• Making money most important • Clandestine maneuverings • Salvaging our island • How long will it take? Disappointed with Hooser, Coast Guard and State I am confused. In Senator Gary Hooser’s Sunday, Sept. 2, article he wrote that the
• Making money most important
• Clandestine maneuverings
• Salvaging our island
• How long will it take?
Disappointed with Hooser, Coast Guard and State
I am confused. In Senator Gary Hooser’s Sunday, Sept. 2, article he wrote that the five Supreme Court Judges required the Superferry to seek an environmental impact statement which was not true. The Supreme Court required the DOT to perform an environmental impact review on the Kahului Harbor facility and closed it temporarily for use, never addressing the Hawaii Superferry.
Vague statements like this feed the fire to those who don’t follow the news but listen to their friends’ gossip. This “Hawaii Superferry fiasco” that the senator refers to is, in my opinion, a stalling tactic and arbitrary and capricious attempt to force the new ferry, sooner or later, into a financial mess. However, the mess will be all of the taxpayers’ problem because the state legislature set the rules, approved it and upon this approval the ferries were built. The private investors will not lose a dime but the taxpayer will loose millions because we, the state, will be sued for non performance and failure to live up to a contract with the state and the superferries.
This ferry with it’s clean-burning engines, no exhaust smoke, and unbelievable maneuverability will replace 10 air flights a day and burn less fuel when you compare it with the amount of tonnage the boat moves on one trip. “Oh, yes,” you bet there are a lot of forces behind this protesting and they are not environmentally motivated. Airlines, shippers, car rentals, inland boat men, unions, teamsters, etc., all fire up their personnel and relatives under the pretext of saving the oceans and whales throw in a few environmentalists and the fight is on. Well, who wouldn’t want to save a whale. We saved all the surfers on that Monday by not running over them. Whales are smart enough to get out of the way.
The Coast Guard was unable to disperse the protesters, on the second day because they did not want to get involved, a lot of show of force with expensive toys. I consider splashing the Coast Guard crew with water the same as spitting on the law officer and the law he enforces. It is a shame that a handful of surfers on Kaua‘i can bring the harbor to a standstill and law enforcement to its knees. There were a lot of kids out there because if the adult is out there defying the law then it must be O.K. and cool. What a great example to set for our young people. So where were the protesters when the cruise lines came in with their black smoke and the sewage that is discharged in our coastal waters. 95% of the people want this ferry. Who made this handful of protesters the god and protectors of nature on Kauai. Bottom line is if the surfers were plucked out of the water and the laws were enforced as has been threatened on the first day, we would not have this problem today; it would be in the courts. But now the protesters know that there is no retribution, no fines because there is, as Gary Hooser said in 2004 when he was a Kauai council member, “There ain’t no sheriff in town”.
Hans Hellriegel
Kapaa
Defining ‘minimal’ improvements
If Department of Transportation Director Barry Fukunaga considers spending 40 million dollars of public money “minimal improvements” then he has a different definition for the word “minimal” than its commonly understood meaning.(Superferry changes legal landscape, Guest Viewpoint, TGI, A6, September 7, 2007).
Even if DOT is claiming 40 million dollars of improvements are “minimal” I believe the exemption is inapplicable under Hawai‘i Administrative Rule (HAR) 11-200-8(b) which states, “All exemptions under the classes in this section are inapplicable when the cumulative impact or planned successive actions in the same place, over time, is significant, or when an action that is normally insignificant in its impact on the environment may be significant in a particularly sensitive environment.”
Basically, HAR 11-200-8(b) is written to prevent agencies from evading the law and blowing up exemptions into huge loopholes big enough to drive a Superferry through, which is what I believe the DOT did in this case. Evidently the Hawai‘i Supreme Court agreed.
Ed Coll
Puhi
People have a right to protest
I think it’s great that “Anybody” is protesting “Anything.”
I can think of many things worse than the Superferry to protest, but at least this island has enough civic spirit to not just accept change as inevitable.
Is it really so offensive to O‘ahu people that neighbor island residents would like to limit urban sprawl to O‘ahu? And to anybody who tells me that I don’t have a right to voice my opinion because I’m not from here and that I should just go home, well I would go home. But, where I’m from in Florida, the water is dead. The dolphins wash up dead on the beach, the fish have sores, redtide is a common occurrence, surfers get infections regularly, the water is so dirty you can’t see your hand right below the surface. Cruise ships and casino boats dump sewage and combined with runoff from overdevelopment, it has wiped out an ecosystem.
I’ve always had great respect for the ocean here and tried to be as low impact a surfer as possible, so I will speak as loudly as I want when I see people harming the ocean here or anywhere. The ocean is the lifeblood of the whole planet.
Kaua‘i people, wherever they are from, have a right to protest anything they feel is harming the ocean or its ihabitants.
Jason S. Nichols
Koloa
How does the Hawaii Superferry know?
How do they know for sure? Do they have metal detectors that you have to walk through when boarding (they should).
How do they know someone isn’t smuggling guns or weapons to our island … or smuggling baby mongoose under their seat … tree snakes, bee mites, coqui frogs?
How do they know someone isn’t smuggling lots of dangerous drugs on them or in their car. Do they really check people and their cars that good to the point where the Superferry’s attorneys can say that they know (for sure) that there is no immediate threat to our island … I don’t think so. It seems that the Superferry is on such a strict time schedule that they don’t have the time to search cars and people really good like they do at the airports and that’s a pretty big risk for them to take … here’s a question,what are the Superferry people gonna say when they do hit and kill a whale this winter?
Dominick P. DiBartolomeo
Lawa‘i
