Tuesday, May 28, 2013
NO RUNS, NO HITS, JUST ERRORS
NO RUNS, NO HITS, JUST ERRORS:
It used to be that when some big corporation or government agency had
some hair-brained scheme that was universally opposed on Kaua`i the
"pusher" would just push harder.
But many times that's blown up in their
faces and in some cases they've eventually had to back down on a
project leaving them with no project plus millions of dollars in free
publicity... the kind they didn't want.
One recent archetypical example of this
was a project to plant trees to burn for electricity and do it on
Hawaiian Homes land in Anahola- land that the Hawaiian community
there had always thought would eventually be developed for homes for
those Hawaiians who qualify.
The company, which had plans and an
agreement to lease the land really cheaply, took a slew of body blows
at various meetings and now the projects seems to be on its way to
the scrap heap.
But after that ignominious instance the
latest corporate-governmental "partnership" ploys seems to
be, "if they push back hard, get out quickly... and cleanly- a
la the PLDC.
But it's being done in a uniquely
Hawai`i way.
The next instance was the plan by the
semi-autonomous Kaua`i Water Department (KWD) to drill a horizontal
potable water well into the "wettest spot in the world"-
the sacred "Mount Wai`ale`ale."
Community groups- both environmental
and cultural- essentially said "are you nuts?" and geared
up for a long drawn out battle.
But instead the KWD announced that,
despite all the professionally made charts and graphs they drew up
and lugged to the first of many planned community meetings showing
the project to be on Wai`ale`ale, in fact some lower level bureaucrat
had simply "made a mistake" and instead they really had
planned all along to drill into Mount Kahili.
Of course no one explained how it could
have been a simple mistake. Nor did they mention that, although you'd
need to drive half way across the island to get from the base of one
to the base of the other, Mount Kahili is simply the back face of
Mount Wai`ale`ale.
And now they've announced
that they're canceling the meeting about the "new" Mt
Kahili project entirely.
Many think that the whole project is
suspicious, saying it's not being done to provide water to current
customers but to essentially support massive planned future tourism
development... and do it on the backs of the current
water-users/rate-payers.
Other say it's because they need all
that water for all that North Shore Ag land so that the "seed
farmers" can grow more biotech (GMO) corn, soybean, cotton and
other "seed." Right now there isn't enough water in the
Moloa`a-Kilauea area even for the current small, organic "truck
farmers."
But this $50 million drilling project-
whether Kahili or Wai`ale`ale- will supply all the water the north
shore could use for any kind of agriculture in an area where the
irrigation ditch system left over from sugar cane days is now
dilapidated to the point where it would be prohibitively costly to
repair. Plus, if it could be repaired, there's no easy way to pay for
it since it's not the kind of potable county water KWD controls- as
was discussed recently by the county council.
It's not that surprising this
announcement comes on the heels of that council discussion.
Back to our PR lesson- one that was not
lost on the the Coast Guard whose recent announcement that they were
going to extend the ocean "danger zone" for the Kekaha
shooting range (which sits next door to the Pacific Missile Range
Facility [PMRF] Naval Base) was met with a slew of negative comments
from fishers, swimmers, surfers and other beach and ocean users.
But today an article
in the local newspaper says that they have withdrawn the plans
for expansion.
So what happened? The newspaper says:
“I think we could chalk it up to a
mistake,” (Lt. Col. Charles) Anthony said by phone Monday. “A
project manager had increased the size beyond what we had seen in the
earlier drafts. We will be making up a proposal with a much smaller
footprint.”
Just a mistake, that's all. Not a
blunder by the military where an attempt to control more land and
ocean has spurred some opponents to suddenly start talking about it
being time to get rid of the shooting range, if not the Navy's
next-door missile range, entirely.
Is this the wave of the future? Will
Monsanto suddenly announce tomorrow that it had been a mistake to
oppose the labeling of GMO products saying it was a decision made by
some low level technocrat in Sector "R?"
Dream on.
But locally apparently it's "any
port in a storm," the belief being that they can save face with
the "I no like say nahting" locals by saying it was all a
simple mistake.
But a word to the wise- the natives are
becoming restless.
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