EVEN REPORTERS GET THE BLUES

EVEN REPORTERS GET THE BLUES: Mesmer never had TV but if he had he would have done well to use the county council's budget hearings to lull his patients into the half-sleep of passive compliance he sought.

So we'll excuse ourself for having such heavy eyelids after attempting to view the un-viewable and relying on- god help us- Leo Azumbuja's account of the council services budget requests session.

Of course he starts off his article with a total fabrication from who knows what recess of his imagination in referring to "County Clerk Peter Nakamura’s mayoral re-appointment and subsequent Kaua`i County Council confirmation in December."

The obviously click-challenged Azumbuja might have at least checked the county charter to find out that the mayor has nothing whatsoever to do with the appointment of the clerk.

But we'll have to rely on his account of a much more important matter- one so important he saved it for paragraph 18 (of 21) in noting that:

(Nakamura) also asked for a new position in Council Services for secretarial support. This new hire would provide support to increase web postings of council documents.

“As part of our goal of increasingthe presence of the council and council documents on the Web, the primary objective that we were given by the council chair was to obtain and upgrade our copier systems to multi-function systems,” said Nakamura, adding that the system would allow the office to begin such process at Nawiliwili and be able to transition directly to the network systems in the renovated Historic County Building.

Nakamura said the office should obtain the second multi-function copier within one month.

“Our hope is that it would be able to decrease the amount of steps that we currently have to do to convert paper documents into readable, searchable documents,” he said.

As we've noted over and over, the posting of the supporting documents for council agenda items that are given out routinely at the council services office has been ourand others' source of choice for uncovering corruption and malfeasance by both the administration and council and therefore the council has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the information age although they've been successful with foot dragging for years now.

As we revealed long ago, council services already has a fancy-schmancy super-duper "copy machine" right now that scans and then actually posts documents on their website- one they've used on things like minutes, agendas and summaries.

But while ignoring that- until now with their questionable claim that they need another one- their main claim has been that somehow they need a new "secretary" whose job we suppose will be to push the second button when they make hard copies of those supporting documents for the members of the council.

Now they need a second machine for the button pusher.

Of course now that they've told the lie about needing a new position for so long they are trapped into including it in the budget.

We can just imagine Nakamura calling up Personnel Director Malcolm Fernandez and asking for the civil service personnel code number for a button pusher. We're pretty sure civil service must have a special class of people with huge index fingers at the ready.