OHA Trustees’ Illegal 2025 Rush to Upzone Kakaako Makai (again)
Mayor encourages Oʻahu residents to participate in annual Community Survey
DNA Solves a 2014 Jane Doe
Continued Hawaii airline seat reductions are expected
SA: … The outlook for Hawaii air service in 2025 remains down, especially after adjustments from Southwest Airlines and following Alaska Airlines’ purchase of Hawaiian Airlines.
“The market is not what it was,” said Brad DiFiore, co-founder and managing director at Ailevon Pacific, an aviation strategy consultancy hired by the Hawai‘i Visitors and Convention Bureau, who presented airline service development insight to the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority Board last week for the first time since 2018.
“Overall, we’re looking at almost 6% down (in domestic service) by June,” DiFiore said, adding that by the summer of 2025, international seats are expected to be down another 4.1% from this year….
“We’ve been in reduction mode since the pandemic. At some point that will, of course, change, but there are a lot of factors in the industry that are at play here,” DiFiore said.
He said another challenge for Hawaii air service is that Southwest’s 2019 entry into the market brought down fares but did not stimulate enough traffic to fill that extra capacity. DiFiore said that helped bring Hawaiian into the arms of Alaska Air Group as it struggled from the pandemic and increased competition.
He said the Aug. 8, 2023, Lahaina wildfire also upended Maui, the state’s second-biggest air market. DiFiore added that the strength of the dollar has hurt international demand for Hawaii.
Coming changes are likely to lead to more reductions.
DiFiore said Southwest is reducing Hawaii capacity by 18.8% by June, with air service at Kahului Airport and Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole affected the most….
read … Continued Hawaii airline seat reductions are expected | Honolulu Star-Advertiser
The usual ethics bills will again be proposed this session
CB: … Twenty years ago, lawmakers promised to curtail campaign donations from government contractors after those transactions had come to be seen as corrupt following a series of scandals in Honolulu. But the Legislature wrote in a loophole that still allowed donations from principals of the companies and their family members….
Ten of Oʻahu’s 36 neighborhood boards, representing communities from Diamond Head to Waiʻanae, have adopted resolutions calling for changes to the House’s internal rules aimed at making the legislative process smoother and more transparent by mandating timely publication of bill testimony and removing the power of committee chairs to unilaterally kill legislation.
Some versions of the resolution also express support for closing the contractor donations loophole and creating a system of comprehensive public funding for political campaigns.
the Foley Commission, proposed a number of corrective measures aimed at increasing transparency in government following the convictions of two former state lawmakers in a bribery scandal.
Many of the panel’s most meaningful proposals failed to pass the Legislature during the last two sessions….
(IQ Test: Are you laughing?)
read … Legislature May Take A Stand Against Decades Of Pay-To-Play Politics - Honolulu Civil Beat
Maui Renters Were Having A Tough Time Even Before The Fires
CB: … The number of renters paying more than $3,000 a month for a place to call home on Maui doubled between 2019 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with nearly one in five renters in the highest tier of rent tracked by the agency last year. That’s still not as bad as Honolulu, where nearly 24% of renters shelled out more than $3,000 a month in 2023, but it’s still a dramatic increase over the last five years….
Data for the latest American Community Survey was collected throughout 2023, which means it only reflects some of the economic aftermath of the Maui fires. The data also shows the median household income dropped from $98,699 in 2022 to $83,691 in 2023.
More than half of renters across the state are considered cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
The survey also shows that a growing number of people on Maui are living with roommates, while the number of people living in family households is declining….
read … Data Dive: Maui Renters Were Having A Tough Time Even Before The Fires - Honolulu Civil Beat
Activists Trying to Erase Everything non-Hawaiian from Hawaii
CB: … During a storm in 1822, a pair of English whaling ships — the Pearl and the Hermes — crashed into a reef about 1,200 miles from Oʻahu in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
More than 200 years later, most people still call that place Pearl and Hermes Atoll, commemorating the lackluster navigational skills of Pacific profiteers.
(QUESTION: How many of these activists have better navigation skills?)
Other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago were similarly named. The French had their turn in 1786. Compte de La Pérouse cruised by a pinnacle covered in bird poop that, in the moonlight, looked like a ship with white sails. It inspired some mariners to get a closer look, only to run aground in the shallow waters.
That pinnacle is still known as La Pérouse. The waters around it are French Frigate Shoals. And a neighboring island 90 miles away is labeled Necker on most maps, which La Pérouse named after Louis XVI’s finance minister.
Colonialists did what colonialists do. They came, they claimed, they took what they wanted and they moved on. They left behind pieces of their sunken ships, and the new names they gave these old places — the same places Hawaiians had frequented for hundreds of years before Westerners arrived, places for which they had their own names, preserved in chants passed down through generations.
(CLUE: This is exactly what activists are doing today.)
But the times are changing with a movement to restore the original names of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which since 2006 have been protected as part of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument….
(REALLY TOUGH IQ TEST: Meanwhile, the majority of Native Hawaiians have left Hawaii. How is the rise of cultural nationalism responsible for the fall of actual nationalism?)
read … What's In A Name? Scientists Are Tying Hawaiian Islands Back To Their Roots - Honolulu Civil Beat
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