Hawaii: Worst State to Make a Living

Anti-GMO Activist: Crazy Hawaiians Make us Look Bad

SJR12: Schatz, Hirono Tinker with Hawaiian Homelands Blood Quantum

Transsexual 'Marriage': Court Challenges Gender Change on Hawaii Birth Certificate

WAM Votes for Semi-Clean repeal of Public Land Development Corp.

SA: The Hawaii Senate Ways and Means Committee is voting Monday on a bill to repeal the Public Land Development Corp., one of several key bills being debated this week.

Both the House and Senate voted to abolish the agency earlier this session in response to overwhelming criticism about the agency's power to override county ordinances to develop public lands.

But the chambers disagreed on the details of the repeal. Now, lawmakers are trying to figure out a compromise.

The House draft repeals the agency and transfers its assets to the Department of Land and Natural Resources. The Senate version also transfers the agency's executive director, planner, and project-development specialist to the department.

Sen. Laura Thielen says if senators pass a different version of the bill, it will end up in conference committee, when lawmakers from both chambers form groups to work out the details of proposals.

“This would be extremely bad news for anyone supporting a repeal of the PLDC,” Thielen wrote on her website. “It’s easy for a bill to die in conference committee without any evidence of who is responsible for killing it.”

UPDATE: 'Clean Repeal'?  "Sen. David Ige, the committee's chairman, said the bill will be amended to strip out a provision that would have transferred three PLDC staffers to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. The provision caused contention at an earlier Senate hearing on the bill after PLDC opponents said it might force the bill to go to House-Senate conference committee, delaying a repeal. Ige said the amended bill is a "clean repeal," but does have differences with the House version over how money in special funds will be handed. The House, however, could accept the Senate changes and avoid conference committee."

read …  Today

Star-Adv: PPPA May be Converted to PLDC in Conference Committee

SA Editorial: Initially, the PPPA was confined to three projects: a Maui film production studio, a main street development in Wahiawa and one county-initiated project "related to education or economic development." It is projected to expire in July 2018.

However, a Senate bill has been expanded to include a "county-initiated pilot project" for each county, plus a small-boat harbor on state lands. This version also states that the film production studio not necessarily be on Maui.

The proposed PPPA is growing into a kind of Christmas tree on which new land-use baubles to benefit various unspecified projects are being hung. What started off as three pilot projects has now grown to seven, and the weight of the add-ons might well topple the whole PPPA idea for the skeptical public.

The PPPA bill, if enacted, would create a board of directors under the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, that "may develop plans and implement projects on behalf of public agencies" and "enter into a cooperative agreement with any public agency to implement projects on behalf of the public agency." Projects would be approved by the board along with "any executive of an affected public agency."

While the bill restricts the authority to the planning and implementation of the "pilot projects," it creates a government agency with some, but not all, of the tools and processes that PLDC was designed to put to use.

The bill must be monitored closely. It could well be changed in the final days of the Legislature to give the PPPA broad authority, creating an entity similar to PLDC.

read … Repeal PLDC, dial back PPPA

Commission proposes 4 percent raises for mayor and city officials

SA: Currently, the mayor's annual salary is $136,428 while the prosecuting attorney makes $129,312. City Council members make $52,446 with the Council chairman making $58,596.

Most department heads now make $121,894 and their deputies $115,677. 

The police chief makes $143,729 and his deputies $137,082. 

City attorneys in the corporation counsel's office currently make between $55,000 and $121,894 depending on experience. Deputy prosecutors make between $43,248 and $120,072. All would also receive 4 percent raises under the proposal approved tentatively today by the Salary Commission.

read … Your Tax Money at Work 

State Burns $140K per Acre to turn farmland into farmland

SA: The state Department of Agriculture hopes to break ground next year on a long-stymied Central Oahu farm subdivision where 150 acres of former sugar cane land in Kunia owned by the state would be leased to small farmers at attractive terms often absent in the private market.

The agency filed a draft environmental assessment last week for the estimated $21 million Kunia Agricultural Park project.  ($21M/150 = $140,000 per acre and they haven’t built anything.)

If developed, the ag park would help expand diversified agriculture and satisfy demand for state farm lot leases by providing small farmers with 24 roughly 5-acre lots at reasonable rents and long-term tenure. ($21M/24 lots = $880,000 per lot average size 6.25 acres.) The project also may provide up to 50 homes for farm operators and employees on the site (Two homes per 5ac lot).

read … Leaseholds

SA: Natural Beauty Allows Hawaii to Enact Bad Laws

SA: "Lucky you live Hawaii" is a mantra that most of us in this beautiful state live by, but that opinion is all in how you look at things.

