Letters for Jan. 27, 2016

Letters for Jan. 27, 2016

Tourism: The positive and negative

While the Kauai Tourism Board and county officials rave about the increasing numbers of tourists and how great it is for our island, maybe it’s time to take a good look at tourism as a whole.

Positive: It can and does create jobs. It can create business opportunities. Generates tax revenues such as airport, hotel, and excise taxes that can be used for schools, hospitals and general community.

Negative: Most of the jobs created are seasonal and low paid. It pushes up property taxes and the costs of goods and services. Displaces locals to make way for more profit-oriented development. There’s more overcrowding and more overall congestion. Money tourists spend doesn’t always benefit the community as it leaks off island to huge international companies- hotels.

Uses proportionally more services such as water, electricity and trash disposal.

Every tourist destination reaches a “tipping point” where the costs to service the tourist industry exceed the money received from tourism. I’d like to see a moratorium on any new visitor accommodations until the infrastructure catches up.

Our roads are junk, we’re running out of waste disposal space, traffic is horrendous, and at some point water is going to become an issue. I’d like to see some fresh candidates with new ideas of how to deal with the future problems instead of the “business as usual” gang we’ve had forever. Otherwise, we are on a runaway train that’s going to end up with nobody being satisfied with the life we have here. Local or tourist.

John Humphrey

Hanalei