DIGGIN’ IN THE CESSPOOL: A few light bulbs went on when the inner machinations of the nepotism and cronyism in Kaua`i county government were revealed as never before at last week’s council meeting after a little known recent ploy by the council came to fruition.
Trying to find out exactly how and why the county hires people has been a mystifying process for as long as the Kaua`i has had a government, especially in the mammoth Department of Public Works and more so in its Solid Waste Division.... that and why they always seem to be incompetent
Threatened council audits and investigations have been aborted attempts at accountability for 10 years although most suspected what exposition of the scheme would reveal..
But during this year’s budget discussions the council finally included in the ordinance a requirement that, when the administration changes a council-funded position to another job, they must at least notify the council.
And the first such transfer was contained in a brief communication (2008-256) requesting a “reallocation” of the position of a “Solid Waste Program Assistant (SWPA)” to a position for a “Senior Account Clerk”.
Solid Waste’s Personnel Director Crystal Fujikawa, flanked by Personnel Director Mel Fernandez, sat before the council and was asked to explain why they were asking for a change a mere three months after they requested the SWPA in the budget that the council approved..
Fujikawa explained that since the SWPA had left the job- although she amazingly couldn’t remember when- this change was a “downward reallocation” to an “entry level” position, raising some eyebrows and objections, especially from the Council Vice Chair, mayoral candidate Mel Rapozo and his ally Shaylene Iseri Carvalho.
“We just budgeted that position” said Iseri. And knowing how badly the Solid Waste Division have been in need of expertise she wondered aloud why personnel didn’t recruit for and fill the position instead of hiring just a clerk.
What Fujikawa said next reveled the true nature of cronyism in Kaua`i government and showed exactly how powerful the mayor is in terms of patronage even though legally he or she only gets to hire department heads.
According to Fujikawa when a county position opens up the first thing they do is to try to see if there is a current county employee with the required expertise who wants to fill it. Nothing wrong with that, as all councilmembers agreed.
But then, if there is no county employee with the specific qualifications who wants the job, instead of trying to recruit someone qualified to fill the position from those on the island or, if not, elsewhere- one who might be able to, as Rapozo said, “hit the ground running”- the county simply eliminates the skilled position and downgrades it to fit the qualifications of the employee they want to promote or hire.
And, if necessary they’ll even make it an entry level job to accommodate someone’s auntie or uncle... or campaign supporter.
And while this type of decision is at the discretion of the department head it’s the mayor who gives- or can instantly take away- the department heads their job.
According to Fujikawa it usually takes at least a year or two to “train” the new person, assuming they have the ability to learn the new job in the first pace.
In the case of the SWPA the job requires at least a year of solid waste experience. Give how important such a position is- especially with the solid waste crisis in the county being such that it caused the approval of another reluctant expansion of the Kekaha landfill at the same meeting- the council funded it in a budget line item.
And if not for the new notification law, as in past years the council and the public would never have known about the plans to hire a clerk instead.
Rapozo was livid. “So we don’t even try to find out if there’s someone on the island that’s qualified to take the job?” he asked. “That makes no sense.”
“They do this so they can pick someone they want that doesn’t have the requirements.” he concluded.
Iseri was equally aghast at the revelation as she wondered aloud if the system is such that, someone applies, they are told they’re not qualified and then they lower the standard for the position so someone else can get the job even though they’re not qualified and can't actually do the job.
“It’s a very unfair process for the pubic that does want county jobs” said Iseri.
Council Chair Jay Furfaro was equally if not more outraged because it happened to someone in his family who applied for a skilled planning position was and told she was unqualified. Now, with the same qualifications, she works in that same area of expertise on Maui.
But this is certainly nothing new for anyone who has been paying attention over the years.
Glenn Mickens came up to the hot seat Wednesday to tell the story of Troy Tanigawa, current head of our Solid Waste Division. Back in the adolescent years of our solid waste crisis in the mid 90’s he was the young relative of a big supporter of then Mayor Maryanne Kusaka.
When Kusaka took over from former mayor, now councilperson and mayoral candidate JoAnn Yukimura, one of her first moves was to fire Yukimura’s solid waste people who had put together a solid waste management plan and were just ready to implement it after having to take two years off from implementation due to Hurricane `Iniki.
Kusaka had convinced the council to move from “line item” budgeting to a “program based” budget allowing her to shift around finds within departments willy-nilly. And one shift was to put the young, unskilled, untrained Tanigawa in charge of the Solid Waste Division where he remains today.
Famed Kaua`i activist Ray Chuan used to refer to Tanigawa as one of Kusaka’s “chosen people- the untouchables” as he railed against Troy’s appointment and bumbling incompetence at council meetings for years.
Finally Kusaka agreed, not that she would fill the position with someone competent but, that she would “send Troy back to school” and teach him how to do the job... while he remained in the position..
And of course she never did this but Tanigawa has remained in the position for the last 14 years throughout the Baptiste administration too. And so of course we are now not just ankle or waist deep in rubbish but up to our eyeballs, all under Tanigawa.
We can only hope for someone who will clean out the barn when the new mayor takes over in November. Many assume that will be the case under Rapozo or Yukimura. But if you like things the way they are Bernard Carvalho can be counted on to keep the same people under the same patronage system to stay in office for 10 years and hiring in his own cronies as is the tradition.
Of course if the proposal for a “county manager” system gets some wings over the next two years as letter-to-the-editor writer Larry Arruda says in today’s local paper, that may not be the case.
We’ll leave you with his words.
Even as much as 15 to 20 years ago, many times while visiting here at home on Kaua`i, I would mention to my parents or to friends that I would like to come home and work for the county. Their response to me was always the same, “You gotta know somebody to get in.”
However, I’m sure that all of the council realize that anything and everything that was said will not change anything.
After watching Kaua`i Council meetings for almost six years, it is very obvious to me that the County Council very seldom has any power and any say so over the administration and/or staff. There is no continuity, and because of that, there is no accountability.
After working for a very organized city in California for 30 years, I can guarantee that this would not happen if the County of Kauai’s was governed under a county manager type of government.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Saturday, September 13, 2008
KPD Blue- Chapter 5 : Maryanne Kusaka
KPD Blue is available now at amazon.com
KPD Blue
By Anthony Sommer
Chapter 5 : Maryanne Kusaka
Mayor Maryanne Kusaka never lacked for style.
Kusaka’s clothes always were carefully tailored, formal and decidedly pastel. Her hair never revealed a single stray strand. She invariably wore a brightly colored scarf on her neck to disguise the loose skin waddle of age on her throat.
Her manners, in public at least, were very courtly. She had a warm smile. She only rarely displayed anger in public. Her rants tended toward scolding rather than verbal assaults.
It was in substance and ethical stature that Kusaka was lacking. The first thing she did after raising her hand and taking the oath of office as mayor was to start selling jewelry out of the mayor’s office.
A retired public school teacher who never held an elected office before becoming mayor, Kusaka learned how to run Kauai County during her years as administrative assistant to Mayor Anthony “Uncle Tony” Kunimura.On Kauai, the administrative assistant is not, as the title would imply on the mainland, a secretary. Kusaka was the unelected deputy mayor and first in line as heir to the throne if Mayor Kunimura was incapacitated.
Kunimura, who ruled Kauai in the early and mid 1980s, easily was the most flamboyant mayor in the island’s history. He didn’t bother very much with obeying the law because, well, who would challenge him?
When Kusaka became mayor in 1994, she commissioned (but didn’t pay for; the taxpayers did that) a bust of Kunimura, who had died by then, and his bronze image holds the place of honor in the center of the courtyard of the county office complex.
“Uncle Tony” ran Kauai in the old style: Reward your friends and punish your enemies.
“Auntie Maryanne,” his protégé, was an apt pupil. She took care of her supporters and loosed the hounds, the county bureaucrats (including the cops), on her detractors. Kusaka was a lifelong Democrat until she ran for mayor. In the 1994 Democratic primary, Jimmy Tehada, a veteran County Council member, defeated the incumbent mayor, JoAnn Yukimura.
It wasn’t that the voters loved Tehada. They were angry at Yukimura.
Kauai’s recovery from 1992’s Hurricane Iniki was slow, largely because of the incompetence of the entrenched county bureaucracy, which Yukimura had inherited.
Yukimura brought in many talented department heads but they could not break through the inertia caused by strong unions and civil service protection. And many of her cabinet members were haoles, mainlanders, and no matter how competent, they were resented by locals, particularly locals who worked for the county.
So, Yukimura took the heat at election time. She took the loss very personally and left Kauai for several years. Later she returned and won election to the County Council.
That meant Tehada, who had knocked her off, was not a particularly popular candidate in the general election. He had been a convenient alternative to Yukimura in the primary. But Tehada was very vulnerable to a well-financed challenger in the general election..
Backed by Kauai businessmen and running as the heir to Tony Kunimura, Kusaka re-registered as a Republican and won the general election.
To run the county and take charge of the recovery from Hurricane Iniki, Kusaka brought in retired Navy Capt. Bob Mullins, the former commander of the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai as her administrative assistant.
