808 Cleanups is tenacious when it comes to cleaning up other people’s messes
by Ethan Pearson-Pomerantz
I’m in a familiar place, high up on the Pali, raindrops splattering on the dirt next to me, traffic noises just barely audible from below between the gusts of wind buffeting the ridgeline. A new sound fills my ears as 808 Cleanups Executive Director Michael Loftin triggers a cordless drill with a wire wheel attached to the bit and gently leans into the rock face next to the popular Pali Puku. Grit flies, driven away from the rock by the metal bristles and specks of paint, until recently forming unsightly graffiti covering the rock next to the puka, float away on the wind.
This is the third time now Michael and I have made the trek up here, alerted by what we’ve seen in posts on social media—Instagram and 808 Cleanups own Facebook group seem to be the best early warning system—that somebody has splashed a painted or magic marker version of their tag or initials or some other form of gibberish on the rocks. The Pali Puka is hardly the only place this occurs. 808 Cleanups volunteers have made regular trips to Pele’s Chair, “Pride Rock” in Lanikai, Kapena Falls and other locations to safely remove graffiti left by people have failed to care for our ʻāina at a most basic level.
And it’s not just graffiti. Repeat dumping just feet from the front gate of the transfer station on Kapa’a Quarry Road have brought out volunteers every few months to pick up the mess. 808 Cleanups volunteers hold regular cleanups at Nimitz beach near Kalaeloa Airport, leaving it looking pristine, only to arrive the next time to find it trashed again. One of our biggest ongoing projects is the almost weekly removal of pallet bonfire remains from the Ka’iwi coastline, where over the past two years volunteers have removed over 24,000 pounds of nails and staples left in the sand! One long time volunteer has a standing appointment at a specific city park to pick up the trash left by families “enjoying” the park every weekend.
So why do so many of our amazing volunteers keep coming back to sites that they’ve already spent hours of their valuable time cleaning up, only to see their efforts undone again and again? It’s because they care. It’s because they know if they don’t do it, nobody will. They do it to educate future generations. They do it because they are motivated by others they see posting on the 808 Cleanups Facebook group. They do it because they are demoralized by the images of tagged rocks and burning beach bonfires they see in their Instagram feed. But most of all they do it because they know it’s the right thing to do.
Back up on the Pali, Michael turns off the drill and brushes paint flecks away from the rock face. We step back and admire the view through the puka, now free of graffiti. We’ll probably be back again, but that’s ok, because today, we’ve made a difference.
Top Photo: Kailua as seen through the Pali Puka.
For more information about getting involved with 808 Cleanups, visit their website at www.808cleanups.org.
The Field of Dreams Led to the Slammer
By Tom Yamachika – On June 7, 2017,the Honolulu City Council voted to authorize bond funding to keep the Honolulu rail project on track.
What they might not realize is that bond funding dramatically raises the stakes for transparency around the rail project.
Beginning in late 2007, the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission began scrutinizing state and local governments to protect investors in what then-Chairman Christopher Cox called the increasingly complex municipal bond market.
In April 2008, the SEC charged five San Diego officials, including the former city manager and auditor, with fraud. City officials were accused of certifying financial statements in 2002 and 2003 that were false because they failed to disclose that the city was purposely underfunding its pension system. Eventually, the officials agreed to pay penalties ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 — the first such fines levied against officials in a muni-fraud case.
In 2010, the SEC established a new unit to investigate misconduct in municipal finance, with an emphasis on pension funding. They charged New Jersey in 2010 and Illinois in 2013 with fraud connected with bond offerings for misrepresenting that their respective pension systems were well funded, when they were in fact under water by billions.
In April 2016, the SEC turned the heat up another notch on Ramapo, a suburb in New York. The plot in this case sounded like “Field of Dreams” – officials in Ramapo wanted to build a $58 million baseball stadium after voters in the town overwhelmingly refused to guarantee bonds to pay for its construction. The officials went to the bond market anyway and raised the money to build the stadium, now called the Provident Bank Park, in part because they “cooked the books of the town’s primary operating fund,” according to the SEC. Instead of just going for fines and penalties, however, the agency involved Preet Bharara, who then was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to indict the town defendants on criminal securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges. In May 2017, a federal jury convicted then-Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence on 20 of the 22 felony charges. The fraud counts on which he was convicted carry 20-year maximum terms. He will be sentenced on September 28th.
