DOGGIE PEE, DOGGIE DOO

DOGGIE PEE, DOGGIE DOO: It won’t be long now until dog poop is once again on the lips of the citizenry what with the expiration of the experimental “bikes on the dog path” law and the new law before the council promising a long hot summer of dog path hearings a-comin’.

So get out you doggie-doodoo-bag and pin it to your shirt because it’s already being spread pretty thick on the pages of the local newspaper- all before the public hearing on the bill to expand dog-crapping to the entire path and also before the required survey is available.

Just this weekend we’ve already been hit with a flaming bag-o-crap lobbed over the wall in a predictable disinformation campaign from the brownshirts of the so-called stakeholders committee: Dr. Randall C. Blake, Sue Hansen, Thomas Noyes, Dr. Becky Rhoades.

Even Joan Conrow- who is usually more concerned with topics of real importance such as her upcoming Honolulu Weekly piece on the latest from the Naue burials debacle- has been busy with watching where she walks after describing a little walk on the “linear park”

After a meeting of the persons if not the minds between her and Councilperson Tim Bynum, who has introduced the latest dog path bill and was an original proponent of the path, she wrote:

Koko and I found ourselves meeting Tim at Lihi Park — the southerly end of the section where dogs are allowed — yesterday afternoon.

Now, readers of this blog know that I am no fan of the Path, but it was a lovely day and the ocean — turquoise and glassy under an offshore wind — looked absolutely ono. Of course, I couldn’t legally access it for a swim so long as Koko was at my side, so I focused instead on the task at hand: listening to Tim.

For those who don’t generally delve into underworld of the anonymous trolls in the comments section of Joan’s blog, it’s pretty much of a zoo where the bored, lonely sophomoric and adolescent-minded baboons gather to mindlessly throw their own feces at each other and Joan.

And today, after mentioning the lawsuit against KIUC for refusing to do anything but talk about stopping their wholesale slaughter of Shearwaters, she wrote about what one particularly dedicated defacer posted over the weekend:

This topic always makes me think of the thoughtful “f the birds” comment left by the shift-key impaired, short dash-fixated “dwps” — aka “mainland mentality,” “Darwin was pretty smart,” “young white atheist male” and “anonymous” — who recently left the comment:

“only here, and a few weird places on the mainland populated by strange people, would a bike path be seen as some sort of bag thing. its bizarre”

I’m assuming he meant “bad” and not “bag,” so let me spell it out for him. A bike path that is part of a road system, so as to truly facilitate alternative transportation, could be seen as a good thing.

But a bike path that runs over a beach or burials, is constructed of coastline hardening concrete, delivers hordes of people to places previously untrammeled, exposes you to possible $500 fines and puts you on the radar of an over zealous enforcement officer riding a bicycle with a poodle in a basket, well, in my opinion, that’s a bad thing.

Although we generally skip the troll-fest we happened on this one and maybe not so coincidentally it stood out to us too.

So a little Kealia and island history is in order.

In 1976 a Japanese developer wanted to put a resort where the Kumukumu camp- right across the highway from the beach- had recently been shut down.

People fought like hell to stop it and did so successfully but at one point those who opposed it but thought it inevitable had suggested Kealia be officially designated as a county beach park to “protect” it from development.

Being malihini at the time we at first blanch didn’t get it. But on second thought we had been around the island long enough to have seen the pattern and saw what happened whenever a “park” designation was made.

Many local people knew full well what happens on Kaua`i when you make a beach or any other gathering place into a “park”.

Where people once had free reign to camp, fish, even drive right to the camping spot and generally be free of rules and restrictions, all of a sudden we now had permits, rangers, prohibitions- including against bringing dogs- and generally had to go somewhere else to relax on weekends ad holidays.

So we stopped the beach park at Kealia. Some of us tracked it for decades and every time the proposal came back up we nipped it in the bud.

Now comes the bike path- that had it’s origins in Kealia Kai- and we thought we had nixed the beach park idea again with a plan that would have the path just run along the old haul cane road.

But Bernard Carvalho- then head of at first the Parks and Rec Division and later the newly-created Department of Parks and Rec- unbeknownst to anyone including the council until it was a done deal, formed a secret committee (later called the stakeholders committee), filled it with bike path proponents and then “secretly” built illegal un-permitted pavilions along the bike path because they had “extra money” (don’t ya just love that one?).

Finally they had to tear down and re-do some of the pavilions that dotted the path. But instead of leaving well enough alone, when the “dog path” bill came along all of a sudden Bernard and his cronies had somehow “declared” the bike path with pavilions to be a “linear park” where dogs would be automatically banned,

Even though by law official designation of parks is supposed to be done by the council- not to mention that no one had ever heard of a “linear park” on Kaua`i before and in fact the term didn’t appear anywhere in our charter, ordinances or administrative rules- their “done deal” stood, especially when Bernard became Mayor.

So through the back door Kealia has essentially become a “beach park” despite citizen vigilance, all due to Bernard’s lack of foresight and bending and breaking of laws, rules and regs and the lack of anyone on the council willing to challenge anything having to do with the bike path since Mel Rapozo and Shaylene Iseri-Carvalho left

That’s just one of the corners cut and reasons why we have an ugly ribbon of concrete running along the beach instead of the natural unspoiled shoreline we used to enjoy.

As with many Kaua`i institutions, its not “bike paths” in general- or electric power co-ops or a dozen other mom-and-apple-pie ideas- it’s THIS bike path that causes us to have to sidestep another stinking pile.