The US Navy in general and Bob Mullins in particular had become folk heroes in the aftermath of Iniki. The missile range provided help first and asked for permission later.
After the recovery, Mullins brought stacks of documents to the mayor’s office to be signed. He wanted cover to show they had “requested” the aid he and the Navy provided.
Kusaka covered Mullins and, when he retired and she was elected, she gave him a job.
Mullins had his own political base—the almost exclusively white and exclusively Republican Navy League, a booster club for the Navy—and that helped Kusaka gain entry into her new political party.
Later, she replaced Mullins (who found himself cozy employment with a defense contractor, as do many military officers involved in the testing and evaluation trade).
Kusaka brought in a local CPA, Wally Rezentes, who shortly afterward filed for bankruptcy because of the failure of his own business.
Rezentes’s son, Wally Jr., was hired as the county’s director of finance. Nepotism, the hiring of relatives, is totally accepted practice in Kauai County government.
Led by both Wally Sr. and Wally Jr., Kusaka’s top aides worked to recover the island from the remaining ravages of Hurricane Iniki and, most importantly, to fend off the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Kauai County was somewhat extravagant in billing FEMA for repairing hurricane damage, including upgrading some county facilities from pre-hurricane condition. Wood buildings were replaced with concrete structures. FEMA was not amused.
Meanwhile, Mayor Kusaka went on the road to boost tourism.
Kusaka loved to travel, and she freely spent huge sums of county money to take dancers and singers to travel-agent trade shows all over the world. A genuinely accomplished and talented singer and hula dancer herself, Kusaka performed whenever and wherever she could find a stage.
After 1992’s Hurricane Iniki, the mayor’s travels to promote Kauai arguably helped the recovery of the tourism industry. Already popular with locals, Kusaka’s efforts to attract visitors cemented her image as the poster child of the tourism industry.
In typical Kauai style, locals (including the local newspaper) never questioned how much of their money she was spending on her junkets.
Why weren’t the resort hotels and airlines and tour companies she was promoting picking up her tab? No one on Kauai, especially the press, was even mildly curious.
In 1998, Kusaka declared the tourism industry fully recovered. Also, in 1998, the county spent $5,603 to send Kusaka (the figure doesn’t include her entourage) on marketing trips.
If the tourist industry was fixed, it would be logical to assume the mayor’s sales trips could be reduced in the coming years.
Yet in 1999, Kusaka’s travel budget almost tripled to $13,082. She ranked second (behind Honolulu’s Mayor Jeremy Harris) among Hawaii mayors for travel spending that year. The mayors of Maui County and Hawaii County weren’t even close.
By far her most extravagant trip in 1999 was to the American Society of Travel Agents trade show in Paris. She was Hawaii’s sole representative.
Kauai County has a strict policy that employees traveling at taxpayer expense must fly tourist class. But Kusaka flew first class all the way (her economic planning director Gini Kapali sat back in tourist).
Kusaka, in fact, liked everything first class.
Despite the fact that—after Mullins’ departure—Kusaka’s cabinet lacked any white faces, the mayor had an affinity for wealthy haole investors who were willing to court (and, if widely-believed rumor is correct, gladly pay for) her favor.
Kealia Kai is a subdivision of multi-million-dollar homesbuilt on huge lots along a bluff overlooking the ocean on the windward side of Kauai. It also is a gated community, which is very rare on Kauai. The gates are considered a slap in the face of local people.
The land previously had been part of a sugar plantation. The lots were listed on the tax rolls as agricultural property, meaning the property taxes on the land would be virtually zero for the new gentleman farms.
Justin and Michele Hughes, a California couple who had developed similar projects in Colorado, represented themselves as the developers of Kealia Kai on Kauai’s east shore just north of Kapaa.
It later turned out another part-time Kauai resident and full-time developer, Thomas McCloskey, was the real developer of the property; a fact the Hughes couple purposely avoided mentioning in public filings.
When a reporter stumbled over McCloskey’s name on a document at a state office and called Michele Hughes asking what that was all about, she blurted out: “His name wasn’t supposed to be on anything!”
Michele Hughes and Maryanne Kusaka became best friends.
While a pile of applications involving Kealia Kai still were pending action before the Kauai Planning Commission, Kusaka called a press conference to introduce Michele Hughes and sing the praises of Kealia Kai.
When a reporter pointed out that it might be unethical for a mayor to be shilling for a development awaiting actionby a county regulatory board, Kusaka responded by giving the reporter a dirty look, called “the stink eye” in Hawaii
Pidgin.
Kusaka had her own weekly television show on cable television (paid for by the taxpayers) and her sole guest thefollowing week was Michele Hughes.
They were so tight that during one Planning Commission meeting, Wally Rezentes Sr., Kusaka’s top aide, actually wascarrying Michele Hughes’s purse.
The Kauai County Council, Kauai County Planning Commission and the Kauai County Police Commission meetings are televised and the mayor and the mayor’s staff watch them live on closed-circuit television.
Even if the mayor is not in the meeting room, the threat of retaliation is only as far away as the nearest television camera, and the Council members and commission members know it.
Kusaka also provided a fine example of how a Kauai mayor can enlist her police department to benefit her friends.
The beach below Kealia Kai is called Donkey Beach and it had for decades been a gay nude beach. Although nude sunbathing was illegal, that prohibition previously had a very low ranking in the law enforcement scheme of things on Kauai.
Suddenly, Kusaka had the KPD running off the gay nudists on a regular basis to please the developers of Kealia Kai. Mr. and Mrs. Hughes (and, as it later was revealed, Tom McCloskey) didn’t think the sight of naked men was helping their chances of selling a “million-dollar view.”
Similarly, there was a straight nude beach—called Secret Beach, although there are directions to it in every tourist guidebook—right below and in full view of the Hughes’s hillside home in Kilauea.
Suddenly, under orders from the mayor, the KPD was rounding up nude sunbathers there as well.
It was the issue of beach patrols that caused the first major rift between Kusaka and KPD Chief George Freitas. The Hugheses offered to donate all-terrain vehicles to the KPD, but only if Freitas provided KPD officers to drivethem and only if the ATVs were used exclusively to patrol Donkey Beach below Kealia Kai to arrest gay nudists.
Freitas said he would gladly take the donated ATVs, but only if he decided when and where on the island they would be used. He was not willing to provide tax-funded privatesecurity patrols for the Hugheses.
Kusaka was embarrassed and she was angry. It is highly likely that it was at this point she began to plot and scheme to get herself a police chief who would do what she told him to do.
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Mayor Maryanne Kusaka headed a full-on witch hunt to get KPD Chief Freitas, trying to convince the Kauai Police Commission to fire Freitas for hindering the prosecution of a KPD officer accused of sexually molesting his step-daughter. In the end, the officer was acquitted, Freitas was found guilty of giving his girlfriend a ride in his police car and yelling at one of his assistant chiefs. He kept his job.
Only after all the state and county permits were issued did McCloskey jump out of the woodpile and announce himself as the actual developer of Kealia Kai. Justin and Michele Hughes were just fronting for him and Michele certainly had done her job winning the mayor’s friendship.
The mayor, quite naturally, immediately began snuggling up to McCloskey as well.
For a long time, rumors abounded that Kusaka had been paid off with a lot at Kealia Kai. There never was anything in the state or county records to indicate that there was any truth to the oft-repeated allegation. But the rumored payoff was and still is widely believed.
Kusaka also was close friend of Jimmy Pflueger, a retired and very wealthy Honolulu Honda dealer turned land developer on Kauai’s north shore. His family had owned land there for more than a century.
Pflueger, often driving the heavy construction equipment himself, was clearing the land and building roads for yet another subdivision for the rich and famous on a bluff overlooking the ocean. In the background are rugged mountains often seen in movies shot on Pflueger’s property.
Pflueger had an “arrangement” with Kusaka that was quite unique. The mayor’s office served as a sort of alarm system for Pflueger.
If anyone called any Kauai County department to complain about Pflueger’s activities and question whether he had permits and was following the law, they got an instant response.
The return call came not from the Planning Department, not from the county engineer, not from the mayor, but from Pflueger himself. Usually within an hour of the original complaint, Pflueger was on the phone with the irate citizen.
Pflueger had made a deal with Kusaka that if any citizen called to complain about any of his pet projects, the complaint would be passed on directly to him by her top aide, Wally Rezentes. Pflueger reckoned, usually correctly, that he could calm them down with his used-car-salesman charm.
The county officials never would investigate the complaints against Pflueger. Kusaka had granted him an informal immunity from county regulation.
That was just fine until Pflueger’s excavation to build a road from the lots where he planned to build luxury homes to Pilaa Beach collapsed in a mudslide during a heavy rain storm. The mud buried a coral reef.
Pflueger ended up paying the largest penalty ever imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency against an individual: $7.5 million.
He also paid the largest state pollution fine in Hawaii’s history: $4 million.
The Pilaa mudslide was only the beginning. More recently, on May 14, 2006, a dam on Pflueger’s property burst in another rain storm, creating an 18-foot wall of water that hurtled downstream, wiping out 100 feet of the only highway serving the area, knocking two buildings completely off their foundations and killing seven people downstream.