Back here in the Aloha State, there is a growing chorus of people who are expressing misgivings about the financial parameters of the rail project. One reader writes, “No one trusts the rail cost projections. No one trusts the rail ridership projections. No one trusts the rail energy use projections. No one trusts the rail land condemnation projections. No one trusts anything about rail.” Those who are now overseeing the project need to be concerned that going out to the bond market with cooked books is a recipe for repercussions of the federal criminal variety.
It doesn’t matter that the officials involved have gotten no personal benefit from the project. Mr. St. Lawrence had nothing to gain personally from building the Provident Bank Park. He just wanted the park built, no matter what. He now may be getting a one-way ticket to federal prison. Officials here may have the best of intentions, but they better be telling the public the truth. Or else.
ThinkTech: Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker – Special Session Update
This week Gene Ward and I discuss the special session that the Governor announced for the end of August. Hold on to your wallets!! More taxes coming to fund an outdated and obsolete, elevated fixed rail system that will never cover its own operating costs. It is also the most expensive rail system ever built in the US. Sounds like another Super Ferry failure on steroids!!
Mucking Around in the Past?
By Tom Yamachika – On Thursday, June 22nd, the board of Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) stunned critics by cancelling a special audit that would have examined past cost overruns.
Ember Shinn, former City Managing Director and HART board member, was quoted as saying, “It’s not my intent to muck around in the past and try to figure out what we did wrong in the past. It’s more trying to get forward.” The HART board decided that the money set aside for was better spent on other things, especially because there were other outside reviews being conducted.
This comment seems to show a lack of understanding of what an audit is, and of the problems that it is supposed to address.
According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the purpose of an audit is to provide users of financial statements with an opinion by the auditor on whether the financial statements are presented fairly in all material respects. The audit (and the auditor’s opinion) enhances the degree of confidence that intended users can place in the financial statements.
Companies, governmental units, and others communicate their financial condition to owners, constituents, or other stakeholders. One common way to communicate this information is through financial statements such as profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and related statements. Stakeholders receiving those statements may be trying to follow the Russian proverb made famous by Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.” So, the entity presenting the financial statements engages a disinterested professional, often a CPA firm, to test the information on the statements to see if it is trustworthy. This testing process is the “audit,” and the resulting opinion is the “audit report.” Variations on this theme also occur, but the overall objective is to enhance stakeholder confidence.
One of the biggest problems with the Honolulu rail project today is the lack of confidence that constituents and legislators have in the financial condition of the project. One recent email I received put it this way: “No one trusts anything about rail. No trust. No deal.” House Finance Chair Luke said something similar March 10, that it’s “not because people no longer support rail, but people have lost confidence in the cost, and they have lost confidence in the management, and they have lost confidence in what this project is going to cost in the future.”
An audit is designed to give people more confidence. Is it “mucking around in the past”? Sure it is. But is it something we need? The dollars that would need to be spent on an audit, no matter who does it, could go toward one of the many other cost items – plenty of costs to go around – but why is it not important to restore public confidence? HART needs to remember that it has a boss, namely We the People of Honolulu. If your boss lost confidence in your work, wouldn’t it be important to do something about that?
And then, why is mucking around in the past a bad thing? As the philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” If we are trying to move forward and aren’t, we need to figure out why. Maybe then we can do something different, and get a different outcome from the doom and gloom that we are all constantly hearing now.
ThinkTech: Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker – Bar and Restaurant Legal Update
Did you know that the stacking rules for drinks have changed?? Mia Obciana, who is an attorney that has extensive experience in the restaurant and bar business in Hawaii, provides us an update and provides some thoughts on how to stay out for trouble. The restaurant and bar business is complicated and risky and you need someone like Mia to guide you though the minefield.
The Media’s Tortured Cultural Marxism
BY FRANK SALVATO
It really is getting painful to endure. The media’s self-righteous and snobbish hangman’s noose flailing to remain hip and relevant is beyond embarrassing. It has crossed into the land of the pathetic.
The first of the last nails in the mainstream media coffin came with their labeling of President Trump’s speech in Warsaw, Poland, as racist. How, in the name of all that is good, can anyone construe the championing Western Civilization as racist?
