• Eyes wide open Eyes wide open As usual, Walter Lewis shared with us another great column encapsulating our County Council’s repeated policy of ignoring the law (“County closes doors often,” A Better Kaua‘i, Dec. 8). The council’s persistent practices
• Eyes wide open
Eyes wide open
As usual, Walter Lewis shared with us another great column encapsulating our County Council’s repeated policy of ignoring the law (“County closes doors often,” A Better Kaua‘i, Dec. 8).
The council’s persistent practices of governing in the dark behind closed doors is, as I have said before, not the council’s fault. The blame must not be placed upon the shoulders of our elected officials in office, but rather on the shoulders of those registered voters that do not vote them out of office as a matter of choice, responsibility and accountability.
Blame must fall on the shoulders of the approximate 21,000 out of 38,000 registered voters, who do not care about or do not understand the responsibilities of citizenship. Approximately 9,000 “bloc voters” keep voting incumbents back into office; Approximately 6,000 to 8,000 voters vote to remove them; and 21,000 “rainbow citizens” stay home, go to the beach, watch soaps, chase after a ball (be it golf, baseball, basketball, bocci, whatever), play cards or sleep. About 24 percent, one in four voters, are controlling your lives and the lives of your family and children. Of course, when one thinks about it, these “rainbow citizens” probably all went through Hawai‘i’s educational system. A system content to teach our children the values of the homeless, being more concerned with nurturing the well being and welfare of their bureaucratic mechanism and rewards rather than the futures of our, and your, children.
How else can one explain this tolerance for totalitarian style rule behind closed doors; for election results overturned, stolen, raided and thrown into the courts such as the Ohana Kaua‘i (property tax relief victory) criminal act of disenfranchising the electorate’s vote count in 2004; of ignoring the Kaua‘i County Charter and persecuting, maligning, and improperly firing a police chief cracking down on drugs and crime; and the list goes on and on and on.
Again, thank you Walter, for your column. But please allow me to add a few sentiments. First, in paragraph two the column states: “On Kaua‘i, county agencies, including the Kaua‘i County Council, do not seem to accept the basic premise of this policy (in a democracy, the people are vested with the ultimate decision-making power.)”
You need to remove the words “seem to” from your statement. They simply “do not accept” the premise.
Second, in your second from the last paragraph, you state: “There is little doubt but that the public interests are better protected (and better served) when citizens have access not only to the determinations made by government but also the reason for the decisions and the positions taken by the individual officials involved.” Witnessing our elected officials’ consistent conduct in office these past few decades it is very evident that they are not concerned with “public interests” or “better protected” or (better served) citizens. They are concerned only with the perpetuation and well being of their bureaucratic, “money-power-politics” structure of rule.
In your last sentence, you refer to officials “willing to close their eyes to the legal and moral standards that apply to their duties” as denying Kaua‘i “the quality of governance we should have in our county.” Our elected officials, statewide, are not closing their eyes, they are closing doors. They are closing doors to our children’s futures. Just look to over development, low-paying jobs, our children forced to move away, government demanding to being more and more and more a part of our daily lives. Their eyes are wide open, never closed, in those closed, dark, rank rooms and they know exactly what they are doing and what they are committing. Crimes. Mahalo, Walter, for your articles. Keep them coming. “Never give up, never give up, never give up.”
John Hoff
Lawa‘i