Authorities still are investigating to determine whether Pflueger had covered over the dam’s spillway with dirt, when the spillway was intended as a safety valve to keep the dam from overfilling.
Kauai County, which at Kusaka’s urging gave Pflueger free rein and never inspected his many projects, played a role in both of those disasters by failing to enforce the law. Kusaka’s firm belief that the rules do not apply to her finally went a bit too far in 2001.
Annoyed that the County Council refused to grant her a pay raise, Kusaka used her authority to transfer funds within her own office to give herself a new car.
Kusaka for years had been driving her personal Cadillac on county business and received a $4,000 annual travel allowance.
In 2001, without telling the County Council, she quadrupled her own travel allowance and paid $16,000 in county funds to lease a bright red Chrysler luxury car for the balance of her term. The car was strictly for Kusaka’s use and the lease specified it would be returned at the end of her term and not made available to the next mayor.
The car was leased, without any bidding, from the automobile dealer who had been her campaign chairman in the previous election. “Sole source” purchases are not uncommon in Kauai County, often in violation of state procurement laws and regulations requiring bids on government purchases.
The Kauai County Council, hardly a tower of ethics and virtue itself, learned of the mayor’s new car at a budget briefing.
The Council members had a few years before given the county departments authority to transfer funds with their own agencies without Council approval. In return, each agency, including the mayor’s office, was supposed to provide an annual self-evaluation and set goals for the coming year.
Under Kusaka, the money freely was shuffled within the county offices but the goals never were set and the evaluations never completed.
Council members were so angry that Kusaka misused the new budget powers they granted her that they stripped the mayor of all the discretionary spending power.Ultimately, she turned in the Chrysler and went back to driving her Caddy.
Despite her socializing with wealthy haole developers, Kusaka remained popular with locals. This was partly because she provided them with jobs, but also because she “talked stink” about white people when she believed no one would hear her.
“I used to go to cabinet meetings and I was dumbfounded by the racist statements the mayor would repeatedly make at almost every meeting,” said former Police Chief George Freitas.
The police chief is not appointed by the mayor but by the Police Commission. The police chief was considered a de facto cabinet member and expected to attend department head meetings, largely to be handy when Kusaka wanted to chew him out at cabinet meetings.
Even one of Kusaka’s closest aides, who is white, said the same of her boss.
“When she would go into one of her rants about haoles, I had to wonder what color she thought I was,” said Beth Tokioka, who served as Kusaka’s press secretary and later become Mayor Bryan Baptiste’s economic planning director.
Tokioka is Caucasian and grew up in Flint, Michigan. She was married to a Japanese-American politician Jimmy Tokioka, now a member of the state legislature, whom Kusaka treats as a son. Though now divorced, her ticket into local society and in county politics now is permanently punched.
Tokioka proved doggedly loyal to both Kusaka and later to Mayor Bryan Baptiste. And it showed. Honesty in her relations with the press was not among her virtues.
“I like Beth but she has some serious ethical blind spots,” said Dennis Wilken, a former reporter for The Garden Island, Kauai’s local newspaper.
Bill Dahle, the senior reporter on the island, now retired, once told Tokioka to her face that no reporter on Kauai ever believed a word she said because she was so devoted to Kusaka.
Kusaka often called Beth Tokioka “my soul mate.” Other haoles in the Kusaka Administration, however, were decidedly unwelcome.
A case in point was in 2002 when Kusaka forced Kauai Film Commissioner Judy Drosd to quit after 10 years on the job, during which she played a major role in the filming of all three Jurassic Park movies on the island.
Drosd, a haole, had been hired by the previous mayor, JoAnn Yukimura, a liberal Stanford attorney who brought in quite a few talented administrators from the mainland. Most of the outsiders left when Yukimura was defeated for reelection, but not Drosd.
Drosd was a 20-year veteran of the television and motion picture business and previously had been the vice president in charge of production for HBO.
In terms of Big League talent and savvy and charm, Drosd was by far the class act in Kauai County government.
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Judy Drosd, a former top executive with HBO and Kauai’s film commissioner for a decade was forced out by Mayor Maryanne Kusaka and replaced by a commissioner with no background in the film industry.
With millions of dollars for the island’s economy at risk, balancing the needs of demanding film producers, greedy landowners who want huge sums to provide film locations, and egotistic movie stars seeking special treatment is no easy act.
When Drosd left Kauai in 2002, she was immediately hired by newly-elected Gov. Linda Lingle to head the state Arts, Film and Entertainment Division. She kept her home on Kauai and commuted to Honolulu every day.
Drosd’s departure resulted directly from the Kusaka’s very shabby treatment of her. Her departure was a tragedy for the island and film-making on Kauai never really has recovered.
Parroting the mayor, Press Secretary Tokioka took it upon herself to play down the loss of Drosd.
Tokioka said in an interview: The film commissioner was “nothing more than a glorified tour guide.”
She added Drosd “hung around for 10 years only so she would be vested in the county’s retirement system.” From all indications, Drosd, who owned a great deal of property on Kauai, was not in need of a government pension.
Kusaka replaced Drosd with Tiffani Lizama, the marketing director for the Kauai Food Bank who had no experience in the film industry.
Worse, Lizama chose as her show business guru the builder of a recording studio in Kapaa that turned out to be nothing more than a means for scamming investors. He fled the island leaving a large number of angry investors in his wake.
The important point to Kusaka was that Lizama, though a haole, was married to a local Kauai Fire Department captain who was one of the mayor’s pets. Again, marriage to a local is a haole’s ticket into the club.
Kusaka’s dislike of whites and especially whites who opposed her in public was put on full public display in 2002.
There is a gaggle of activists who show up at every Kauai County Council meeting to complain, usually quite correctly, how inept and unethical most county agencies are. They call themselves the “nit-pickers,” a tag intended to be derogatory that was pinned on them by the editor of the local paper. They wear it as a badge of honor.
All are haoles. Locals would never speak out against the government.
County Council meetings were given live gavel-to-gavel coverage (except, of course, for the many executive sessions) on Hoike, the public access cable television network.
In addition to the Council meetings, Kauai County paid Hoike $40,000 a year to provide a video crew and transmit the mayor’s weekly television show, which was nothing but a propaganda opportunity and was scripted by Beth Tokioka.
(Kusaka also did a weekly radio “interview” with a Kauai “newsman” on a local radio station. Both the questions and Kusaka’s answers were written by Beth Tokioka.)
The line between Kusaka and the activist community was drawn during her first term.
A decades-old dispute between north shore residents reached the boiling point in 1997 and 1998.
Tour boat companies were hauling thousands of visitors every day on sight-seeing trips along the spectacular Na Pali Coast.
The tour boats ran out of Hanalei on Kauai’s north shore, technically a harbor but not nearly large enough to accommodate the huge number of tour boats and tourist vehicles running in and out of what is, arguably, the most beautiful bay in the world.
Kusaka lined up with the boat operators, part of her beloved tourism industry.
That put her on the opposite side from the environmental activists, an unlikely coalition of white North Shore environmentalists and pro-sovereignty Native Hawaiians who claimed the boats were destroying the bay, the river and the town. They wanted the tour boats out of Hanalei Bay.
The issue was so contentious that one joint state and county public hearing droned on for 18 hours of passionate speech-making from representatives of both sides, televised on Hoike, of course..
It finally was decided in 1998 by Gov. Ben Cayetano, whose speech-writer was—not coincidentally—a haole environmentalist from Kauai.
Cayetano was, at the time, in a desperate fight for a second term against former Maui Mayor Linda Lingle. Cayetano was a Democrat and needed the liberal north shore Kauai vote. Lingle and Kusaka were Republicans.
Cayetano simply pulled the plug on the tour boats and Kusaka.
He ordered them out of Hanalei and forced them to move to Port Allen on Kauai’s west side, a long haul from the Na Pali. Cayetano won (Lingle would come back four years later and take the governor’s office). The activists cheered. Kusaka seethed.
The payback came in 2002 when Kusaka pulled a plug of her own on the activists, knocking them off of island-wide television.
It’s also likely Kusaka had not forgotten the County Council had taken away her new car the year before. The Council members, every bit as much as the activists, basked in the free notoriety they received from the weekly meeting television broadcasts.
Taking away the free publicity medium favored by both the Council and the activists may well have crossed the vindictive mayor’s mind.
The activists had long ago figured out that the televised Council meetings gave them a perfect platform from which to hammer county government. It was watched by a huge audience, and, best of all, it was free.
All they had to do was stand up and speak.
Kusaka was fed up with the haole activists and their constant carping about her administration. It was time for getting even. “Punish your enemies” is a part of Rule #1 for Kauai politicians.
So, Kusaka shut down the live Hoike telecasts of the Council meetings (but not, of course, her own weekly show). One fine day in the spring of 2002, Kusaka decreed that airing the Council meetings without closed captioning for the hearing-impaired was a violation of federal law.
