February 18, 2006 - Saturday

Quid pro quo?

It may have been just an unfortunate and unavoidable problem of timing, but that's certainly the impression left yesterday when the University of Hawaii Board of Regents announced their intention to reward Interim President David McClain with a permanent appointment less than 24 hours after McClain offered up a recommendation favoring the controversial plan for a Navy-sponsored research center.

In supporting the Navy-affiliated center, McClain overruled the chancellor and bypassed the Faculty Senate of UH-Manoa, the system's only research campus, to adopt a plan which has divided the faculty and will certainly make future governing of the university more difficult. Should he accept the permanent appointment, McClain's tenure will be marked by a nagging impression that he was ultimately offered the job because he bowed to outside political pressures.

It's one of those cases where the appearance of a conflict of interest can and probably will have repercussions, whether or not one exists in fact.

And at the State Capitol yesterday the House was bogged down by the continuing clash over a bill aimed at bailing out the developers of the stalled Hokulia luxury development on the Big Island. Democrats spent nearly 90-minutes wrangling in caucus before emerging for a sometimes emotional floor debate which ended in a divided vote passing the bill on to the finance committee.

The Advertiser has a short story this morning, while the Star-Bulletin again did not cover the issue.

In my view, there were two highlights of the floor debate. The first was the strong and articulate voice of Republican Cynthia Thielen, who accused the bill's backers of "inciting a hysteria in this chamber" with images of thousands of homes in dozens of subdivisions suddenly being open to legal challenge.

Thielen called this scenario "flatly wrong" and "absolutely false".

"This is called setting up a straw man," Thielen said. "Existing homes are not at risk."

The bill, she said, "is a travesty, it's an embarrassment, and it's wrong."

"You know in your hearts that it's wrong," she said, challenging both her Republican colleagues as well as those on the other side of the party divide.

Democrat Helene Hale, who began her elective career on the Hawaii Board of Supervisors (now the County Council) over 50 years ago, was overcome with emotion as she rose to cast "a strong vote of no".

The written version of Hale's comments prepared for insertion in the House Journal is a history lesson and a bitter attack on those she calls "two-week men," slick-talking developers offering "big ideas and big projects with big promises".

But before they would begin, they always wanted something first. Tax breaks, fast-tracked approval, assurances. They always wanted something big from the local taxpayers in return. I wouldn't give any promises and they would tell me that they would be back 'in two weeks.' They never returned and from those days on, I always referred to them as the 'two week men.'

Hale, after reviewing the history of Hokulia and finding occasion to quote James Madison and the Federalist Papers, came to this: "What we are saying by voting for this measure is that we are in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, 'two-week men!'"

And so, it seems, we are.

Attorney Alan Murakami, who represented the plaintiff in the lawsuit that has successfully blocked Hokulia from being built, offered testimony in Thursday's committee hearing that is also worth noting. After a quick review of the legalities, Murakami offered a view of the negative social impact of Hokulia.

Hokulia and luxury residential projects like it inflate property values and encourages the worst form of land speculation. Successful developers essentially buy cheap and sell high. They compete for water, labor, and other valuable resources. They create negative impacts on cultural properties, traditional and customary rights, and invaluable environmental values. As a matter of sound public policy, this legislature should be working to curb such abuses of agricultural land, not encourage them.

Indeed.

February 17, 2006 - Friday

Thanks to the Advertiser for a good story by Kevin Dayton and Derrick DePledge on yesterday's House hearing on the Hokulia bail-out bill, a last minute move which avoided the committees that would normally have heard the measure. There was a lot of buzz about this in the House yesterday, but somehow it appears to have slipped under the Star-Bulletin's radar, at least I don't see a story in the Bulletin this morning.

Click for more

I suppose the variety of coverage is another benefit of remaining a two newspaper town.

More on Hokulia tomorrow.

A Washington Post story this week highlighted upgrades to the main portal to all kinds of government information, www.FirstGov.gov. It manages to pull up all sorts of things. Enter "Hokulia", for example, and you'll get a long listing of news clips, county documents, state reports, etc. Fun for a Friday afternoon.

February 16, 2006 - Thursday

Developers of the Big Island's Hokulia development and their backers hope to use a bit of legislative sleight of hand this morning to power their special interest bill around a key House committee. The bill, HB 1368 House Draft 1, is on the agenda of the House Committee on Economic Development and Business Concerns (EDB) at 9 a.m. It would retroactively legalize single family homes on certain agricultural lands which might otherwise be illegal under current law, which only allows "farm dwellings" on lands designated for their agricultural value.

