nice at all.”
When asked if the homeless situation keep tourists from returning, a visiting Frank Stenz said “I haven’t seen many volatile homeless, but it would be a consideration. I guess (you would) if you have a bad experience.”>
“A lot of visitors do say they see more homeless in Waikiki than before,” said Rich, “and we don’t want this to turn away a lot of visitors because obviously we want them to return to Waikiki.”
SA: One-two punch that combines services to the most vulnerable homeless with enforcement of rules preserving the cleanliness and the public access to Honolulu parks and sidewalks
CB: ‘Compassionate Disruption’: Honolulu’s Homelessness Balancing Act
read ... Invasion Waikiki
Rail Provides only 27% of Promised Jobs
CB: The Honolulu light rail project is generating far fewer local jobs than originally projected, partially due to legal delays and the hiring of out-of-state workers....
As of April, rail had created only 1,145 direct jobs in Hawaii, according to the authority. About 40 percent of these jobs have gone to non-Hawaii residents brought in from the mainland or other countries. The figures were provided to the Honolulu City Council last week at the request of Council member Kymberly Pine....
For nine years of construction, spanning 2010 — 2019, the rail project was supposed to support an average of 4,200 direct jobs every year.
SA: Funds offered for toxic land test
read ... Is Honolulu Rail Living Up to Its Promises of Job Creation?
Bill would let city try anew to sell projects
SA: City Council members appear ready to give the Caldwell administration the OK to find a new buyer for the city's housing projects, but want to limit the number of units that can be converted to accommodate low-income and very-low-income occupants in the Downtown-Chinatown district.
The plan to limit the number of lower-income units touched off a spirited discussion Wednesday among city officials and area residents about what the tenant mix should be at three major Downtown-Chinatown towers: 200-unit Chinatown Gateway Plaza, 236-unit Marin Tower and 90-unit Harbor Village.
Introduced by Councilwoman Carol Fukunaga, who represents the Downtown-Chinatown district, Resolution 14-121 states mixed-income housing areas should be "retained to preserve the economic stability of the surrounding neighborhood."
read ... Bill would let city try anew to sell projects
UH moves 'free speech zone'
KL: Not everyone agrees that the university can limit speech, though.
“Freedom of expression and open dialogue are fundamental to academic freedom so a public institution of higher education should be at the forefront of being open to free speech,” said Gerald Kato, an associate professor and undergraduate chair for the school of communications. “Restricting speech on campus is contrary to the mission of the university.”
Sean Mitsui, an Associated Students of the University of Hawai’i senator and member of Mānoa’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty, said he doesn’t agree with UH’s policy.
“Here at UH Mānoa and other college campuses alike, we have to get permission to hold an event or activity, which I understand,” Mitsui said. “However, to receive permission to use a small portion of land that is used specifically for free speech seems unnecessary to me. As long as the group is not disrupting anyone else, free speech should be upheld as a right that we could spontaneously and freely exercise.”
The recent lawsuit against UH Hilo for not allowing students to hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution while not in a free speech zone has caused its officials to reevaluate permanent changes to its policy.
“The university never really explained the basis for so-called ‘free speech zones,’ and courts have generally struck down such restrictions when they’ve been challenged elsewhere,” Kato said. “Such zones here were never challenged until the recent federal lawsuit against UH-Hilo that was recently settled – clearly there were constitutional problems with establishing limited areas to exercise free expression on campus.”
read ... UH moves free speech zone
GMO ban, UH research at odds
WHT: Hawaii County set itself apart from much of the rest of the state in December by effectively banning the large biotech seed companies that have become a major, though controversial, part of Hawaii agriculture.
But with a ban also on the outdoor testing of transgenic crops, can the Big Island, home to genetically modified papaya, still be a place for genetic research?
Six months later, the answer might be clearly no for some researchers while a bit hazy for others.
Because of the law, Russell Nagata, Hawaii County administrator for the University of Hawaii’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, said his staff will not pursue genetic engineering.
“It will prevent us from using biotech as a solution” to agricultural issues, he said following a panel discussion on genetic modification Thursday evening.
“It forces us to look at it in a different manner. It may be slow, it may not be as effective.”