Kusaka said that her ever-vigilant County Attorney’s Office had decided showing the meetings without closed captioning for the hearing impaired was not allowed by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
As a result, Council meetings (including the activist antics that infuriated Kusaka) weren’t shown until they could be transcribed and captioning provided. That took about a week, which meant they aired after the next weekly Council meeting. They were always at least a week behind.
As a source of information for the public and a stage for the activists, the televised meetings had become useless. No one was watching.
The odd thing was that there was no record of any complaints from anyone of an ADA violation.
Not from the deaf community on Kauai. Not from the agencies enforcing the ADA: The State Disability and Communications Access Board, the U.S. Justice Department, or even the county’s own ADA coordinator.
None.
And Kusaka was not particularly a champion of the disabled.
According to some of those who were present, at one cabinet meeting Kusaka went into a tirade about the ADA and how much it was costing Kauai County to provide facilities for the disabled.
Her tantrum was so vicious that her loyal press secretary, Beth Tokioka, left the meeting in tears. Tokioka has a son who is deaf.
Another very strange thing was the Mayor’s Office (actually Tokioka) administered the county’s contract with Hoike to air the County Council meetings. In all the other counties, it was the county clerk, who works for the County Council rather than the mayor, who handled the television contracts.
Initially, Hoike, a private non-profit agency, refused to shut down the live broadcasts. It announced it would still show them live and then show the meetings with subtitles if and when they became available.
Tokioka told Hoike that the county (meaning the mayor’s office) owns and controls the use of all the tapes of County Council meetings.
Tokioka, as she often did, was blowing smoke. The contract did not say the county owns the tapes.
Tokioka continued to lie when she said the mayor’s actions shutting down the broadcast were the result of a demand from the State Disability and Communications Access Board.
What really happened was Kauai County asked the state agency whether closed-captioning was required on broadcasts of all government meetings. Kauai County was the one that brought up the topic.
The state responded, in writing, that there was no such requirement for closed captioning broadcasts of government meetings.
Generally, the state Disabilities Board told Kauai County officials, it supported Kusaka’s move to require subtitles. But no law requires closed captioning, their letter clearly stated.
Then the Alice-in Wonderland character of Kauai County government kicked in: Reality is what Kauai County says it is, not what the law states.
When all else fails, the Kauai County Attorney’s Office states that whatever the mayor does is legal, whether it actually is or not.
Once again, no one had the funding to fight the county in court. So Tokioka said the call had been made by the county attorney.
Game over.
Actually, Olelo, the public access cable channel in Honolulu and thus the biggest in Hawaii, did not provide closed captioning of government meetings. And no government agency or individual complained.
The rest of Hawaii recognized there would be a conflict of the “separation of powers” doctrine if the executive branch had control of the legislative branch’s television contracts.
Constitutional niceties such as “separation of powers” rarely, if ever, occur to anyone in Kauai government, or at least in the Mayor’s Office.
Kusaka blurted out her real motive for yanking the meetings from television on her weekly radio interview when she decided to depart from Tokioka’s prepared script and ad-lib.
In one especially candid moment, Tokioka once told a reporter: “I write the scripts but I usually have no idea what’s going to come out of her mouth.”
One of the noisiest activists, Andy Parks, brought a tape of Kusaka’s broadcast outburst to play for the County Council in June 2002.
First, he pointed out, correctly, that there is no legal requirement to delay broadcasts of the Council meetings until closed captioning can be added.
“It does not exist. It’s not true. It’s a lie,” Parks told the Council.
Then he pushed the “play” button on his tape recorder and there was the mayor’s voice:
“All the garbage that goes on at the Council meetings—it’s such a waste of money paying for it. We allow everybody, and they come to have free rein out there,” Kusaka insisted. Kusaka clearly indicated she would do anything to stop “wasting money” on televising Council meetings because “my critics” were using the meetings as a public forum.
Eventually, the Hoike mess was sorted out. The county contracted with a court-reporting service to provide realtime captioning and the Council meetings were back to being shown live.
The resolution was not the result of a sudden thaw in the frosty relationship between the mayor and the activists (or the mayor and the hearing impaired).
The fact is, 2002 was an election year for the Council. As a means of gaining taxpayer-funded campaign publicity, the incumbents wanted the free air time the televised session gave them, With the long delay waiting for captioning, no one was watching them on TV.
And, as the mayor’s radio broadcast revealed, it wasn’t about deaf people at all.
It was about those haoles who criticized her on islandwide television every week.
Forty years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, it’s hard for people from the mainland United States—even people in other parts of Hawaii—to realize that, on Kauai at least, it’s always all about race.
But it is.
The problem is even more acute in the KPD.
When George Freitas became chief in 1995, he didn’t exactly inherit a well-oiled, racially diverse law enforcement machine from former Chief Cal Fujita, who retired under fire.
Far from it.
Fujita’s racist hiring practices led to a discrimination lawsuit that eventually cost county taxpayers a bundle and Fujita his job.
Freitas was hired to clean up the mess Fujita had made. Freitas was given a mandate by the Police Commission (again, the majority appointed by the liberal but by then deposed Mayor Yukimura) to attain and maintain a high standard of diversity within the KPD.
Freitas was the only white member of the department above the rank of sergeant (Freitas is Portuguese, which is considered “local” in Hawaii even if the US Department of Labor counts him as a Caucasian).
But in the Kauai scheme of ethnicity, Freitas, even though born and raised on Oahu, still was an outsider, a haole. Freitas had spent his entire career as a police officer and administrator in Richmond, a very rough suburb of Oakland, Calif. He didn’t speak Pidgin and he didn’t share the racial prejudices of most KPD’s middle management who had ascended under Fujita’s regime.
When Freitas became chief, only two KPD officers were Chinese and only five were women.
KPD officers traditionally were males who had either Japanese or mixed Hawaiian blood.
The KPD has had only one African-American officer in the department’s history. And he quit and went to work for the Kauai Fire Department after a very short time.
“There’s nothing wrong with the racial mix. We’ve got a great bunch of cops,” said longtime Police Commission Chairwoman Dede Wilhelm in a 2001 interview.
Wilhelm said she went to Kauai’s high schools to talk up a police career for young women, “but the wahine don’t sign up. It’s not glamorous enough.”
As for KPD having only two Chinese-American officers, she said: “The Chinese are smart. They go study medicine.” During Kusaka’s eight years in office, the word “diversity” never came up. To the contrary, her press secretary, Tokioka, insisted: “It’s the mayor’s job to find government jobs for Kauai residents.”
A few months after she had left office, it was revealed that Kusaka (or “Queen Maryanne” as all of the County Council members called her, but not to her face) had purposely ignored a new state law aimed at filling a desperate need by all police departments throughout Hawaii for new recruits.
The statute went into effect in July 2002. For the first time, police departments in Hawaii were allowed to recruit on the mainland. It gave the mayor of every county the power to waive the one-year Hawaii residency requirement for police recruits.
Not only did the mayor of Kauai refuse to use the law, she ordered the County Attorney’s Office not to mention it to the Kauai Police Commission.
“As far as I know, there is still a one-year residency requirement,” Stanton Pa, then Police Commission Chairman, said seven months after the law went into effect.
Told about the change, he shook his head and sighed, “It’s news to me.”
Freitas said that despite the fact the KPD had more vacancies than at any time in its entire history—20 of 140 positions went unfilled in 2002—Kusaka repeatedly refused to recruit on the mainland.
In fact, Freitas said, Kusaka refused to recruit outside Kauai.
Freitas said Kusaka screened all of the police applications and interviewed each candidate herself. “She scrutinized every officer we hired,” Freitas said.
One of the curious by-products of KPD and Kusaka racism was in the department’s choice of targets at the police pistol range. They certainly didn’t go unnoticed by haole activists.
The KPD pistol range used large poster-size photographs of rough looking and heavily armed individuals as targets for the cops to practice their pistol marksmanship.
Every one of the posters was a blown-up photo of a Caucasian. Not one of the police targets showed a picture of any Asian or Pacific Islander criminals or, for that matter, anyone of color.
Kusaka finally ran up against term limits (two four-year terms) and had to step down. When she tried to extend her political career, she failed.
In 2004, Kusaka ran for state senate and was soundly defeated by Gary Hooser, a former member of the Kauai County Council, a vocal critic of Kusaka’s (Hooser was the one who pointed out her lease of a luxury car)
Despite Kusaka’s rather shaky ethical record, the election wasn’t about ethics because Hooser’s were as bad as Kusaka’s.
It was revealed during the campaign that Hooser had neglected to pay state withholding and excise taxes he collected from his employees at his magazine publishing company over an 11 year period.
Eventually, the state forced Hooser to repay the $89,875 in taxes but in a deal Hooser cut with the tax collectors, they dropped any penalty or interest, which totaled another $50,440.
The Kauai voters forgave Hooser for cheating the state (and them) out of the penalties and interest.
Hooser was elected. Kusaka was defeated.
Clearly, Kusaka had worn out her welcome with the voters.
KPD Blue
By Anthony Sommer
Chapter 5 : Maryanne Kusaka
Mayor Maryanne Kusaka never lacked for style.
