A SERIES OF PAINFUL SHOTS IN THE BELLY

A SERIES OF PAINFUL SHOTS IN THE BELLY: Our last two chief executives – the late Mayor Bryan Baptiste and current Mayor Bernard Carvalho- have had somewhat divergent management styles. While Baptiste’s explosive temper, petty vindictive nature and penchant for secrecy belied his moniker of “Mayor Aloha” Carvalho is more of a well meaning boob and a self-imposed prisoner of an inherited crooked system.

But the resultant entrenched entropic enterprise remained consistently corrupt because both had a weapon in their arsenal to overcome their shortcoming- mouthpiece Beth Tokioka, the brains behind both operations.

So it’s no surprise that she can both deny and confirm “rumors” in the same breath.

The contention in our Monday post that tonight’s meeting on the new landfill in Kalaheo is indeed not just a public “informational meeting” but a “scoping meeting” for the environmental impact statement (EIS) was deftly addressed in today’s newspaper thusly by when reporter Michael Levine asked if it was true:

Tokioka said Wednesday that a rumor floating around that the meeting is “secretly a scoping meeting” and would be the only opportunity for community members to officially testify for the EIS is untrue.

While comments tonight “are valid and should be considered” in the EIS, the formal process has not yet begun and there will be other scoping meetings and other opportunities for community members to voice their concerns, Tokioka said.

There will be another community meeting on Dec. 16, she said. Those two meetings are “above and beyond” what the mayor is required to do by law, she added

Now to the uncritical reader it might appear that Tokioka is denying that this is indeed a scoping meeting. But, like any true weasel, the weasel words she uses belie the denial.

What she “denies” in the first paragraph is only that it is the “only” scoping meeting, announcing for the first time that there will apparently be other scoping meetings- something that the original press release failed to say.

What she isn’t saying is that this is not a scoping meeting.

By way of explanation as we detailed the other day but didn’t state in as many words, no one publicly calls them scoping meetings- the legal term for the information gathering meetings- any more.

That term had become one that alerted the public that it was the time to give input and list items to be mitigated in the EIS so they now call them call them “informational meetings”.

But if you did take the first paragraph as a denial that it was indeed a scoping meeting the second paragraph makes it clear that “there will be other scoping meetings” meaning our contention that this is a “secret” scoping meeting absolutely true in the sense that the fact that it is a scoping meeting was not mentioned in the press release.

The statement that “the formal process has not yet begun” simply depends on what you consider the “formal process” to be. If you don’t include the scoping meetings and consider the beginning to be the compilation of the draft EIS then this is true. But it doesn’t mean that the EIS process doesn’t begin tonight especially since the outfit preparing the EIS will be there tonight- as Tokioka admits “(w)hile comments tonight ‘are valid and should be considered’ in the EIS”.

Based on the press release and the lack of any mention of other “public informational” meetings we wrote on Monday:

What that means is that if you don’t show up to the little “Q&A” you will have missed the all important opportunity to present testimony- legally know as a “scoping meeting”- regarding the issues that should be considered in the EIS that must be prepared for the landfill project to go forward.

Yes- the use of the words “the... opportunity” would indicate it’s the only one.

And that was what gave Tokioka- the now-divorced half of a power couple with State Representative Jimmy Tokioka until the second time he couldn’t keep his pants on- the ability to deny that it was going to be the “only” scoping meeting- something that, with the new information today that there will be other meetings, has changed.

But that’s all that’s changed, The mealy-mouthed way governmental entities try to hide the scoping meetings and corral people into boring presentations and then deny the community the right to have a conversation rather than a lecture is a methodology that Kaua`i county has embraced- Tokioka’s ability to talk out of both sides of her mouth notwithstanding.