If you're gauging Hawaii by measures such as "fiscal policy," "regulatory policy" and "personal freedom," then the islands don't necessarily fare so well, at least as those categories are defined in the latest edition of the "Freedom in the 50 States." The report is issued by George Mason University's Mercatus Center, which describes itself as "the world's premier university source for market-oriented ideas."

It gave Hawaii the low ranking of 47…But who's walking around saying "Lucky you live North Dakota"? 

(Here’s a non-rhetorical question: Even if natural beauty allows Hawaii to attract people in spite of bad laws, why would you want to enact those laws in the first place?)

Related: Report: Hawaii 47th in Freedom

read … Use Natural Beauty as an Excuse for Bad Laws

Patient responsive months after end-of-life case

SA: Karen Okada's family is happy with her care since an end-of-life rift resulted from dueling documents….

read … Patient responsive months after end-of-life case

HPD Lieutenant charged with drunk driving after Crashing into Parked Car in Waikiki

KHON: Police say Lt. Colin Wong crashed into a parked car near the Modern Hotel in Waikiki around 2:30 Saturday morning.

He was off-duty at the time. 

Wong was arrested for operating a vehicle under the influence of an intoxicant and for refusing to submit to a breath or blood test.

He's a lieutenant in the police department's specialized services division and specifically the SWAT team

read … DUI

HFP only 1% Female

CB: The Honolulu Fire and Emergency Medical Services departments are still sorting the pros and cons of a controversial proposed merger that has been championed by Mayor Kirk Caldwell as a life and money-saving opportunity. Perhaps the biggest critics of joining the departments are female EMTs and paramedics who fear a merger could mean reverting to a male-dominated work culture not seen at EMS since the 1990's.

Women account for 32 percent of the county's EMS workers, but just 1 percent of its firefighters. This statistic, coupled with the fact that the fire department is five times larger than EMS, has roused some female EMS workers to voice concerns about how a merger might alter their work lives. Would they be subject to tougher physical requirements? Would they have to fight fires? How would they cope with the absence of women's restrooms and sleeping quarters at the county's fire houses?

There are a dozen female firefighters currently employed by the county. If the Fire and EMS departments were to merge today there would be about 80 women working alongside 1,285 men.

Jennifer Altomare, a paramedic, said she has a great working relationship with the firemen and foresees no issues in working more closely with them. But she fears she wouldn't be able to meet the physical and emotional requirements of the job if she were forced to cross-train as a firefighter-paramedic.

read … Honolulu Fire Behind Nation in Number of Women in Dept

Longer Wait For Disability Benefits In VA Secretary's Home State

CB: In January, the latest period for which figures were available, 70 percent of compensation disability claims nationally had been pending longer than the goal of 125 days. That’s brought protests from veterans groups and criticism from Congress. However, the backlog was worse in the Honolulu office, where 77 percent of those claims had been pending longer than the 125 days.

The backlog of cases in Honolulu has grown since January 2012, when 69.4 percent of similar claims had been pending for that long.

It was also taking longer in the Honolulu office than the average nationally to process disability claims that require an assessment of the severity of a disability. Nationally, it took the VA an average of 279 days to complete such claims. It the Honolulu office, it took almost four months longer — an average of 390.2 days.

A year earlier, it took an average of 254 days to process a claim in the Honolulu office.

read … VA

Heterosexuals Only: Hawaii Bill Limits Chlamydia Treatment

CB: Hawaii lawmakers want to counter the state’s high rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea by letting doctors treat the partners of patients who have the sexually transmitted diseases without first examining them.

But only the straight ones.

The House Consumer Protection and Judiciary committees are set to hear Senate Bill 655 Monday afternoon, one of the last hurdles it needs to clear before becoming law.

AMA: Ethics of Expedited Partner Therapy

Minnesota Medicine: “It is not recommended for the partners of patients with syphilis or HIV because of the complexity of treatment courses, nor is it indicated for homosexual populations because of the higher rate of HIV infection in the partner population seen in observational studies.”

read … STDs 

Hitler Invented Term ‘Assault Rifle’

SA: The term "assault rifle" is a translation of the German word "sturmgewehr," which literally means "storm rifle" as to "storm" an enemy stronghold. The name was actually coined by Adolph Hitler in 1944, when the German army designed what has come to be known as the world's first assault rifle, the Sturmgewehr 44.

Reality: Connecticut Shooting: Failure of Mental Health System

read … Gun debate afflicted with inaccurate, emotional terminology

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