Kusaka’s clothes always were carefully tailored, formal and decidedly pastel. Her hair never revealed a single stray strand. She invariably wore a brightly colored scarf on her neck to disguise the loose skin waddle of age on her throat.
Her manners, in public at least, were very courtly. She had a warm smile. She only rarely displayed anger in public. Her rants tended toward scolding rather than verbal assaults.
It was in substance and ethical stature that Kusaka was lacking. The first thing she did after raising her hand and taking the oath of office as mayor was to start selling jewelry out of the mayor’s office.
A retired public school teacher who never held an elected office before becoming mayor, Kusaka learned how to run Kauai County during her years as administrative assistant to Mayor Anthony “Uncle Tony” Kunimura.On Kauai, the administrative assistant is not, as the title would imply on the mainland, a secretary. Kusaka was the unelected deputy mayor and first in line as heir to the throne if Mayor Kunimura was incapacitated.
Kunimura, who ruled Kauai in the early and mid 1980s, easily was the most flamboyant mayor in the island’s history. He didn’t bother very much with obeying the law because, well, who would challenge him?
When Kusaka became mayor in 1994, she commissioned (but didn’t pay for; the taxpayers did that) a bust of Kunimura, who had died by then, and his bronze image holds the place of honor in the center of the courtyard of the county office complex.
“Uncle Tony” ran Kauai in the old style: Reward your friends and punish your enemies.
“Auntie Maryanne,” his protégé, was an apt pupil. She took care of her supporters and loosed the hounds, the county bureaucrats (including the cops), on her detractors. Kusaka was a lifelong Democrat until she ran for mayor. In the 1994 Democratic primary, Jimmy Tehada, a veteran County Council member, defeated the incumbent mayor, JoAnn Yukimura.
It wasn’t that the voters loved Tehada. They were angry at Yukimura.
Kauai’s recovery from 1992’s Hurricane Iniki was slow, largely because of the incompetence of the entrenched county bureaucracy, which Yukimura had inherited.
Yukimura brought in many talented department heads but they could not break through the inertia caused by strong unions and civil service protection. And many of her cabinet members were haoles, mainlanders, and no matter how competent, they were resented by locals, particularly locals who worked for the county.
So, Yukimura took the heat at election time. She took the loss very personally and left Kauai for several years. Later she returned and won election to the County Council.
That meant Tehada, who had knocked her off, was not a particularly popular candidate in the general election. He had been a convenient alternative to Yukimura in the primary. But Tehada was very vulnerable to a well-financed challenger in the general election..
Backed by Kauai businessmen and running as the heir to Tony Kunimura, Kusaka re-registered as a Republican and won the general election.
To run the county and take charge of the recovery from Hurricane Iniki, Kusaka brought in retired Navy Capt. Bob Mullins, the former commander of the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai as her administrative assistant.
The US Navy in general and Bob Mullins in particular had become folk heroes in the aftermath of Iniki. The missile range provided help first and asked for permission later.
After the recovery, Mullins brought stacks of documents to the mayor’s office to be signed. He wanted cover to show they had “requested” the aid he and the Navy provided.
Kusaka covered Mullins and, when he retired and she was elected, she gave him a job.
Mullins had his own political base—the almost exclusively white and exclusively Republican Navy League, a booster club for the Navy—and that helped Kusaka gain entry into her new political party.
Later, she replaced Mullins (who found himself cozy employment with a defense contractor, as do many military officers involved in the testing and evaluation trade).
Kusaka brought in a local CPA, Wally Rezentes, who shortly afterward filed for bankruptcy because of the failure of his own business.
Rezentes’s son, Wally Jr., was hired as the county’s director of finance. Nepotism, the hiring of relatives, is totally accepted practice in Kauai County government.
Led by both Wally Sr. and Wally Jr., Kusaka’s top aides worked to recover the island from the remaining ravages of Hurricane Iniki and, most importantly, to fend off the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Kauai County was somewhat extravagant in billing FEMA for repairing hurricane damage, including upgrading some county facilities from pre-hurricane condition. Wood buildings were replaced with concrete structures. FEMA was not amused.
Meanwhile, Mayor Kusaka went on the road to boost tourism.
Kusaka loved to travel, and she freely spent huge sums of county money to take dancers and singers to travel-agent trade shows all over the world. A genuinely accomplished and talented singer and hula dancer herself, Kusaka performed whenever and wherever she could find a stage.
After 1992’s Hurricane Iniki, the mayor’s travels to promote Kauai arguably helped the recovery of the tourism industry. Already popular with locals, Kusaka’s efforts to attract visitors cemented her image as the poster child of the tourism industry.
In typical Kauai style, locals (including the local newspaper) never questioned how much of their money she was spending on her junkets.
Why weren’t the resort hotels and airlines and tour companies she was promoting picking up her tab? No one on Kauai, especially the press, was even mildly curious.
In 1998, Kusaka declared the tourism industry fully recovered. Also, in 1998, the county spent $5,603 to send Kusaka (the figure doesn’t include her entourage) on marketing trips.
If the tourist industry was fixed, it would be logical to assume the mayor’s sales trips could be reduced in the coming years.
Yet in 1999, Kusaka’s travel budget almost tripled to $13,082. She ranked second (behind Honolulu’s Mayor Jeremy Harris) among Hawaii mayors for travel spending that year. The mayors of Maui County and Hawaii County weren’t even close.
By far her most extravagant trip in 1999 was to the American Society of Travel Agents trade show in Paris. She was Hawaii’s sole representative.
Kauai County has a strict policy that employees traveling at taxpayer expense must fly tourist class. But Kusaka flew first class all the way (her economic planning director Gini Kapali sat back in tourist).
Kusaka, in fact, liked everything first class.
Despite the fact that—after Mullins’ departure—Kusaka’s cabinet lacked any white faces, the mayor had an affinity for wealthy haole investors who were willing to court (and, if widely-believed rumor is correct, gladly pay for) her favor.
Kealia Kai is a subdivision of multi-million-dollar homesbuilt on huge lots along a bluff overlooking the ocean on the windward side of Kauai. It also is a gated community, which is very rare on Kauai. The gates are considered a slap in the face of local people.
The land previously had been part of a sugar plantation. The lots were listed on the tax rolls as agricultural property, meaning the property taxes on the land would be virtually zero for the new gentleman farms.
Justin and Michele Hughes, a California couple who had developed similar projects in Colorado, represented themselves as the developers of Kealia Kai on Kauai’s east shore just north of Kapaa.
It later turned out another part-time Kauai resident and full-time developer, Thomas McCloskey, was the real developer of the property; a fact the Hughes couple purposely avoided mentioning in public filings.
When a reporter stumbled over McCloskey’s name on a document at a state office and called Michele Hughes asking what that was all about, she blurted out: “His name wasn’t supposed to be on anything!”
Michele Hughes and Maryanne Kusaka became best friends.
While a pile of applications involving Kealia Kai still were pending action before the Kauai Planning Commission, Kusaka called a press conference to introduce Michele Hughes and sing the praises of Kealia Kai.
When a reporter pointed out that it might be unethical for a mayor to be shilling for a development awaiting actionby a county regulatory board, Kusaka responded by giving the reporter a dirty look, called “the stink eye” in Hawaii
Pidgin.
Kusaka had her own weekly television show on cable television (paid for by the taxpayers) and her sole guest thefollowing week was Michele Hughes.
They were so tight that during one Planning Commission meeting, Wally Rezentes Sr., Kusaka’s top aide, actually wascarrying Michele Hughes’s purse.
The Kauai County Council, Kauai County Planning Commission and the Kauai County Police Commission meetings are televised and the mayor and the mayor’s staff watch them live on closed-circuit television.
Even if the mayor is not in the meeting room, the threat of retaliation is only as far away as the nearest television camera, and the Council members and commission members know it.
Kusaka also provided a fine example of how a Kauai mayor can enlist her police department to benefit her friends.
The beach below Kealia Kai is called Donkey Beach and it had for decades been a gay nude beach. Although nude sunbathing was illegal, that prohibition previously had a very low ranking in the law enforcement scheme of things on Kauai.
Suddenly, Kusaka had the KPD running off the gay nudists on a regular basis to please the developers of Kealia Kai. Mr. and Mrs. Hughes (and, as it later was revealed, Tom McCloskey) didn’t think the sight of naked men was helping their chances of selling a “million-dollar view.”
Similarly, there was a straight nude beach—called Secret Beach, although there are directions to it in every tourist guidebook—right below and in full view of the Hughes’s hillside home in Kilauea.
Suddenly, under orders from the mayor, the KPD was rounding up nude sunbathers there as well.
It was the issue of beach patrols that caused the first major rift between Kusaka and KPD Chief George Freitas. The Hugheses offered to donate all-terrain vehicles to the KPD, but only if Freitas provided KPD officers to drivethem and only if the ATVs were used exclusively to patrol Donkey Beach below Kealia Kai to arrest gay nudists.
Freitas said he would gladly take the donated ATVs, but only if he decided when and where on the island they would be used. He was not willing to provide tax-funded privatesecurity patrols for the Hugheses.