The facts speak for themselves. For the most part, the West is responsible for many of the most incredible advancements in human history. For the most part, the nations of the West only enter into conflict to defend the defenseless and/or advance the cause of freedom. We ended the era of slavery, battle against indentured servitude and have the intestinal fortitude to call a religion out on their need for radical reformation to expunge the use of violence as a tool of conquest.
But some of the more caustically ignorant in the mainstream media’s self-anointed class (read: the ideologically challenged snobs of The Washington Post, the LA Times, Salon, The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the look-down-their-nose usual suspects) ignore these facts and, through the lens of confused reality, see the West as purveyors of racism, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, you name it.
FOX News reported,
“Trump’s Thursday speech in Warsaw was largely acclaimed – even by longtime critics – as the president took Russia to task for destabilizing actions around the world and praised the Polish resistance during World War II as a model for cultures fighting existential threats. But several Left-leaning outlets…decried the speech as an ode to white nationalism and anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric…The Washington Post headlined an opinion piece from editorial board member Jonathan Capehart ‘Trump’s white-nationalist dog whistles in Warsaw.’”
The Atlantic threaded reality through their Cultural Marxism sausage maker to come up with this delusion,
“In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred ten times to ‘the West’ and five times to ‘our civilization’…His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too…The West is a racial and religious term.”
So, to defend and support Western Culture is to be a white nationalist touting racial strife and religious bigotry?
Anyone with a sixth of a brain understands that the Islamic dominated the Middle East has been at war with itself – engaged in tribal war, i.e. Sunni v. Shi’ite – for centuries. Muslims have been killing Muslims in the name of their religion since 672 A.D. and the morally relativistic pseudo-intellectuals of the talentless yet connected mainstream media choose to ignore that fact in deference to their need to make everyone “equal”?
The truth can be hard to swallow sometimes. And many have been ostracized for telling the truth. Galileo faced torture and imprisonment for his theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe; that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vise-verse. The “media” of that age led the movement to have him branded a heretic. The media, in other instances, has been used as tools of ideological movements that have sought to oppress people in the evilest of ways (read: Stalin, Hitler, Mao).
Today, the liberal elitists of the mainstream media are desperate to advance their cause as well. Today their cause is Cultural Marxism. Communism failed as a governmental and economic system, as did Socialism. But Cultural Marxism, where political correctness usurps the Charters of Freedom (the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Bill of Rights) as the basis for the execution of a shadow authority, robs the people of representation in government.
Today the Fourth State, in collaboration with their Progressive overlords, is attempting to redefine events in real time so as to “newspeak” us into submission. They are attempting to force us into seeing reality as contrived; twisted fiction as gospel.
For all the consternation over “fake news,” it appears the mainstream media is the chief purveyor of the propaganda. Where there does exist a plethora of click-bait, regurgitated news websites, those sites are motivated by a quest for money. The fake news coming out of the mainstream media is centered – exclusively – on thought control; control of the masses and the way we think.
Now, more than ever before, we all must be discerning about from where and whom we get our information. Check sources, vet writers, follow-up on important points to get to true sources; existing as highly suspect of “anonymous” attributions.
Until a few brave and honest information brokers see the opportunity to re-invent the news media beyond newspapers, cable argument shows, and traditional news desks, we will necessarily need to identify and choke-out dishonest propagandists and newspeak brokers if we are to survive as a free thinking people.
“Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods…and the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool.” – Plato, 427BC
Weekly Fuel Prices Report from AAA Hawaii: Gas Prices Flat Nearly All Year
Gas price averages continued to remain stable throughout the islands this past week as has been the case since the beginning of the year, according to the AAA Hawaii Weekend Gas Watch. Today’s statewide average price is $3.05, which is just four cents higher than on Jan. 1, and is the same price as last Thursday, and the same price on this date a month ago. The highest state average price of the year was on Feb. 21 at $3.11. Today’s state average price of $3.05 is 23 cents higher than on this date a year ago, according to GasPrices.AAA.com.
In Honolulu, today’s average price for regular is $2.89, which is one cent lower since last Thursday, one cent lower on this date last month and 26 cents higher than last year. On Jan. 1, Honolulu’s average price for regular was $2.88, just a penny lower than today. The Hilo average price is $3.03, which is the same price as last Thursday, one cent higher than on this date last month and 12 cents higher than on this date a year ago. Wailuku’s average is $3.51, which is two cents higher than last Thursday, one cent higher than on this date a month ago, and 22 cents higher than on this date a year ago.
