Letters for June 6, 2015

Letters for June 6, 2015

Support for housing development

The Hokua Place development looks quite amazing! The beautiful island of Kauai surely needs a well thought out and planned community-minded housing project like Hokua! I hope the community sees the need and wisdom in the plan submitted and gets behind it and moves it forward.

Rick Newton

Gilbert, Arizona

Thanks for voting to benefit residents

Thanks to Mel Rapozo, Ross Kagawa, Arryl Kaneshiro, Mason Chock and KipuKai Kualii for your vote in support of the homestay ordinance. What you did today was the right thing. Your decision brings under control a segment of our business community which has operated for years, in some cases, without control nor permits.

It was time for this to stop.

Residents thank you for standing up for those of us who cannot come forward to voice their concerns in the face of strident opposition or who have lived with unpermitted vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods or on farm lands.

Thank you for voting your conscience. Thank you for voting for the benefit of all the residents of Kauai.

Sam Lee

Koloa

Renewable energy key to Hawaii’s future

The state Legislature has set a goal for Hawaii homes to be 100 percent powered by renewable energy by 2045. The Legislature has recognized that global climate change and ocean level increases pose a serious threat to our economy and our way of life.

Our 72-unit condo in Poipu burns over 5,500 gallons of propane a year, just to heat water. Poipu is an ideal location for solar, but many condos remain on fossil fuel because of solar’s upfront costs.

Condos in Hawaii are required to maintain a long-term reserve savings account to deal with scheduled repairs. These reserves are substantial, and could be used to fund solar. Savings from the solar would then replenish the reserves until the loan was repaid.

However, an unseen large scale repair could put the reserves in the red.

The state could lessen this risk by guaranteeing the reserve study loan. So in the unlikely event that a condo falls behind in its reserves due to a solar investment, the state would step in and loan the condo the outstanding balance of the condo’s solar loan. Since this would be a loan there would be no long-term expense to the state. These loan guarantees would move Hawaii rapidly toward our goal of clean energy especially because they would target multi-family dwellings.

John Patt

Koloa

Euthanasia rates are too high

According to Kauai Humane Society’s published statistics on their website (kauaihumane.org ), the overall live release rate in 2014 was 39 percent. That means that of all animals taken in, only 39 percent of those animals left alive. (It’s worse if you look at the

live release rate for dogs, which was 65 percent, but for cats it was 19 percent. That means that less than one out of five cats turned in made it out alive.)

Now, let’s look at some other information for comparison. KHS notes that it uses PetPoint to do its statistics. If you go to petpoint.com, you can find the 2014 year-end report that puts together information from over 1,300 animal welfare organizations. In 2014, the average live release rate was 72 percent. For dogs, the rate was 79 percent and for cats it was 64 percent.

The recently corrected KHS euthanasia rate for 2014 is 70 percent, vice the 59 percent that had been published.

The overall national euthanasia rate for 2014 from PetPoint is 29 percent. So KHS euthanasia numbers are more than two times higher the national average.

It is very easy to see that the numbers for KHS are much, much worse less than the national average — and that has got to stop! It should not mean a death sentence for a cat — or a dog — to be turned in to KHS.

Martha Girdany

Kilauea