Kusaka was embarrassed and she was angry. It is highly likely that it was at this point she began to plot and scheme to get herself a police chief who would do what she told him to do.
(pic)
Mayor Maryanne Kusaka headed a full-on witch hunt to get KPD Chief Freitas, trying to convince the Kauai Police Commission to fire Freitas for hindering the prosecution of a KPD officer accused of sexually molesting his step-daughter. In the end, the officer was acquitted, Freitas was found guilty of giving his girlfriend a ride in his police car and yelling at one of his assistant chiefs. He kept his job.
Only after all the state and county permits were issued did McCloskey jump out of the woodpile and announce himself as the actual developer of Kealia Kai. Justin and Michele Hughes were just fronting for him and Michele certainly had done her job winning the mayor’s friendship.
The mayor, quite naturally, immediately began snuggling up to McCloskey as well.
For a long time, rumors abounded that Kusaka had been paid off with a lot at Kealia Kai. There never was anything in the state or county records to indicate that there was any truth to the oft-repeated allegation. But the rumored payoff was and still is widely believed.
Kusaka also was close friend of Jimmy Pflueger, a retired and very wealthy Honolulu Honda dealer turned land developer on Kauai’s north shore. His family had owned land there for more than a century.
Pflueger, often driving the heavy construction equipment himself, was clearing the land and building roads for yet another subdivision for the rich and famous on a bluff overlooking the ocean. In the background are rugged mountains often seen in movies shot on Pflueger’s property.
Pflueger had an “arrangement” with Kusaka that was quite unique. The mayor’s office served as a sort of alarm system for Pflueger.
If anyone called any Kauai County department to complain about Pflueger’s activities and question whether he had permits and was following the law, they got an instant response.
The return call came not from the Planning Department, not from the county engineer, not from the mayor, but from Pflueger himself. Usually within an hour of the original complaint, Pflueger was on the phone with the irate citizen.
Pflueger had made a deal with Kusaka that if any citizen called to complain about any of his pet projects, the complaint would be passed on directly to him by her top aide, Wally Rezentes. Pflueger reckoned, usually correctly, that he could calm them down with his used-car-salesman charm.
The county officials never would investigate the complaints against Pflueger. Kusaka had granted him an informal immunity from county regulation.
That was just fine until Pflueger’s excavation to build a road from the lots where he planned to build luxury homes to Pilaa Beach collapsed in a mudslide during a heavy rain storm. The mud buried a coral reef.
Pflueger ended up paying the largest penalty ever imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency against an individual: $7.5 million.
He also paid the largest state pollution fine in Hawaii’s history: $4 million.
The Pilaa mudslide was only the beginning. More recently, on May 14, 2006, a dam on Pflueger’s property burst in another rain storm, creating an 18-foot wall of water that hurtled downstream, wiping out 100 feet of the only highway serving the area, knocking two buildings completely off their foundations and killing seven people downstream.
Authorities still are investigating to determine whether Pflueger had covered over the dam’s spillway with dirt, when the spillway was intended as a safety valve to keep the dam from overfilling.
Kauai County, which at Kusaka’s urging gave Pflueger free rein and never inspected his many projects, played a role in both of those disasters by failing to enforce the law. Kusaka’s firm belief that the rules do not apply to her finally went a bit too far in 2001.
Annoyed that the County Council refused to grant her a pay raise, Kusaka used her authority to transfer funds within her own office to give herself a new car.
Kusaka for years had been driving her personal Cadillac on county business and received a $4,000 annual travel allowance.
In 2001, without telling the County Council, she quadrupled her own travel allowance and paid $16,000 in county funds to lease a bright red Chrysler luxury car for the balance of her term. The car was strictly for Kusaka’s use and the lease specified it would be returned at the end of her term and not made available to the next mayor.
The car was leased, without any bidding, from the automobile dealer who had been her campaign chairman in the previous election. “Sole source” purchases are not uncommon in Kauai County, often in violation of state procurement laws and regulations requiring bids on government purchases.
The Kauai County Council, hardly a tower of ethics and virtue itself, learned of the mayor’s new car at a budget briefing.
The Council members had a few years before given the county departments authority to transfer funds with their own agencies without Council approval. In return, each agency, including the mayor’s office, was supposed to provide an annual self-evaluation and set goals for the coming year.
Under Kusaka, the money freely was shuffled within the county offices but the goals never were set and the evaluations never completed.
Council members were so angry that Kusaka misused the new budget powers they granted her that they stripped the mayor of all the discretionary spending power.Ultimately, she turned in the Chrysler and went back to driving her Caddy.
Despite her socializing with wealthy haole developers, Kusaka remained popular with locals. This was partly because she provided them with jobs, but also because she “talked stink” about white people when she believed no one would hear her.
“I used to go to cabinet meetings and I was dumbfounded by the racist statements the mayor would repeatedly make at almost every meeting,” said former Police Chief George Freitas.
The police chief is not appointed by the mayor but by the Police Commission. The police chief was considered a de facto cabinet member and expected to attend department head meetings, largely to be handy when Kusaka wanted to chew him out at cabinet meetings.
Even one of Kusaka’s closest aides, who is white, said the same of her boss.
“When she would go into one of her rants about haoles, I had to wonder what color she thought I was,” said Beth Tokioka, who served as Kusaka’s press secretary and later become Mayor Bryan Baptiste’s economic planning director.
Tokioka is Caucasian and grew up in Flint, Michigan. She was married to a Japanese-American politician Jimmy Tokioka, now a member of the state legislature, whom Kusaka treats as a son. Though now divorced, her ticket into local society and in county politics now is permanently punched.
Tokioka proved doggedly loyal to both Kusaka and later to Mayor Bryan Baptiste. And it showed. Honesty in her relations with the press was not among her virtues.
“I like Beth but she has some serious ethical blind spots,” said Dennis Wilken, a former reporter for The Garden Island, Kauai’s local newspaper.
Bill Dahle, the senior reporter on the island, now retired, once told Tokioka to her face that no reporter on Kauai ever believed a word she said because she was so devoted to Kusaka.
Kusaka often called Beth Tokioka “my soul mate.” Other haoles in the Kusaka Administration, however, were decidedly unwelcome.
A case in point was in 2002 when Kusaka forced Kauai Film Commissioner Judy Drosd to quit after 10 years on the job, during which she played a major role in the filming of all three Jurassic Park movies on the island.
Drosd, a haole, had been hired by the previous mayor, JoAnn Yukimura, a liberal Stanford attorney who brought in quite a few talented administrators from the mainland. Most of the outsiders left when Yukimura was defeated for reelection, but not Drosd.
Drosd was a 20-year veteran of the television and motion picture business and previously had been the vice president in charge of production for HBO.
In terms of Big League talent and savvy and charm, Drosd was by far the class act in Kauai County government.
(pic)
Judy Drosd, a former top executive with HBO and Kauai’s film commissioner for a decade was forced out by Mayor Maryanne Kusaka and replaced by a commissioner with no background in the film industry.
With millions of dollars for the island’s economy at risk, balancing the needs of demanding film producers, greedy landowners who want huge sums to provide film locations, and egotistic movie stars seeking special treatment is no easy act.
When Drosd left Kauai in 2002, she was immediately hired by newly-elected Gov. Linda Lingle to head the state Arts, Film and Entertainment Division. She kept her home on Kauai and commuted to Honolulu every day.
Drosd’s departure resulted directly from the Kusaka’s very shabby treatment of her. Her departure was a tragedy for the island and film-making on Kauai never really has recovered.
Parroting the mayor, Press Secretary Tokioka took it upon herself to play down the loss of Drosd.
Tokioka said in an interview: The film commissioner was “nothing more than a glorified tour guide.”
She added Drosd “hung around for 10 years only so she would be vested in the county’s retirement system.” From all indications, Drosd, who owned a great deal of property on Kauai, was not in need of a government pension.
Kusaka replaced Drosd with Tiffani Lizama, the marketing director for the Kauai Food Bank who had no experience in the film industry.
Worse, Lizama chose as her show business guru the builder of a recording studio in Kapaa that turned out to be nothing more than a means for scamming investors. He fled the island leaving a large number of angry investors in his wake.
The important point to Kusaka was that Lizama, though a haole, was married to a local Kauai Fire Department captain who was one of the mayor’s pets. Again, marriage to a local is a haole’s ticket into the club.
Kusaka’s dislike of whites and especially whites who opposed her in public was put on full public display in 2002.
There is a gaggle of activists who show up at every Kauai County Council meeting to complain, usually quite correctly, how inept and unethical most county agencies are. They call themselves the “nit-pickers,” a tag intended to be derogatory that was pinned on them by the editor of the local paper. They wear it as a badge of honor.
All are haoles. Locals would never speak out against the government.
County Council meetings were given live gavel-to-gavel coverage (except, of course, for the many executive sessions) on Hoike, the public access cable television network.
In addition to the Council meetings, Kauai County paid Hoike $40,000 a year to provide a video crew and transmit the mayor’s weekly television show, which was nothing but a propaganda opportunity and was scripted by Beth Tokioka.
