• Salary process gone astray • Paving paradise • Kaua‘i Made money: where are local leaders? Salary process gone astray Last November the Salary Commission deferred until July 1, 2011, seven percent increases for all administrative executive positions. The budget
• Salary process gone astray • Paving paradise • Kaua‘i Made
money: where are local leaders?
Salary process gone astray
Last November the Salary Commission deferred until July 1, 2011, seven percent increases for all administrative executive positions.
The budget submitted by the mayor assumes that these increases will not take effect even though the commission has taken no action to defer or cancel them.
Everyone appears to assume that the commission took care of business in November when it included in its salary resolution the following provision:
“The Mayor with approval of the County Council is hereby authorized through the County’s annual operating budget to limit the funding and thereby reduce the salary for any non-elected officer or employee to an amount lower than the figure established for the position in this resolution.”
The mistakes made by the commission in this sentence are breathtaking.
Apparently with approval from the county attorney’s office, the commission claims the power to delegate without limits its salary-setting authority to elected officials, thereby rendering its own charter-mandated function superfluous and negating the salary-setting role granted by the charter to department heads and boards/commissions.
The bottom line is that, even if the provision were valid, the commission is still responsible for the deferral it put in place in November and the salaries which will take effect if the commission takes no action before July 1.
The commission probably acted with the best of intentions, but this provision makes a mockery of Charter Section 29.03.
The fact that neither the administration nor the council questioned but embraced the provision demonstrates how far astray the executive salary process has wandered.
Horace Stoessel, Kapa‘a
Paving paradise
Saturday’s headlines highlighted more precedence-setting commercial development on the North Shore (“Anaina Hou: A hui hou to contested case,” The Garden Island, March 26).
The developer’s own employees promoted a petition to hold a special meeting of the Kalihiwai Ridge homeowners to remove the board that filed the intervention and replace them with their own “hand-picked” board members who then withdrew the intervention only four days after being elected.
These developers also managed to install many of their employees on the Kilauea Neighborhood Association Board to gain the approvals needed for their commercial amusement park in 2007, and some have since resigned after getting what they were able to accomplish there.
The developer claims that “All of our uses came out of public meetings,” which were the KNA meetings that had the board “stacked” with their employees.
If these uses were really what Kilauea wanted then why does the 2006 Kilauea Town Plan and the Kaua‘i General Plan both call for this specific site, if ever developed, to be used for “Affordable Housing”?
This particular site will also serve as easy highway access to the 43-lot CPR subdivision of “Gentleman’s Estates” where the guava plantation used to be.
The parcel in question is zoned state Agricultural and county Open District, both of which prohibit commercial development of any kind.
If the phase 2 application is approved on April 12, then the precedence has been set for Kaua‘i’s precious Open and Agricultural lands to be paved over and lost forever. Is this a wise decision for Kaua‘i?
Jim Gair, Kilauea
Kaua‘i Made money: where are local leaders?
Imagine Kaua‘i coining its own money. Legal, this practice could prevail as the ultimate Kaua‘i Made, buy-local system.
Other municipalities already do it. “BerkShares” (Massachusetts) and “Ithaca Hours” (New York) are quite successfully circulating millions of dollars worth of transactions annually in goods and services.
Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses.
In its first two full years (2007- 2008), the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares.
During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.
According to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, by law, local money may not resemble federal bills or be promoted as legal tender of the United States.
Obvious challenges inhibit this venture. But other communities overcame.
How? Vision, leadership and a trusting, dedicated, active business community that understands what local currencies mean to the “buy local” ideal, especially in times of economic collapse.
So where is this group of local business leaders?
Local currency is not revolutionary or foreign; in fact, Kaua‘i had its own money many years ago.
I keep a “lucky” Kaua‘i One Dollar coin in my wallet, often imagining a more prosperous island people.
Rolf Bieber, Kapa‘a
