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|  NewsCoconut WirelessOct 15 2009It’s wonderful to hear that Rep. Joe Souki can change hats so easily, working hard for the interests of his Central Maui constituents one minute and shilling for his big business cronies the next. To ...
| NewsHawaii and Maui Renewable Energy RundownAre we making progress toward energy independence? There's good news and bad newsOct 08 2009A few items of interest on the renewable energy (RE) front bubbled to the surface this week. Since the Energy Expo a month ago, I’ve been following a curious cover-up locally by...
|  NewsMaui Dep't of Liquor Control Minor Decoy Busts......what defines success?Oct 08 2009Some of the most interesting moments at Liquor Control meetings happen on the margins, when board members and department officials aren’t directly addressing the cases at hand, but other...
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October 29, 2009 HYPER LOCAL
Despite increasing public outcry, it looks like the County is sticking to its guns regarding Halloween in Lahaina. Their position, as explained to me by public information officer Mahina Martin last month, is to treat the annual bash as a "non-event" since no one pulled a permit. That means the street will be open to traffic and there won't be any central organization for things like floodlights and portable toilets. I've been inundated with e-mails from partygoers worried the county's hands-off approach could spell disaster; solutions proposed range from the dramatic (everyone step into the street at once at a pre-determined moment and see if the cops start cracking skulls) to the optimistic (asking drivers to voluntarily avoid Front Street). If everything shakes down like last year—which is what Martin told me they're anticipating—the event will be an anti-climactic headache and nothing more. But in the absence of oversight, the likelihood of problems undeniably increases. We'll see…. More than a week after the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled Councilmember Sol Kaho'ohalahala is a resident of Lahaina and not Lanai where he serves, the ramifications of the decision remain unclear; the only certainty is this saga will have more twists and turns before it's done. If, in the end, the ruling means Kaho'ohalahala can't serve on the Council that may be a fair outcome (if he truly hasn't established a permanent residence on Lanai; he does have a family home there). But it would also cost Maui an even-handed, generally principled politician, a rare commodity indeed… This week's Rob Report (page 6) examines an effort by the Maui County Real Property Tax (RPT) office to force farmers to prove their land is being used for agriculture or face steep, possibly retroactive tax hikes. The result could be disastrous for small farms or those growing mostly for personal use, effectively discouraging local food production at a time when we should be doing the exact opposite. The goal, of course, is to raise revenue. Here's a better place to start: as reported in this space, in an effort to strike shame into the hearts of tax evaders, RPT has posted a list of the top 25 delinquent accounts on the County's Web site (co.maui.hi.us). If RPT channeled its efforts into collecting on the top 10 accounts, the result would an influx of more than $1 million. Point being, maybe we should target the scofflaws before we go after the farmers….
LOCAL
Hey, speaking of Rob (who's getting his strokes for the month here), he's quoted in an AP story about Hawaii Oceanic Technology, a Honolulu company that's been given approval to launch a "tuna farm" off the Big Island. Here's the relevant bit: "The project won't be sustainable if it imports its feed and exports about 90 percent of its product, said Rob Parsons, a board member of the environmentalist group Maui Tomorrow. The venture looks like it will suffer from the same pollution and disease problems as cattle farms, he said. "This is not a farm," Parsons said. "It's an industrial feed lot."…
NOT LOCAL
Though many still regard our military entanglement in Afghanistan as that other war, U.S. troops are dying there at an accelerating rate. In fact, with 55 American casualties to date, October 2009 is the deadliest month in the war's eight-year history. Tucked into the various media accounts was this interesting tidbit: three of the fallen soldiers weren't soldiers at all, but DEA agents sent over to tackle the opium trade that funds the Taliban. So now we've married the War on Terror with the War on Drugs, and have picked as the central staging ground a country affectionately dubbed "the graveyard of empires" (just ask the Soviets, the British and the Romans). Good thing our President is a Nobel Peace Prize-winner…. You know when you flush your business but it won't to go quietly, and you're forced to wait for the toilet tank to refill, flush again, then cry out in frustration when the defiant little bastard bobs back to the surface? I propose a new name for those gravity-defying turds: Orly Taitz. As in, "Man, I had the worst Orly Taitz this morning—I was stuck in the bathroom so long I was late for work!" If the name sounds familiar, it's because it belongs to the leader of the "birther" movement, the group of "concerned" citizens (and by "concerned" I mean bat-guano crazy) that's convinced Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is a fake and that he is in fact foreign born and thus ineligible to be president. Like the buoyant bits of excrement that bear her name, Orly refuses to stay down. Despite being hit with a $20,000 sanction by a Georgia judge earlier this month for conduct that "borders on delusional," Taitz is keeping up the fight—one of her e-mails landed in my inbox this morning, an oasis of insanity amidst a sea of dry government press releases. Here's a thought: what if, with her blinding platinum hair and ambiguous accent, Orly is actually a subversive comic in the Andy Kaufman/Sacha Baron Cohen vein, performing an elaborate bit satirizing right-wing conspiracy nuts? That would be awesome, but I'm putting my money on the unflushable poop hypothesis. Maui Time Weekly, Jacob Shafer
Tags: Maui Politics
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