i L i n d . n e t

If you tried to check this site yesterday afternoon, you were probably out of luck. My hosting service, HostRocket.com, was “down” for several hours. Nothing I could do about it except apologize.

The extent of opposition to the Superferry has been surprising, perhaps because earlier news coverage didn’t reflect the wide community forces at work. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Superferry public relations spin dominated much of the earlier coverage.

Jan TenBruggencate’s story in yesterday’s Advertiser and a story today in The Garden Island by Nathan Eagle show a breadth of opposition that is quite extraordinary.
Eagle writes:

“It was so exciting to see the spirit of Kaua‘i,” surfer Andrea Noelani Brower said. “The experience of being in the water was very powerful with the moon rising and the canoes and the surfers and the protesters silhouetted against the background.”

The protesters were mixed ethnicities, political backgrounds and economic levels, new residents and locals who have lived on Kaua‘i for generations, the 22-year-old lifelong Kaua‘i resident said.

He also notes: “Many swimmers and surfers were greeted on shore by Kaua‘i Police Department officers and masked SWAT team members.” Masked? What’s that about?

I spent a while yesterday afternoon looking for more primary information on the issue.

A recording of last week’s oral argument before the Hawaii Supreme Court is available from the Judiciary web site in mp3 format.

The appeal briefs filed by both sides can also be downloaded here.

There are a couple of very good web sites. There are a bunch of photos of the protests at Planet Kauai, (more photos here) while another side presents the social and environmental impacts, and another documents the dangers to whales.

There seems to be a dramatic disconnect on the question of the Superferry’s fuel efficiency. A column in the Garden Island asserted:

No one planning the future of Hawaiian inter-island passenger service would design a ship that burned 5,600 gallons of fuel to travel the 110 miles between O‘ahu and Kaua‘i harbors.

The Superferry gets only 0.02 miles per gallon, so, even with 800 passengers that is still only 16 passenger-miles per gallon.

For a comparison: Hawaiian Airlines flies 115 people on its Boeing 717s. They operate with a fuel efficiency of .44 mile per gallon. That comes to 50 passenger miles per gallon, or three times the people moving efficiency of the Superferry.

But a 2005 article in an industry publication quotes Superferry CEO John Garibaldi:

Commenting on the stringent environmental focus placed on Hawaii Superferry’s proposed service, John Garibaldi, Hawaii Superferry CEO, stated, “Our ferries, because of the short inter-island distances, use just one-tenth of the fuel per passenger compared to flying, and our vessels have zero wastewater discharge to protect our oceans.”

What’s the real answer? Right now, I don’t know.

Which gets me to the Advertiser editorial, which begins:

You would think the Hawai’i Supreme Court had ample time to voice its opinion on the Hawai’i Superferry.

Instead, it issued a vague ruling just days before the Superferry was set to launch, paving the way for a costly backlash. Yesterday, three Maui groups filed a request for a temporary restraining order to halt the service immediately, and Maui attorney Isaac Hall asked for an injunction. These actions, as well as the court’s ruling, come after more than three years of planning, and after the state has already invested $40 million of taxpayers’ money in harbor improvements.

Such last-minute moves reflect a serious lack of planning, and serve as red flags against doing business in our state.

How can they get so confused?

The amazing thing about the unanimous Supreme Court ruling is that it came just hours after the case was argued, something that in the normal course of events would have taken months. The “vague ruling” was a preliminary order with the full opinion to follow later.

And, yes, the recent court actions do “come after more than three years of planning”. They also come after three years of warnings, three years of public opposition, and several years of litigation. And “a serious lack of planning”? Absolutely. But not, as the editorial writer(s) imply, on the part of opponents.

In presenting the case to the Supreme Court, Hall laid out a very different perspective. He noted that Superferry officials have acknowledged all along that their project will impact traffic, pose dangers to whales, and lead to other potential problems. But the Superferry demanded to deal with these issues outside of the established legal framework for resolving such things through an environmental assessment or EIS. Instead, they gave an ultimatum. If the state requires an environmental review, the whole Superferry project would be abandoned. In the face of that threat, Hall argued, the state and the ferry backers proceeded to simply ignore the law.

Governor Lingle was caught on camera yesterday saying that she believes her administration did the right thing.

As reported by KITV: “I have no regrets. I think our guys handled this just right. It was clear the Superferry should not be singled out for an environmental assessment,” Lingle said.

That’s a stunner. With an uprising on Kauai and a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that her administration actually did it wrong, it’s like Ms. Lingle has been living on a different planet. Actually, she apears to be an inhabitant of Bizarro World of Superman fame, where everything was backwards. A Bizarro interpreter would translate “our guys handled this just right” as “we really screwed up”, which appears to be the correct statement.

A reader chimed in with this comment:

To put it lightly, I bet Rod Haraga is no longer upset that Lingle iced him out as head of DOT: He can sit back and laugh at the mess. And Barry Fukunaga, who let the Superferry proceed without an environmental impact statement, without Haraga’s approval, is about to learn the cost of being boss. There may be some justice here……..

And so it goes.