• Ohana Kauai and Proposition 13 • More Ohana Kauai • Kerry’s plans • Presidential debate Ohana Kauai and Proposition 13 In the September 26 Garden Island Council member Yukimura published a letter from Frank Lauterbur of UBS Financial Services
• Ohana Kauai and Proposition 13
• More Ohana Kauai
• Kerry’s plans
• Presidential debate
Ohana Kauai and Proposition 13
In the September 26 Garden Island Council member Yukimura published a letter from Frank Lauterbur of UBS Financial Services of Los Angeles. I have known Frank since the days of the Kauai Electric fiasco. He is a skilled municipal bond underwriter and marketer. He is not “an independent bonding agency” as Ms. Yukimura asserts. Many times his firm has been employed by Kaua‘i County to market its securities. His opinion is not that of the major bond rating firms.
In a recent conversation Frank expressed his view that any voter initiative invokes a knee jerk reaction from any Californian of “Oh God, another Proposition 13.” No matter how small the effect ( in the case of the Ohana Kauai Amendment less than 2% of the County budget.) the response is the same, impending disaster! In his three paragraph letter he refers to proposition 13 four times. The OK Amendment is similar to Prop 13 only in that is a voter initiative. It’s revenue effect is not material. Nor is it material on the County’s bond rating or borrowing costs.
My letter of September 15 to TGI outlines the responses of the two foremost bond rating agencies – that the OK proposal is an interesting change necessitating a close watch as to how the county handles the situation. To them it puts into question the ability of government to address these problems. People resort to this kind of voter action only when government has neglected them.
Various members of Ohana Kauai, including me, made individual calls on all members of the Council and the Mayor. The reception was lukewarm, at best. As soon as Ohana Kauai decided upon the Charter Amendment as the delivery vehicle, the county government, galvanized into action, created the task force and the Council passed a 6% annual tax rise cap on residential property.
Chick Lanphier
Princeville
More Ohana Kauai
Should the resident homeowners of Kauai trust the County Council to have our best interest at heart?
Some members of the County Council say they don’t know what a “resident” is. If the Council was really concerned about what “resident” means, they would pass an ordinance of what a resident is.
The Ohana Resident Tax Amendment states, “The County shall adopt such ordinances, laws, rules and regulations as are necessary to carry out and are consistent with the purpose of the foregoing policy and the terms of this section.”
This portion of the Amendment empowers the County council to define this alleged vague term.
Also, there is a great amount of misinformation coming from these same Council Members. They are creating fear of job loss with County employees if the Amendment passes. Shame on them!!
They also say the County’s bond rating will go down when in fact, the bond experts say the Council Members are misleading us. Shame on them!!
Even the amount of the reduction in the windfall of additional taxes was misstated by these members.
Shame on them!!
They say, “trust us. We are going to take the recommendations of the
Real Property Tax Task Force and study them and come up with a better plan.” I hope they do.
In the meantime, let’s take care of our resident homeowners and future resident homeowners on November 2.
Vote yes, on the Ohana Resident Property Tax Amendment. It’s something we can trust.
Bill Steed
Kilauea
Kerry’s plans
In speeches and during the debates, Senator Kerry repeatedly refers to the plans he has. He urges us to visit his website – johnkerry.com – to learn more about those plans. I did, and strongly urge those of you with Internet access to do the same. Judge for yourselves.
For those without Internet access, let me make some observations. I downloaded and printed out six of those plans so I could read them carefully. They are on vital campaign issues ranging from national security to health care to the environment.
What a disappointment. Each of these “plans” is just one page in length. Roughly half of each page is a philosophical discussion of what’s wrong. The balance of each page consists of a few short paragraphs with bold headers saying what, if elected president, John Kerry will do. These amount to glib promises like “Create Good-Paying Jobs,” “Develop Tomorrow’s Technology Today,” “Cut your (health care) Premiums” to name just a few.
While he does say what he wants to do, in no case does Senator Kerry say how he will do it. The essence of any plan is to explain how one will proceed to achieve the plan’s goals. I came away from my visit to johnkerry.com convinced that, sadly enough, these vaunted plans are nothing but vaporware. For the uninitiated, “vaporware” is a term long applied to software a company has promised to deliver but which never appears.
Sorry, but a pile of vaporware just won’t win my vote.
John A. Love
Kapa‘a
Presidential debate
During the presidential debate last Friday, President Bush was asked to name three mistakes he has made since taking office. He could, or would, not do it. He has been unable to answer that simple question before, and that inability to admit mistakes reveals a great character flaw in this man: if he cannot admit mistakes, then he cannot make corrections in his course or learn anything from his experience, thus leaving all of us with no other option that to keep repeating the mistakes. His inability to admit mistakes has allowed me to understand why he has been such a dismal failure in business all of his life.
Most of the controversy in this election has centered on the war in Iraq, but forget Iraq. What about the impact his “policies” have had on us in the United States, and especially in Hawaii with our dependency on oil? Here are some of the countless mistakes to be found in reviewing his “domestic policy”:
He endorsed programs that led to “outsourcing” thousands of jobs to foreign countries…Despite his claims to the contrary, experience has shown that these are jobs that we will not get back again.
The tax cuts he so proudly defends are for the wealthiest of our citizens and do not benefit the middle or working classes who continue to bear the brunt of the cost of government.
He has devastated most of the progress made in the past 30 years protecting our environment: he has passed legislation to open up logging in the last vestiges of wilderness; he continues to try and open up the pristine Alaskan tundra (north shore) area for oil drilling, and has supported an massive increase in oil drilling throughout the US; and his “Clean Air Act” has lowered emission regulations, making our air dirtier now than when he took office!
Wendy Beckett
Kapa‘a
