SAME OLD DOGS, SAME OLD TRICKS

SAME OLD DOGS, SAME OLD TRICKS: Though there are few benevolent bright bulbs running for council along with the usual sucking black holes, the same can’t be said about this year’s Mayor’s race.

It’s Slim Pickens out there and we’d probably vote for him if he was running before one of the four headless horsemen. It’s one of those elections where the “none of the above” crazes come out of the woodwork.

Having an NOTA choice on the ballot might make some fools feel better but is an exercise in futility.

NOTA as an electoral choice only make matters worse. It forces another vote, usually for an even worse slate. It makes you wonder where all the NOTA people were when others were filing to run.

Sometimes there is a candidate who fills the NOTA niche- a candidate who, we’re told, has no chance of winning but who everyone agrees with on the issues. Such an apparent non-sequitor is informative of the sorry state of what passes for democracy in our two-party-addled system.

This year on Kaua`i even our NOTA candidate is a malahini high school teacher with no government experience whose only campaign promise is that he will give his salary back to the taxpayers.

For all we know, if elected he may even need to watch one of those 50’s film strips on “How a Bill Becomes a Law” replete with talking cartoon documents, narrated by the condescending Mr. Know-It-All.

At least during the last election, among the usual “electable” dregs we had good-governance aficionado and current council candidate Bruce Pleas to vote for for mayor. It gave people an opportunity vote their conscience and at least use their vote to make an NOTA statement.

But Rolf Bieber could be a Ralph Cramdon or a Ralph Richardson but he’s no Ralph Nader and no one is lining up to support his policies because he doesn’t appear to have any.

As for the “aboves”, Bernard Carvalho would be four more years of even more of the headless chicken dance that passed for an administration under Bryan Baptiste- same department heads, same private interests sitting on all the boards and commissions, same cronies, same time, same station.

All the corruption, secrecy and general inactivity you’re come to know and love will dig itself in a little deeper, approve few more hotels, sell off a few more beach accesses and generally run the place into the ground.

Bernard can best be described as the lack of brains behind Baptiste, putting together secret task forces and done deals and generally exhibiting an expertise only in paper shuffling.

The reason his ads say “together we can” is because he has no idea how to do it himself. He hasn’t got a clue and needs all the help he can get from anyone who’ll give it.

Not that he’ll take it from us. He’s usually already made his decision based on what the various and sundry crooks have told him because he knows he’s not capable of rendering a learned one. Few other than he himself will disagree that he treats you and your required public testimony as a bothersome nuisance.

It’s hard to imagine anyone worse for our future but perhaps only if you hadn’t met that piece of work they call Mel “tail-gunner-Joe” Rapozo.

There actually is a shot in hell of him ripping into some of the sleaze in county government but only if it’s someone Mel has it in for anyway. He can be petty and vindictive and isn’t above abusing his position with the witch hunts and cover-ups that have characterized his tenure on the council.

It usually depends on who’s got what on him at the time.

And that leaves our sister JoAnn Yukimura. She’s a shell of the activist she once was- the one dedicated to public service who spoke and acted her mind and was wildly popular for it..

Now she’s ditched all service but the lip kind and become the consummate politician.

She is single-handedly responsible for continuing vacation rentals in non-tourism areas, the thousand acres of million-plus-dollar homes at Kukui`ula and keeping official legal opinions and council public policy decisions away from public eyes..... all the while claiming to have ended the vacation rental crisis and led “affordable” housing efforts and verbally championing the sunshine law.

But she’s also the one of the smartest people in government– or at least she used to be until she thought she lost the ‘94 election because she didn’t make everybody happy.

Then she took one of those Steve Covey “Seven Irritating Habits of Highly Annoying A-holes” seminars and became the developer’s best friend, creating “win-win” situations by losing what had already been won.

She now compromises and compromises until the final product doesn’t resemble anything but the dreams of the developers and other assorted thieves and rogues. Anyone who waves a park, a road, land for an unneeded new school or some other unfathomable pet project at her is thus entitled to a private beach or some other golden-egg-laying goose in return.

But while she’s no longer smart enough to see what she’s doing to herself or us, she is smart and at one time did great things for this island.

We don’t expect her to change but at least under JoAnn we would have a mayor who knew what the right thing to do was at one time and may actually set a few things in balance.

Which is why- and even we can’t believe we’re saying this- we are urging people vote for JoAnn Yukimura for Mayor on September 20.

It could be worse... a whole lot worse.

SALTY DOG

SALTY DOG: Dividing lines on the Hawaii Superferry (HSf) were reportedly drawn at Tuesday’s mayoral debate with candidates Mel Rapozo and Bernard Carvalho giving unqualified support and JoAnn Yukimura and Rolf Bieber coming down on the skeptical side.

Seemingly though, for most the determining factor is completion of the environmental impact statement (EIS) currently being undertaken.

