Praise for mayor Our mayor makes time for each and every community on Kaua‘i. He spoke to the business owners and the citizens of Hanapepe about solutions. He spoke about visions. He spoke about his team. He spoke in positives.
Praise for mayor
Our mayor makes time for each and every community on Kaua‘i. He spoke to the business owners and the citizens of Hanapepe about solutions.
He spoke about visions. He spoke about his team. He spoke in positives.
He addressed the county’s achievements. He is on a mission: sustainability for Kaua‘i.
Charles Buxton said, “You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.”
Our mayor makes time for each of us on Kaua‘i.
Ronald Horoshko, Kalaheo
Grove Farm evictions
Grove Farm is evicting its long-term and elderly tenants from Koloa Camp based on a market study that says in this economy it can sell 50 homes (15 of them “affordable”) made out of Chinese shipping containers for about $400,000.
If this study is correct, there’s no global economic crisis, unemployment is 4 percent, banks are lending money to home buyers, and every new home in Koloa Camp will have a swimming pool in its back yard (Google: GreenPlace LTD – 3D Exterior Fly-Through).
Rather than evict its long -term tenants, Grove Farm should allow them to remain on the premises and throw out the purveyors of this flawed market study, instead.
John Patt, Koloa
County failures
It’s always amusing to read letters to the editor from people who do not retain memory of the news published in this newspaper.
Twenty years of county administration “Home Rule” or “Keep Kaua’i Kaua‘i” failures to write and submit long-term highway development plans to the State Department of Transportation (DOT) is the cause of the loss of access to Death Alley highway bypass funds.
Lacking coherent county master plan input, portions of the highway are widened to four lanes that repeatedly bottleneck back into two lanes, creating new and obvious safety hazards.
Our new county engineers have inherited twenty years, or more, of backlogged failures to provide development plans to the DOT, and I’m sure they are busy catching up.
We look forward to an affordable, sensible, and timely emergency bypass and Death Alley highway plan being sent to the DOT this year.
Tens of millions of our tax dollars, spent on wages and studies, have been wasted over the last 20 years.
Now, 20 years later, we find ourselves back re-re-beginning the process of choosing a new dump site. Gross incompetence gets promoted, and now collects fat retirement checks and benefits.
Maui has retailed their composted green waste for a decade here on Kaua’i. Every administration has failed to develop any significant diversified agriculture while the county attorney’s legal opinions promoted and permitted the building of vacation rentals and non-agricultural ‘gentleman’s motel estates’ on agricultural land.
Plantation owners, not county economic development, introduced seed corn and then GMO crops. Contrast today’s yellow pages directory ads on O‘ahu and Maui, reflecting their agriculture development leadership, and the same yellow pages directory ads, or lack thereof, today here on Kaua‘i.
We buy vegetables grown on Maui and O‘ahu. Who in the administration has any personal success and recent educational experience in developing a single export agriculture business, much less developing a new sector of agriculture? Were the administration serious, there are unlimited Hawai‘i and West Coastmarkets for dry land production of taro, corn, chips and flour. Developing an export industry requires experience, negative personal consequences from failure and a burning passion to succeed. There’s not a guaranteed retirement package if you fail.
Fallow fields waiting for Wall Street real estate financier profits fill with weeds that burn our homes. Our county fire prevention program does not want to confront this issue.
By allowing years of dangerous fuel loads (weeds) to accumulate with zero property maintenance expense, the Kaua‘i Fire Department ensures greater future profits for Wall Street financiers and prevents any incentive today to promote diversified agriculture on idle lands.
Council decisions regarding purchases, contracts, policy and implementation are made in secret executive sessions.
The threat of developer law lawsuits has the county attorney controlling all important decisions — even whether “shall” really means “may,” even though his opinions were grossly incompetent in preventing ongoing, egregious civil rights violations costing taxpayers at least $1 million dollars in settlements and expenses.
Apparently, the county attorney’s legal opinions now control everything, including deciding how many Transient Accommodation Units will be built in any given year.
The mayor, likewise, is deathly allergic to sunshine. No board or commission knows the details of the court’s decision regarding legal human resources and loss prevention programs.
The voters will soon decide. More secretive executive session government and anti-sunshine patronage politics that will super-size real estate financiers’ profits while wasting millions on administration failures, or sunshine and controlled growth that super-sizes our lives and downsizes our taxes?
It’s a new year, but nothing’s changed. Yet.
Lonnie Sykos, Kapa‘a