(Kusaka also did a weekly radio “interview” with a Kauai “newsman” on a local radio station. Both the questions and Kusaka’s answers were written by Beth Tokioka.)
The line between Kusaka and the activist community was drawn during her first term.
A decades-old dispute between north shore residents reached the boiling point in 1997 and 1998.
Tour boat companies were hauling thousands of visitors every day on sight-seeing trips along the spectacular Na Pali Coast.
The tour boats ran out of Hanalei on Kauai’s north shore, technically a harbor but not nearly large enough to accommodate the huge number of tour boats and tourist vehicles running in and out of what is, arguably, the most beautiful bay in the world.
Kusaka lined up with the boat operators, part of her beloved tourism industry.
That put her on the opposite side from the environmental activists, an unlikely coalition of white North Shore environmentalists and pro-sovereignty Native Hawaiians who claimed the boats were destroying the bay, the river and the town. They wanted the tour boats out of Hanalei Bay.
The issue was so contentious that one joint state and county public hearing droned on for 18 hours of passionate speech-making from representatives of both sides, televised on Hoike, of course..
It finally was decided in 1998 by Gov. Ben Cayetano, whose speech-writer was—not coincidentally—a haole environmentalist from Kauai.
Cayetano was, at the time, in a desperate fight for a second term against former Maui Mayor Linda Lingle. Cayetano was a Democrat and needed the liberal north shore Kauai vote. Lingle and Kusaka were Republicans.
Cayetano simply pulled the plug on the tour boats and Kusaka.
He ordered them out of Hanalei and forced them to move to Port Allen on Kauai’s west side, a long haul from the Na Pali. Cayetano won (Lingle would come back four years later and take the governor’s office). The activists cheered. Kusaka seethed.
The payback came in 2002 when Kusaka pulled a plug of her own on the activists, knocking them off of island-wide television.
It’s also likely Kusaka had not forgotten the County Council had taken away her new car the year before. The Council members, every bit as much as the activists, basked in the free notoriety they received from the weekly meeting television broadcasts.
Taking away the free publicity medium favored by both the Council and the activists may well have crossed the vindictive mayor’s mind.
The activists had long ago figured out that the televised Council meetings gave them a perfect platform from which to hammer county government. It was watched by a huge audience, and, best of all, it was free.
All they had to do was stand up and speak.
Kusaka was fed up with the haole activists and their constant carping about her administration. It was time for getting even. “Punish your enemies” is a part of Rule #1 for Kauai politicians.
So, Kusaka shut down the live Hoike telecasts of the Council meetings (but not, of course, her own weekly show). One fine day in the spring of 2002, Kusaka decreed that airing the Council meetings without closed captioning for the hearing-impaired was a violation of federal law.
Kusaka said that her ever-vigilant County Attorney’s Office had decided showing the meetings without closed captioning for the hearing impaired was not allowed by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
As a result, Council meetings (including the activist antics that infuriated Kusaka) weren’t shown until they could be transcribed and captioning provided. That took about a week, which meant they aired after the next weekly Council meeting. They were always at least a week behind.
As a source of information for the public and a stage for the activists, the televised meetings had become useless. No one was watching.
The odd thing was that there was no record of any complaints from anyone of an ADA violation.
Not from the deaf community on Kauai. Not from the agencies enforcing the ADA: The State Disability and Communications Access Board, the U.S. Justice Department, or even the county’s own ADA coordinator.
None.
And Kusaka was not particularly a champion of the disabled.
According to some of those who were present, at one cabinet meeting Kusaka went into a tirade about the ADA and how much it was costing Kauai County to provide facilities for the disabled.
Her tantrum was so vicious that her loyal press secretary, Beth Tokioka, left the meeting in tears. Tokioka has a son who is deaf.
Another very strange thing was the Mayor’s Office (actually Tokioka) administered the county’s contract with Hoike to air the County Council meetings. In all the other counties, it was the county clerk, who works for the County Council rather than the mayor, who handled the television contracts.
Initially, Hoike, a private non-profit agency, refused to shut down the live broadcasts. It announced it would still show them live and then show the meetings with subtitles if and when they became available.
Tokioka told Hoike that the county (meaning the mayor’s office) owns and controls the use of all the tapes of County Council meetings.
Tokioka, as she often did, was blowing smoke. The contract did not say the county owns the tapes.
Tokioka continued to lie when she said the mayor’s actions shutting down the broadcast were the result of a demand from the State Disability and Communications Access Board.
What really happened was Kauai County asked the state agency whether closed-captioning was required on broadcasts of all government meetings. Kauai County was the one that brought up the topic.
The state responded, in writing, that there was no such requirement for closed captioning broadcasts of government meetings.
Generally, the state Disabilities Board told Kauai County officials, it supported Kusaka’s move to require subtitles. But no law requires closed captioning, their letter clearly stated.
Then the Alice-in Wonderland character of Kauai County government kicked in: Reality is what Kauai County says it is, not what the law states.
When all else fails, the Kauai County Attorney’s Office states that whatever the mayor does is legal, whether it actually is or not.
Once again, no one had the funding to fight the county in court. So Tokioka said the call had been made by the county attorney.
Game over.
Actually, Olelo, the public access cable channel in Honolulu and thus the biggest in Hawaii, did not provide closed captioning of government meetings. And no government agency or individual complained.
The rest of Hawaii recognized there would be a conflict of the “separation of powers” doctrine if the executive branch had control of the legislative branch’s television contracts.
Constitutional niceties such as “separation of powers” rarely, if ever, occur to anyone in Kauai government, or at least in the Mayor’s Office.
Kusaka blurted out her real motive for yanking the meetings from television on her weekly radio interview when she decided to depart from Tokioka’s prepared script and ad-lib.
In one especially candid moment, Tokioka once told a reporter: “I write the scripts but I usually have no idea what’s going to come out of her mouth.”
One of the noisiest activists, Andy Parks, brought a tape of Kusaka’s broadcast outburst to play for the County Council in June 2002.
First, he pointed out, correctly, that there is no legal requirement to delay broadcasts of the Council meetings until closed captioning can be added.
“It does not exist. It’s not true. It’s a lie,” Parks told the Council.
Then he pushed the “play” button on his tape recorder and there was the mayor’s voice:
“All the garbage that goes on at the Council meetings—it’s such a waste of money paying for it. We allow everybody, and they come to have free rein out there,” Kusaka insisted. Kusaka clearly indicated she would do anything to stop “wasting money” on televising Council meetings because “my critics” were using the meetings as a public forum.
Eventually, the Hoike mess was sorted out. The county contracted with a court-reporting service to provide realtime captioning and the Council meetings were back to being shown live.
The resolution was not the result of a sudden thaw in the frosty relationship between the mayor and the activists (or the mayor and the hearing impaired).
The fact is, 2002 was an election year for the Council. As a means of gaining taxpayer-funded campaign publicity, the incumbents wanted the free air time the televised session gave them, With the long delay waiting for captioning, no one was watching them on TV.
And, as the mayor’s radio broadcast revealed, it wasn’t about deaf people at all.
It was about those haoles who criticized her on islandwide television every week.
Forty years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, it’s hard for people from the mainland United States—even people in other parts of Hawaii—to realize that, on Kauai at least, it’s always all about race.
But it is.
The problem is even more acute in the KPD.
When George Freitas became chief in 1995, he didn’t exactly inherit a well-oiled, racially diverse law enforcement machine from former Chief Cal Fujita, who retired under fire.
Far from it.
Fujita’s racist hiring practices led to a discrimination lawsuit that eventually cost county taxpayers a bundle and Fujita his job.
Freitas was hired to clean up the mess Fujita had made. Freitas was given a mandate by the Police Commission (again, the majority appointed by the liberal but by then deposed Mayor Yukimura) to attain and maintain a high standard of diversity within the KPD.
Freitas was the only white member of the department above the rank of sergeant (Freitas is Portuguese, which is considered “local” in Hawaii even if the US Department of Labor counts him as a Caucasian).
But in the Kauai scheme of ethnicity, Freitas, even though born and raised on Oahu, still was an outsider, a haole. Freitas had spent his entire career as a police officer and administrator in Richmond, a very rough suburb of Oakland, Calif. He didn’t speak Pidgin and he didn’t share the racial prejudices of most KPD’s middle management who had ascended under Fujita’s regime.
When Freitas became chief, only two KPD officers were Chinese and only five were women.
KPD officers traditionally were males who had either Japanese or mixed Hawaiian blood.
The KPD has had only one African-American officer in the department’s history. And he quit and went to work for the Kauai Fire Department after a very short time.
“There’s nothing wrong with the racial mix. We’ve got a great bunch of cops,” said longtime Police Commission Chairwoman Dede Wilhelm in a 2001 interview.
Wilhelm said she went to Kauai’s high schools to talk up a police career for young women, “but the wahine don’t sign up. It’s not glamorous enough.”
As for KPD having only two Chinese-American officers, she said: “The Chinese are smart. They go study medicine.” During Kusaka’s eight years in office, the word “diversity” never came up. To the contrary, her press secretary, Tokioka, insisted: “It’s the mayor’s job to find government jobs for Kauai residents.”
