Letters for Tuesday, November 7, 2017

People won’t give up vehicles, so plan accordingly

The update of the General Plan includes Housing/infrastructure and Transportation, which are two of the issues that must be addressed.

For transportation we are still beating on a dead horse to raise our excise tax to pay for more buses and to pave our long-deteriorating roads. We must find out where the waste in our system is going then we will not have to raise our taxes. As Ross Kagawa has said, stop going after the bells and whistles like the Hardy Street project and so many others and use the time and money for our priority needs.

Councilwoman Yukimura recently said that we have sources of money other than excise tax like the gas, the weight, the registration fees, and the utility taxes designated for our roads. This is true. But of the $17 million plus we are taking in from those sources Ed Renaud and his crew are getting about $1.2 million, so let’s find out why the bulk of those funds are not going to our roads where they are supposed to go and give him what he needs to properly pave these roads.

Until those in authority and the public involved with the long-range general plan update admit that the private vehicle will continue to be used over any other means of transportation and must be paramount in our traffic solution going forward, the problem will remain and only get worse.

The majority of the people who live here will continue to use their vehicles and the mass of the visitors will rent cars so alternate and cane haul roads must be opened if corrections are to be made.

We cannot stop people from coming here and living here as long as we live in a democratic society. But we can put a moratorium on large multi units being built until infrastructure is first put in place to handle it. We failed to put infrastructure in place years ago and that is why we have the traffic mess we have today. We do not need more studies and plans of what needs to be done, but just actions to do them.

Glenn Mickens, Kapaa

Development will not be stopped

In response to Leon Osowski, (TGI Forum, Nov. 6) the answer is “no.” Our elected officials will continue to expand; new hotels, more condos, more flights and more tourists, all the while bowing down to their corporate overlords, happy with the table scraps that are tossed their way while they blindly sell out their children’s future.

There is no easy path for our community. People are happy to make money off tourism and new home construction and who are you and I to deny them this? We would be asking many of our friends and neighbors to find a new way to make a living. Asking others to sacrifice for our quality of life.

I agree whole heartily with you that we must slow down and even reverse tourist growth to ensure that we have a better quality of life. However, I see no realistic way to make this happen.

We live in a democracy and if my fellow Americans want to elect a buffoon to lead our country, so be it. If my fellow citizens on Kauai want to continue with growth that leads us to a community more in line with Oahu, so be it.

However, if the majority of you want to push for changes in the way that we move forward as a community then I will happily get behind any candidate that will push for less flights, less growth and more restrictions on big corporations. As of now, I don’t see the will to do it.

David Presley, Hanalei