Scientists interviewed say growing modified crops, that are still under development, in open fields is necessary to test their effectiveness.
read ... GMO ban, research at odds
Anti-GMO fervor, sanctimony
KE: ...it's not just (Dustin Barca's) empty campaign promises that concern me. That's typical among politicians, including many who are regularly re-elected. No, what worries me are his other words, the ones where he departs from his carefully crafted script and reveals who he really is, and worse, how little he really knows.
For example, this piece on ESPN.com:
"There is a bacteria on the reef in Hanalei Bay that doesn't exist anywhere in the world," explains Barca, a former ASP Tour competitor who grew up surfing Hanalei alongside Andy and Bruce Irons. "It's killing the reef. There are a lot of big chemical companies -- such as Dow and Monsanto, among others -- that test in the hills and fields around Kauai, and what we're seeing on the reef at Hanalei, it's no coincidence."
No coincidence? Does anyone in their right mind really believe the chem companies are impacting the reef in Hanalei, which is on the opposite side of the island? And btw, Dustin, Monsanto hasn't been on Kauai for a few years now.
Then there was this weekend's Instagram post, where he's running past Hanapepe Valley, but identifies it as Waimea Canyon. But hey, we'll cut him some slack since he's a North Shore boy. And he's not gonna get the westside vote, anyway. Not while he's riling workers with a video that derides the seed companies as “lazy man's farming," though he's never actually had his ass out in a field all day.
But it was the article in Flux that really raised eyebrows, and I'm not just talking about the part where he dropped out of school in tenth grade (did he ever finish?) and has spent his adult life fighting and surfing. Has he ever had a regular job, the office-kine, like where you show up every day at the Round Building and put in a solid 10 to 15 hours? Is he even working now?
No, it was this comment:
“I’m not a religious person, but I feel like I’m on a mission from God.”
Hooboy. Giant red flag.
Followed by this:
Even from an early age, Barca was angry and quick to throw a punch. He fought so much that his surf sponsorships were revoked. “I’m the sorest loser—I don’t see myself losing this fight. No way.”
And therein you see the true essence of the “leadership” behind the anti-GMO movement on Kauai. It's got all the religious fervor, sanctimony and single-minded group think of an evangelical sect wrapped in the angry, reactionary violence of a sore-loser mob quick to throw a punch.
read ... Kauai Eclectic
Bill on biodegradable bags hits snag over definitions
SA: Environmental groups have pushed to include biodegradable bags in the ban, pointing out that most bags labeled "biodegradable" do not break down completely. Their decomposition yields small bits of material that can be harmful to sea turtles and other animals that ingest them.
Retailers and bag manufacturers are lobbying Council members to either leave the exemption on biodegradable bags in place or to tweak a ban on biodegradable bags so that what could be defined as compostable bags are exempt.
Chang said there continues to be conflicting information over which products can break down completely and whether compostable bags would be more beneficial to the environment than bags labeled as biodegradable. Some argue that language simply banning plastic bags would work and still allow certified compostable bags, which should not contain any plastic.
Some people who support the bill said they believe compostable bags are preferable to plastic, while others suggest compostable bags also are harmful. Compostable bags break down completely, but do so most effectively only when placed into a composting machine, manufacturers said.
City Deputy Environmental Services Director Tim Houghton said the city does not compost solid waste.
read ... Bill on biodegradable bags hits snag over definitions
Hawaii’s premium cigar industry denied parity in state tax code
HR: The 2014 Hawai‘i legislative session has ended, and again Hawai‘i’s premium cigar industry has been denied parity and fairness in the state’s tax code.
In 2013 the state Senate passed a cigar tax cap bill (SB188) on premium cigars by a vote of twenty-four to one. This year the House passed its own version of a tax cap (HB1849), which included all large cigars.
Surprisingly, Senate Ways and Means chair David Ige deferred the bill indefinitely, with neither a vote nor a public hearing.
Prior to the deferral, the bill had been amended and sent to the Senate Committee on Health. Amendments included striking the $.50 tax cap on all large cigars and leaving the tax amount open for further debate.
A second amendment would have added language exempting premium cigars from the self-service display ban set to go into effect July 1, 2014. But rather than amending the bill, as the Attorney General’s office suggested, or sending it to conference committee, Senator Ige deferred it, thus killing any hope of its passage this year. This was certainly unexpected, because last year Senator Ige had supported a $.50 tax cap on premium cigars.
read ... High Taxes
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