Hokulia, a luxury subdivision marketed to Fortune 500 executives who already own multiple homes in other places, was halted by a 2003 court order after being found to have violated state law. That case is now pending before the Hawaii Supreme Court.

A duplicate of the bill being heard today, HB 2525, was referred jointly to the House Committee on Land, Water, and Ocean Resources (WLO) and the Agriculture Committee, then to Judiciary and on to Finance. But the bill, which has been unsuccessfully pushed before, did not get a hearing and will die this week as a key House deadline passes.

Hokulia backers, apparently fearful that the Supreme Court will uphold the unfavorable decision, are now trying an end run to beat the clock. They have taken an unrelated bill which had been approved by WLO last year before stalling in the House. Now they've removed all of its original language and replaced it with the exact text of HB 2525, and set this new House draft for hearing by EDB, which is expected to be much more favorable to the measure.

The move, if successful, slips them past the questioning of the two committees with the closest subject matter jurisdiction, and instead lines them up before a friendly audience.

Expect a battle, perhaps not in this business-oriented committee heavy with Big Island representatives, but as this bypass bill moves forward.

I've just added this to my reading list for the day--the new report by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights which assesses the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Growing up reading of the abuses of the Soviet regime, the Stalinist prison camps, the Gulag, it's truly gut-wrenching to realize that our own government is it the inheritor of these practices.

February 15, 2006 - Wednesday

A lawsuit filed earlier this month in the federal bankruptcy court in Northern California on behalf of bankruptcy trustee John Kendall alleges that Plan Compliance Group "did not observe corporate formalities" and freely exchanged funds with another business controlled by PCG owner Francis William "Bill" Reimers.

The suit seeks to consolidate the assets and liabilities of the two companies in the bankruptcy process.

Plan Compliance Group was contracted by the Hawaii Department of Education and the University of Hawaii to serve as third party administrator for voluntary retirement investments made by teachers and faculty until millions of dollars disappeared last fall. The funds remain unaccounted for. Other school districts in at least three states also that contracted with PCG also have reported losses, as have dozens of individual investors. PCG filed for bankruptcy in December.

The suit alleges PCG and Univest Capital Management Ltd., which had offices in the same building in Walnut Creek, shared directors and officers, and were "owned, controlled and operated by Frances William Reimers."

"The financial affairs dealings are extremely tangled and commingled, for instance, many bank accounts of PCG stand in the name of PCG/Univest," and funds were moved back and forth between the companies "on a regular basis", the suit alleges.

And a financial statement filed on January 26 on behalf of Plan Compliance Group shows few tangible assets and a string of outstanding claims against the company, including $79,094.94 owed to the State of California for income taxes dating back as far as 2003. The largest listed debt is $2.3 million owed to the Hawaii Department of Education, although the amounts lost by most of the other school districts involved have not yet been reported.

Here on the cat front, Sunday morning was spent with Kili and Romeo at VCA Animal Hospital in Kaneohe, our regular source of veterinary care. Romeo was in for his annual checkup, and Kili for a preventive check because I just have a "feeling" that there have been subtle shifts in her behavior.

Romeo weighed in at over 16 pounds, which I think makes him the all-time heavyweight cat of our household.

Ms. Kili tested positive for hookworms, probably the result of her hunting prowess, resulting in a large bottle of liquid medication and instructions on dosages for all nine of the cats. Actually, the instructions list out each of the cats and their last recorded weights. For the record, I've attached it here.

February 14, 2006 - Tuesday

Happy Valentines Day! I'm working in an otherwise all-female office, and I'm afraid I'm going to fail the Valentine test. What can I say?

And let's remember that today's celebrations are the result of a classic in spin control. If you can't beat them, well, spin them. Here's a bit of history:

The holiday's roots are in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, a fertility celebration commemorated annually on February 15. Pope Gelasius I recast this pagan festival as a Christian feast day circa 496, declaring February 14 to be St. Valentine's Day.

Then there are the details. Ready to give this a try during your office party?

The ritual involved the sacrifice of goats and a dog in the Lupercal by priests called Luperci, who smeared the foreheads of two noble young men with the blood of the sacrificed animals and then wiped it off.  At this point, the youths were required to laugh.  Then the luperci, clothed in loincloths, ran about the area, lashing everyone they met with strips of skin from the sacrificed goats.  Young wives were particularly eager to receive these blows, because it was believed that the ritual promoted fertility and easy childbirth.  These ceremonies were accompanied by much revelry and drinking.

One day it's loincloths and goat blood, the next day it's a new Christian feast, and now it's chocolates and flowers and lots of otherwise useless things emblazened with red hearts. Take your choice, I suppose.

Glass half full, or...? Who knows? It's another two-newspaper-town morning.

