• Drugs and crime • Best Christmas gift • Bike path a waste of funds Drugs and crime The article titled “Mayor: Murder shocked entire island,” published Dec. 30, can’t really be a shock. For decades, if not centuries, statistics
• Drugs and crime • Best Christmas gift • Bike path a waste of
funds
Drugs and crime
The article titled “Mayor: Murder shocked entire island,” published Dec. 30, can’t really be a shock.
For decades, if not centuries, statistics and published documentation point to murders and crimes being the end product of substance abuse.
I received a letter in December thanking me for participating in the public meeting “Taking Care of our ‘Ohana is our Kuleana”
The mayor’s office Anti-Drug Program results were: “Resounding support for residential treatment, clean and sober homes, and therapeutic living and recovery throughout the island of Kaua‘i … We continue to move forward to achieve the outcome that will best serve Kaua‘i’s families”
I ask: How many more murders, thefts, domestic violence, assaults, child abuse and neglect, rape, child sexual abuse, drunken driving fatalities, etc. will need to happen until the root of 99.9 percent of the problem — lack of substance abuse treatment — is addressed?!
How long will it take?!
Mr. Mayor and other elected officials, our island ‘ohana deserves kokua as soon as possible, before the untreated addiction of substance abuse manifests in the results of above-mentioned outcomes.
Will 2011 bring the outcome that those Kaua‘i folks pleaded for during public meetings?
Hau‘oli makahiki hou to all readers of TGI and staff. A big mahalo for covering this critical issue.
Bonnie Bator, Anahola
Best Christmas gift
After reading the letter from Daniel Kusher, from the Lihu‘e Post Office, I just had to write and say: Mahalo for caring.
Sorry to hear that the Post Office here on Kaua‘i decided not to deliver mail on Christmas Day.
I had sent my package of love to my brother and family in West Virgina. When I called on Christmas eve, I was so disappointed to find that my package had not arrived.
Expecting that my gifts would not arrive until Monday, I called on Christmas day to send my well wishes. Much to my surprise, I found out my package was delivered Christmas morning. That to me was the best Christmas present ever.
Marcia McPhail, Kapa‘a
Bike path a waste of funds
Talk about irony and falsehood! Dennis “Happy Camper” Fujimoto’s story, with accompanying great pictures, illustrates the fable of building a multi-million-dollar “bike path” that real bikers and bike events don’t even use.
As Dennis points out, the 25-mile ride covered areas from Kaua‘i Lagoons to Ahukini Pier to Kipu and back to Kaua‘i Lagoons, but never once using any part of the segmented path already built.
Hey, recreational bike rides are great and those bike routes that the DOT built 30 or 40 years ago along our highways — the ones that retired inspector Joe Rosa has testified about many times — were probably intended to be for that purpose, as well as for commuting.
What we have built and wish to finish building is a 100 million dollar multi use path — not for true bikers, not for alternate means of transportation to alleviate traffic, and not to benefit the masses on Kaua‘i, whose tax dollars are funding it.
If this were a high priority project, if all people on Kaua‘i would benefit from its construction, and if the funds were available to build it, then I would wholeheartedly endorse it.
But none of these 3 conditions can be met so why is this project being pushed?
Sure, as many of my friends keep saying it is good idea and should be built. But this “good idea” is extremely costly and in these hard times should not be on the “to do” list.
DOT estimated that the cost of this path, from Nawiliwili to the south end of Lydgate Park, would be over $60 million. But on their latest questionnaire of prioritized projects to be done, $57 million of this part of the path was deferred or eliminated, as the funds are not there to do it.
Ray McCormick, the head of DOT on Kaua‘i, is fighting to find federal funds to repave our deteriorating highways. Since these highways, as well as all our county roads, are top priority projects, let’s help him convince the feds to put Transportation Enhancement funds into our roads and not our “paths”.
And, while we are talking about transportation let’s stop this myth that people will use bikes, buses, mass transit or any alternate means of commuting. Certain members of the council continually tell everyone to bike and bus wherever they go but ask any one of them if they will ever abandon their vehicle and the answer is obvious. “Do as I say but not as I do.”
We desperately need alternate roads to move from point A to point B. Those cane haul roads were built to keep the sugar cane trucks off the highways, and like the Kapa‘a Bypass Road — which was once a sugar cane haul road — it is doing its job and should be used as a blueprint to alleviate traffic.
To further emphasize the need for alternate roads, what better example can we have than the tragic Kaloko Dam Break to illuminate this need? Cut off or break any segment of the ribbon that circles this island and we stop moving. Not only for traffic but for the need for disasters, flooding, hurricanes, and fires.
People, let’s rattle the cages of our elected officials and make sure our tax money is being appropriately used.
Glenn Mickens, Kapa‘a