“Despite mostly flat fuel prices over the first seven-plus months of the year in Hawaii, they remain the most expensive in the country. Other states follow behind: California, $2.93, Washington, $2.80 and Alaska, $2.79,” according to AAA Hawaii General Manager Liane Sumida. “To stretch their gasoline dollars, drivers should keep their vehicle maintenance up to date for the best gas mileage while also reducing the likelihood of big and expensive repairs.”
Motorists can find current prices along their route with the free AAA Mobile app for iPhone, iPad and Android, available at AAA.com/mobile. The app also can be used by AAA members to map a trip, find discounts, book a AAA-rated hotel and access AAA roadside assistance. AAA Hawaii reminds drivers that AAA continues to help travelers and the public with fuel information on GasPrices.AAA.com.
Prices as of 8 a.m. July 6:
| Area | Regular | One Week Change | Record Price | |||
| Honolulu | $2.89 | -1 cent | $4.48 (5/8/2011) | |||
| Hilo | $3.03 | No Change | $4.76 (4/22/2012) | |||
| Wailuku | $3.51 | +2 cents | $4.98 (5/9/2011) | |||
AAA Hawaii Weekend Gas Watch is a weekly snapshot of gas prices. Price comparisons are offered as a community service. Prices are derived from fleet vehicle credit card transactions at more than 120,000 stations around the country. Prices shown are combined averages updated three times daily.
Carving Up the Price of Car Rentals
By Tom Yamachika – One of the legislative bills that is now being considered by Gov. David Ige is a curious bill, HB 735, involving the car rental industry. The bill doesn’t seek to impose new taxes or fees upon rental cars. Instead, it affects how car rental businesses can show these fees on rental car invoices as separate line items.
Hawaii Revised Statutes section 437D-8.4 states that motor vehicle lessors may visibly pass on certain charges to a lessee. These charges are the general excise tax (GET); county surcharge; rental motor vehicle and tour vehicle surcharge tax; rents or fees paid to the Department of Transportation; and 1/365 (per day rented) of the annual vehicle license and registration fee, and annual weight taxes. This is already quite a bit more than most businesses, which customarily pass on to the consumer only the GET and county surcharge.
The bill would allow the per-day amount of the annual fees to be increased to 1/292, on the theory that most vehicles are only rented 80% of the time (365 times 80% is 292, the expected number of days rented in a year), would include more annual fees such as license renewal fees and safety check costs, and would allow one-time fees such as license plate fees and use taxes to be recovered, apparently on the same basis as annual fees.
Some industry testifiers in support of the bill said that the changes would allow rental car companies to recover all government fees they pay for their cars, rather than the fraction of the fees that they are currently collecting under existing law.
Even under current law, there are quite a bit of costs being passed on. I tried to reserve a car on Maui and was quoted a base daily rate of $32 with $14.14 (44% of the base price) in additional fees and taxes, some of which are not charged by the government:
Concessionaire fee (11.11%) $ 3.64 per day
Customer Facility Charge 4.50
Frequent Travel Program 0.75
Highway Surcharge 3.00
Vehicle License Fee Recoupment 0.52
Total Tax 1.73
Total Fees and Taxes $ 14.14
Actual Per-Day Charge $ 46.14
What happens if there are other government charges besides those listed here? The companies indeed recover those costs, but as part of the car rental price. That’s what most businesses do when they have any expenses, whether charged by the government or anyone else – they consider and include those costs in the price of their product or service. This legislative bill doesn’t change these costs, but allows them to be included on a separate line item so they can blame the big bad government for the charges, rather than the poor innocent car rental company.
The Office of Consumer Protection, which is part of our Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, opposed the bill. OCP observed that the addition of one-time fees to the list of passed-on fees is not consistent with the current law, which only allows the pass-on of recurring costs. It also complained that the bill “unnecessarily complicates” the calculation of the pass on.
As consumers, it’s important to understand that additional taxes and fees apply. If you are quoted a base rate, like $32 in the example above, know that you will be paying somewhat more than the $32 in the end. If you are shopping for a rental car, you should understand what your bottom line is going to be before you hit the “reserve” button.