WAAAIT FOR IT.....

WAAAIT FOR IT.....: The Hawai`i Government Employee’s Association (HGEA) endorsements are out (thanks to Ian Lind for posting them) and they say more about Kaua`i in who and what doesn’t appear in them than what does.

Glaringly absent is any endorsement in the 15th House district where incumbent “Democrat” Jimmy Tokioka is facing off against Republican Larry Fillhart, the quotes around Democrat possibly explaining the endorsement.

Tokioka was a Republican before switching when he ran for Ezra Kanoho’s old seat and voted like one during his days on the Kaua`i County Council.

While Dee Morikawa in the 16th and Mina Morita in the 14th got the nods apparently Tokioka didn’t even get the “just because you’re a Democrat now” pick.

In the council race only four of the five incumbents running were deemed acceptable with buffoonish business shill Dickie Chang failing to make the grade for obvious reasons.

Less obvious was why former Mayor and Councilperson JoAnn Yukimura didn’t make the list while everybody’s darling- including the usual big-bucks special-interests- newcomer Nadine Nakamura along with former Councilperson Mel Rapozo getting a checkmark.

Is it a long standing grudge from her mayoral days when she tried to shake the county workers out of their slumbers or her more recent attempts to make everybody happy and so pleasing no one?

But the one thing missing from the Kaua`i endorsements- something that’s listed for all the other islands- is their recommendations for county charter amendments.

The reasons apparently is, incredibly enough, in an election that is five weeks from tomorrow the county has not finalize and announced the changes proposed by the Charter Review Commission.

A check of the CRC’s web page finds nothing, as does a check of the county’s elections page. To find the proposed amendments that will have apparently gotten final approval at today’s CRC meeting, one has to look at the agenda for the meeting since the last meeting minutes posted are those of July 26th.

It’s usually confusing enough to figure out what the charter amendments say and mean, as evidenced by last election’s trick question that removed the county’s “stricter than the state’s” sunshine guidelines under the guise of “conforming to the state sunshine law” (wmphasis added).

If this year’s questions don’t appear soon in the “newspaper of record” soon we’ll be doing their job for them again later this week- notwithstanding the way they hilariously and inappropriately editorialized this weekend about how they:

continue to utilize our resources to the best of our ability in our ongoing effort to hold our elected officials and other powerful players accountable (and) recognize the wide-ranging role the local newspaper plays in the community and we consider this responsibility of utmost importance.

Between the county and the local newspaper it’s apparently a race to the bottom to see who can best keep us un and ill-informed.