Kauaians overwhelmingly, whether they favor or despise the HSf want to know all the impacts island wide and how they are going to be dealt with.

But ever since the Eco-Roundtable candidates’ forum there’s been a question as to the validity of the current Belt Collins EIS that was called the “Act 2 EIS” in a question to the candidates, as distinguished from a normal EIS under the Hawai`i and National Environmental Protection Acts, HEPA and NEPA respectively.

Though we’ve asked numerous people during the last month what the exact difference was we were unable to even get an approximate answer... until now.

Intrepid Superferry researcher and foe Brad Parsons- who was MauiBrad until he recently moved to our shores to become KauaiBrad- has a post at his Hawaii Superferry Unofficial Blog, explaining that Act 2 will not contain one of the most important elements of an EIS- the “no action alternative”.

Apparently one of the council members didn’t get it either and asked Brad to clue us in on what others have been referring to.

Brad wrote in reply

From reading Act 2 and Chapter 343 and from a speech I heard Dan Hempey give based on a conversation he had with Isaac Hall, my understanding is that Act 2 does not allow for the 'no action' alternative on the project being studied, further it does not provide for the governing authority to reject and not allow the project. The 'no action' alternative is a part of a real EIS under HEPA Chapter 343 and a federal NEPA EIS.

What this essentially means is that it’s a given that the EIS will not have to provide for mitigation of the environmental, cultural and social impacts because it doesn’t really matter whether they do or not.

In other words the boat is already in service so therefore the impacts somehow don’t matter and can and will be ignored.

But does the Hawai`i state legislature really have the right to say this? Apparently not.

HEPA is the state version of NEPA which details the federal mandates states must follow in preparing EIS’. And one of the most important is the evolved standard “no action alternative” which is in EIS’ for the “accepting” entity to use if they determine that either all the impacts are not identified or more importantly that the impacts are so great that they simply cannot be sufficiently mitigated.

Many think the latter would probably be the case in an “honest” EIS without spending hundreds of millions of dollars on improving our infrastructural capacity and protecting our resources

In the federal courts it has become quite clear that the “no action alternative” (NAA) is an essential element of any EIS.

Just recently here in Hawai`i, in cases involving both the Army’s use of the sacred Makua Valley on O`ahu and the Navy’s use of sonar, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the lack of the NAA is reason enough to go back to the drawing board and has stuck down the EIS’ that didn’t contain them.

But the whole history of the HSf is littered with a total regard of federal law. That’s because it has suffered from a dearth of cases filed in federal court except for one that was thrown out, not on the merits but on technicalities, well before many pertinent facts were known and more than a year before the ferry first attempted to travel.

As PNN detailed in a series of articles last year, from the State Department of Transportation’s original “exemption” for the HSf that was struck down by the Hawai`i Supreme Court to the state’s lack of adherence to the federal Coastal Zone Management act by playing a shell game with the local Special Management Area permitting process, the state has routinely ignored federal laws that trump the state statutes.

But none of the attorney’s involved in getting adherence to State law have chosen to go to the Federal courts to get state compliance since that long ago ruling

Parsons closed his piece by saying

The following is a passage written by a legal expert involved and further explains it, "Act 2 changed the very purpose of HEPA just to accommodate the Superferry Corporation. Until November 1, 2007 (the day Act 2 took effect), HEPA had been based on the fact that EA studies were “critical to humanity’s well being,…and that an environmental review process” was necessary to “alert decision makers to significant environmental effects which may result from the implementation of certain actions.” Act 2’s stated purpose is to “facilitate the establishment of interisland ferry service and, at the same time, protect Hawai‘i’s fragile environment (italics added) by clarifying that neither the preparation of an environmental assessment, nor a finding of no significant impact, nor acceptance of an environmental impact statement shall be a condition precedent to, or otherwise be required prior to … operation of a large capacity ferry vessel company.”"

Rapozo has been duped- as has Carvalho, as have thousands of people on Kaua`i- into thinking that a there is an EIS being prepared that adheres to federal standards.

But as feared, the legislature’s “Act 2”- which threw out the "condition precedent" requirements of Chapter 343 of State law aka HEPA - not only allowed the HSf to operate while an EIS was being done but threw out any question of operation after it was done.

As mayoral candidate JoAnn Yukimura was quoted as saying at the debate

Yukimura said she needs assurance the issues that may be identified in the environmental assessment — such as traffic, drugs, overcrowded parks, invasive species and cultural theft — will be operationally addressed and “not just with words.”

It’s like asking if we want a chocolate bar and then giving us a chocolate-covered turd. When we break it open and look at it closely we complain that “this is nothing but a piece of shit”.

Apparently Rapozo’s, Carvalho’s and the Chamber of Commerce crowd’s answer to us is “yeah but it’s really great shit”