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Monday, September 14, 2015
September 14, 2015 News Read
By Andrew Walden @ 2:24 PM :: 3374 Views

Hawaii Congressional Delegation How They Voted September 14, 2015

UH Manoa Comes up with new Scheme to Waste $300M on Nothing

CB: The airport and University of Hawaii at Manoa must be the dynamic duo of dysfunction — twin, prestige poster kids for the state’s poorly maintained and embarrassing infrastructure. But let’s put HNL and its byzantine problems aside for the moment and look at the Manoa campus.

Maybe it’s the simple fact of being a college campus in the tropics that accounts for Manoa’s overall funkiness — its stained and cracked concrete, its pushy tree roots and mildewed corners.  (But remember: Deferred maintenance transforms operating expenses into capital 'investments') Less simple is the institution’s long-running tragedy/farce as the state’s queer and highfalutin foster child, used and abused for decades by politicians and contractors while it tries to plumb the Pacific world and ready Hawaii’s next generations.

The result is a patchwork campus, a fitful agglomeration eluding order and the sustained idea.

UH Manoa’s Landscape Master Plan (2012) summed things up pretty well when it published a sorry photo of an outdoor bench at a central campus crossroads next to two mismatched garbage bins. The caption: “Site furnishings do not always communicate an appropriate image for a leading research university.”

Nevertheless, there’s some good (even worse) news in this, UH Manoa’s 98th year: In August, the Board of Regents approved first steps in what is shaping up to (pretend to) be a $300 million consolidation of the campus’ underground infrastructure....  (Oh goody.  Another tech debacle mixed in with more debt-financed construction we didn't know we needed.)

read ... Another $300M down the drain

Recycling Wastes $1.2M/Year in Honolulu

KITV: It is costing us so much money to ship it to the mainland and the commodity prices for paper is very low Lori Kahikina heads the city's department of environmental services and is in charge of both the landfill and recycling. She also knows many might think it is garbage to throw away perfectly good used cardboard, plastic or paper. 6:15 "its emotional. People want to feel like they are doing good and recycling. People on a whole don't understand that things go to h-power not the landfill." that's right. She would prefer many recyclables to be burned for power. Because the city gets some money back on the electricity that is generated. Money that could go toward the $1.2 million Honolulu spends every year to pay for the island's recycling program.

Related: Honolulu Recycling Plan Needs Revisions

read ... Honolulu reconsiders recycling

More to Waste: Hawaii tax revenues jump 17% in first two fiscal months

PBN: Hawaii tax revenues for the first two months of the current fiscal year were 17 percent higher than the same time period last year, the state Department of Taxation said.

Some of the growth can be attributed to an 8.4 percent increase in general excise and use taxes and a 5.6 percent increase in the hotel room tax, while the cessation of allocations from the G.E.T. to the Hawaii Hurricane Relief Fund with the fiscal year that ended June 30 can account for the rest, the Department of Taxation said....

read ... More to Waste

A Year After Sit-Lie--Predatory Bums out of Waikiki and No Lawsuit

SA: Wednesday marks one year since Mayor Kirk Caldwell signed Honolulu’s first sit-lie bill into law, banning people from sitting and lying on Waikiki sidewalks 24 hours a day.

The new law quickly shifted the landscape in the government’s handling of homelessness.

The law spurred what appears to be a majority of Waikiki’s homeless to move out of Hawaii’s tourism mecca. Some went to shelters or found other housing arrangements, but others simply moved themselves and their belongings into other portions of the city....

While some two dozen areas have a sit-lie ban in place, police have enforced it only in Waikiki and Downtown-Chinatown. Since the Downtown-Chinatown area was added on Dec. 5, police have issued 6,192 warnings and 30 citations there and made three arrests, HPD said.

HPD spokeswoman Yu said she did not know of any sit-lie warnings, citations or arrests made elsewhere on Oahu, despite the addition of some two dozen areas by Council members.

read ... A year after sit-lie ban hits the city, results vary

Can Rapid Rehousing Get Homeless Families off Street

CB: Scott Fuji is a gatekeeper of sorts for “Big Data” about Oahu’s homeless population.

Fuji heads PHOCUSED, the homeless advocacy group tasked with maintaining the “coordinated entry system”— which has so far assessed the needs of about 3,400 homeless households on the island — and he’s often called upon to crunch the data to keep track of the latest trends....

This has led to an effort to expand the use of “shallow subsidies,” typically $150 to $500 a month, to quickly place struggling people back into housing — or keep them from becoming homeless in the first place.

The approach is known as “rapid rehousing,” a strategy that has been gaining traction across the country in recent years....

Kimo Carvalho, director of community relations at The Institute for Human Services, says the upside of this approach is that, compared to deeper subsidy programs like Section 8, it can be implemented cheaply.

According to PHOCUSED, it would cost about $1 million to provide shallow subsidies of $350 a month to 200 homeless households. By contrast, the city is now spending $3 million a year to run its Housing First program — the centerpiece of Hawaii’s effort to combat homelessness — with a goal of housing 110 people.

read ... PHOCUSED

Poverty and Hazardous Waste Go Together

SA: ...Residents living along a stretch of Central Oahu that includes Wahiawa and Kunia are most at risk from pollution from abandoned hazardous waste sites.  High levels of lead paint, a suspected carcinogen, plague communities in Palolo Valley, Waipahu and large swaths of Kaimuki. And Waianae and Nanakuli, which have high levels of poverty, host much of the island’s hazardous waste.

This is just a snippet of the information that legislators, government officials and local residents can discern from a new online mapping tool developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to promote environmental justice.

The tool, called EJScreen, provides detailed information about pollution, traffic congestion, toxic spills,air quality, sources of water pollution and other environmental hazards, and combines this with census data to identify areas where there are high levels of poverty or where certain ethnic groups are concentrated.  The EJScreen mapping tool can be accessed on the EPA's website at www2.epa.gov/ejscreen....

(Translation: Environmentalism is a rich people's game.  Others get stuck with the result.)

read ... EJ Screen

Killing Nene, Hoary Bats--A High Price for Energy

SA: If having 100 percent oil-free energy in Hawaii at the expense of a few more nene or hoary bats that can be killed is the price of being self-sufficient, then I feel sorry for the people and islands of Hawaii (“Maui wind farm owner wants higher limit on bat, nene kills,” Star-Advertiser, Sept. 9).

Those big mainland energy companies are just waiting to swoop down on us and suck all our energy up. Our local politicians and CEOs seem more than willing to grant them free rein. Once we let them raise their quotas of the “expendables,” then it’s ridiculous to appear to try to save these two endangered species now or in the future when we really have become dependent on these newer sources of energy.

CB: Politics Are Why Our Electricity Bills Will Remain High

read ... High Price to Pay

LNG Secrets: 9200 Pages Turned over by HEI, NextEra

IM: A secret file containing 9,200 pages was turned over to the Public Utilities Commission and the Consumer Advocate on September 11.

A log listing each of the over 400 documents that makes up that secret file has been made part of the public record. Each entry on the log shows the name of a document, the subject matter, the type of correspondence, the date, who wrote it, who it was sent to, who got a cc copy, why it is confidential and how many pages exist in the document.

The file contains emails and attachments between HECO and NextEra regarding Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).

read ... HECO-NextEra Merger's Evidentiary Hearing Mystique

State Stops Posting Care Home Inspection Reports Online

CB: Blaming a lack of resources, the Hawaii Department of Health is now ignoring the requirement that took effect in January....

read ... Excuses

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