Star-Bulletin: ERS on pace to post 8% return.

The state's largest pension fund, posting a gain for the 10th time in the last 11 quarters, reached the midway point of its fiscal year more than halfway toward its annual 8 percent target rate of return.

Advertiser: Pension fund’s earnings stumble.

The Hawai'i Employees' Retirement System, the state's largest pension fund by assets, earned less than it hoped in the most recent quarter, as several of its money managers stumbled on energy and utility investments.

Regarding beach debris, this comment comes from a reader just up the coast in Punaluu:

Earlier this month an identical debris pile washed up next to my house near Punalu`u Beach. This was a short time after you printed that photo on your site. It's possible that we saw the same chunk of junk. The daily tides continued moving the pile up the coast. It was half a mile north of me by the next day. I got a photo of it too.

If you are ever on the Big Island and want to witness mountains of ocean debris (I think it would blow your mind!), take a trip down to the shoreline areas on the northeast coast above Ka Lae/South Point. The nets and trash literally form mountains on the shorelines, and must periodically be moved by heavy equipment. It is a long and difficult trip down to the 'Junk' beaches.  The trip begins just outside Naalehu, and heads over very rough dirt roads. 4WD with high clearance is necessary. To do the trip with enough time to see everything you should begin the trek down from Naalehu before dawn, unless planning to camp overnight.

The debris items that really got my attention were the massive logs (telephone pole sized, and some of them were the 'super' poles we have been seeing placed lately). Any vessel less than something HUGE running into one of these 'dead-heads' at sea wouldn't stand a chance.

For the most part, glass fishing floats don't stand a chance of making it to shore intact due to the rugged, rocky shorelines. It's really interesting to see what washes up on the shore. There are patches of 'beach' where it's all multicolored plastic 'sand'. There seems to be lots of Japanese trash...  many to the plastic items that were still intact had Japanese writing.

I think you'd find the trip interesting... I hope you'll consider making it some day. I think it would make a great story for your web site.

February 13, 2006 - Monday

Editor & Publisher reports on questions raised over the delay in reporting VP Cheney's involvement in a shooting over the weekend. Apparently it only became known when a reporter learned of the incident from the owner of the ranch where the incident happened.

E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occured and called Vice President Cheney's office for confirmation.

The confirmation was made but it is not known for certain that Cheney's office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner.

Hawaii's youth correctional facility made the New York Times today in a story about the ACLU's lawsuit.

The headline last month was direct and devastating: "UH among lowest in per-dollar efficiency" (Star-Bulletin, 1/18/06).

Last week we were informed that it was also wrong. Well, let's get that straight. The reporting was correct, but the underlying report was wrong. And the Star-Bulletin reported the corrections last week, although the follow-up rarely gets the attenton of the original.

And it makes you wonder how many of these other reports that make Hawaii look so bad have similar problems with their underlying data and assumptions.

Kaaawa has seen its share of the huge ocean debris field described in an excellent Advertiser story today by Jan TenBruggencate. Some days it has been so bad that you wonder how anything at all can survive in the ocean. As the story makes clear, these large nets are not the biggest danger. It's the layers of platic bits, formerly parts of chairs, bottles, racks, filters, and anything else you can think of.

It started raining around midnight and continued through much of the night, although stopped around 4 a.m. I expect that this morning will look a lot like Saturday, shown here. Just click for a larger photo.

February 12, 2006 - Sunday

The thermometer on our wall says it's 58 degrees (F) this morning. That's cold here in Hawaii. Actually, to be precise, the problem isn't really the cold. The problem is that we lack the technology for keeping warm. No heating, no fireplace, single wall construction, louvered windows and no insulation, few warm clothes. Of course, we talked to someone yesterday morning who will be flying home into -7 degree weather in New York today. She emphasized the point: "That's 39 degrees colder than the ice cubes in your freezer." But, despite that dose of reality, our 58 feels very, very cold. I'll have to dig out a heavier sweat shirt for the walk.

Random browsing...Here's a reminder that times do change--a story about a couple, including a woman from Hawaii, now celebrating their 50th anniversary, who had to get married across the state line because interracial marriages were illegal in South Dakota and stayed that way until just a couple of years before Hawaii became a state. And these laws weren't struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967. That's a timeline I had forgotten.

You might find it interesting to check your neighborhood in Zillow.com, which tracks real estate values. Very educational.

And it's Sunday, so how about some weekend cats? This is Ms. Kili, who doesn't know she's off to the vet a little later in the morning, although she's worried that I haven't let her out of the house yet. But click on her photo for more. I'm calling this batch, "Almost valentines".

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