A few months after she had left office, it was revealed that Kusaka (or “Queen Maryanne” as all of the County Council members called her, but not to her face) had purposely ignored a new state law aimed at filling a desperate need by all police departments throughout Hawaii for new recruits.
The statute went into effect in July 2002. For the first time, police departments in Hawaii were allowed to recruit on the mainland. It gave the mayor of every county the power to waive the one-year Hawaii residency requirement for police recruits.
Not only did the mayor of Kauai refuse to use the law, she ordered the County Attorney’s Office not to mention it to the Kauai Police Commission.
“As far as I know, there is still a one-year residency requirement,” Stanton Pa, then Police Commission Chairman, said seven months after the law went into effect.
Told about the change, he shook his head and sighed, “It’s news to me.”
Freitas said that despite the fact the KPD had more vacancies than at any time in its entire history—20 of 140 positions went unfilled in 2002—Kusaka repeatedly refused to recruit on the mainland.
In fact, Freitas said, Kusaka refused to recruit outside Kauai.
Freitas said Kusaka screened all of the police applications and interviewed each candidate herself. “She scrutinized every officer we hired,” Freitas said.
One of the curious by-products of KPD and Kusaka racism was in the department’s choice of targets at the police pistol range. They certainly didn’t go unnoticed by haole activists.
The KPD pistol range used large poster-size photographs of rough looking and heavily armed individuals as targets for the cops to practice their pistol marksmanship.
Every one of the posters was a blown-up photo of a Caucasian. Not one of the police targets showed a picture of any Asian or Pacific Islander criminals or, for that matter, anyone of color.
Kusaka finally ran up against term limits (two four-year terms) and had to step down. When she tried to extend her political career, she failed.
In 2004, Kusaka ran for state senate and was soundly defeated by Gary Hooser, a former member of the Kauai County Council, a vocal critic of Kusaka’s (Hooser was the one who pointed out her lease of a luxury car)
Despite Kusaka’s rather shaky ethical record, the election wasn’t about ethics because Hooser’s were as bad as Kusaka’s.
It was revealed during the campaign that Hooser had neglected to pay state withholding and excise taxes he collected from his employees at his magazine publishing company over an 11 year period.
Eventually, the state forced Hooser to repay the $89,875 in taxes but in a deal Hooser cut with the tax collectors, they dropped any penalty or interest, which totaled another $50,440.
The Kauai voters forgave Hooser for cheating the state (and them) out of the penalties and interest.
Hooser was elected. Kusaka was defeated.
Clearly, Kusaka had worn out her welcome with the voters.
Friday, September 12, 2008
PUTTING LIPSTICK ON A DOG
PUTTING LIPSTICK ON A DOG: Tony Sommer’s new book KPD Blue has spent a week dotting the “i’s” and crossing the “t’s” on allegations of two reported cases of apparent police misconduct and even abuse as we reported this week... and over the last six months in many other incidents.
Sommer’s book is now available at amazon.com . Throughout the fall PNN will continue serializing the book on weekends with the hilariously deadly serious Chapter 5 entitled Marianne Kusaka coming tomorrow.
In chapter 5 we meet “the Queen” through details of her early efforts to sell jewelry out if the Mayor’s office through her abject anti-“haole” racism and into the driver’s seat of her taxpayer-leased, unbudgeted, red, luxury Chrysler. .
(Parenthetically, 30 years ago her 2nd grade students- and of course we parents- knew you didn’t want to be white in that class... especially when she let kids off early on “kill-a-haole day”).
But worse was the total ineptitude of all those around her and her ability to use their stupidity to let them all get away with highway robbery. She would have gotten rich too if the Coco Palms renovation project hadn’t gone belly up.
Poor Marianne. She was responsible for dozens of inept bozos getting corporate positions when they became too inept for believability. But her attempt to finally cash in herself- after she had to give back the Kealia Kai house site- was the now defunct Coco Palms deal in which she had to give back millions, some say 10 or more- in the deal, as PNN reported in July.
Sommer’s story is spot on and documented by someone who collected the information first hand.
But the book does have an understandable error regarding how the term “nitpickers” arose, with Sommer crediting it to TGI Editor Sue Dixon Strong.
But although Dixon used the term as her own she was actually quoting Kusaka’s who used the term to describe all those who were complaining the original price of KIUC was too high, an amount subsequently dropped by $50-100 million depending on whose numbers you use.
When famed Kaua`i government watchdog Ray Chuan finally gathered a bunch of Princeville ex-financial energy consultants and engineers they made her look silly for supporting the co-op as it was. And after seeing all the documents the council irregulars joined in.
The original almost $300 million price was insane . And complaints about that and management were met with a public statement by Kusaka that people were just “nitpicking” the deal.
But eventually they dropped the price 70 million and it was still too high, some say as much as twice or more what it was worth. .
The leadership of the Democratic Party in the person of the venerable Turk Tokita had joined the organizing board and when Democrat JoAnn Yukimura joined she squelched DOH documents- despite PNN reports- on our `Ele`ele plant toxic waste dump.
More importantly she gave the board united Democratic Party support. And Republican Kusaka didn’t like it, especially when KIUC top dog Greg Gardiner was being excoriated over his current- and sometimes past- documented deceits and dirty deeds.
Kusaka wanted the deal done. But the council was sitting through hours of televised meetings starring the “nitpickers”- who had adopted the name in a statement of ridicule of Kusaka. They were now credited with “saving” consumers tens of millions and trying to save tens if not a hundred more.
They filed up to have their three or six minutes tirades against the price and not the co-op concept but against “this” co-op- the one with the widely reviled and defamed Gardiner in charge
And Kusaka didn’t care. Her new-found Republican buddies- the ones who put her in office like Charlie King- had a big stake in seeing Republican-leaning, former “Kaua`i Times” newspaper owner, Gardiner look good.
The council was the last obstacle because the self appointed co-op board had essentially put it in their hands. The Council, in an effort to not pay the exorbitant price, actually passed a charter amendment creating a municipal power authority that remains unused today.
Finally the council got Kusaka to come and have her tell them face-to-face why they should take the give or take $225 million deal.
But unbelievably enough it was scheduled on the agenda as a secret executive session (ES) meeting,
The nitpickers and the public in general were outraged. And especially when they met under a Sunshine law provision [HRS 92-5(a)4] supposedly to meet with their “attorney” and there was no lawyer in the room- just the council and Kusaka.
(Correction- Attorney Bill Milks was in the room but was essentially there as camouflage while Kusaka and the council cut the deal.)
That’s when and where Kusaka and the council cut the deal for KIUC’s final approval
They came out of ES and everything was signed, sealed and delivered. No discussion. Vote- 7 ayes, Mr. Chair. Meeting adjoined..
Anthony Sommer, the author of “KPD Blue” and a reporter for the Honolulu Star Bulletin Kaua`i Bureau Chief at the time read the Sunshine law and didn’t believe what he just saw happen.
Having been at The Garden Island for a brief spell he knew that unlike real newspapers TGI doesn’t go to court for open meetings matters and freedom of information type requests. ... ever... at all... as a matter of policy.
But Sommer didn’t know that the Star Bulletin wasn’t going to back him up either by hiring a lawyer to find out what was discussed and just how they could decide a major public policy issue in secret .
So Sommer sued on his own nickel.
He won his case although it took years and of course by then the co-op was a thriving company with the highest rates in the country by a wide margin.
Enjoy Chapter 5- see ya Monday.
Sommer’s book is now available at amazon.com . Throughout the fall PNN will continue serializing the book on weekends with the hilariously deadly serious Chapter 5 entitled Marianne Kusaka coming tomorrow.
In chapter 5 we meet “the Queen” through details of her early efforts to sell jewelry out if the Mayor’s office through her abject anti-“haole” racism and into the driver’s seat of her taxpayer-leased, unbudgeted, red, luxury Chrysler. .
(Parenthetically, 30 years ago her 2nd grade students- and of course we parents- knew you didn’t want to be white in that class... especially when she let kids off early on “kill-a-haole day”).
But worse was the total ineptitude of all those around her and her ability to use their stupidity to let them all get away with highway robbery. She would have gotten rich too if the Coco Palms renovation project hadn’t gone belly up.
Poor Marianne. She was responsible for dozens of inept bozos getting corporate positions when they became too inept for believability. But her attempt to finally cash in herself- after she had to give back the Kealia Kai house site- was the now defunct Coco Palms deal in which she had to give back millions, some say 10 or more- in the deal, as PNN reported in July.
Sommer’s story is spot on and documented by someone who collected the information first hand.
But the book does have an understandable error regarding how the term “nitpickers” arose, with Sommer crediting it to TGI Editor Sue Dixon Strong.
But although Dixon used the term as her own she was actually quoting Kusaka’s who used the term to describe all those who were complaining the original price of KIUC was too high, an amount subsequently dropped by $50-100 million depending on whose numbers you use.
When famed Kaua`i government watchdog Ray Chuan finally gathered a bunch of Princeville ex-financial energy consultants and engineers they made her look silly for supporting the co-op as it was. And after seeing all the documents the council irregulars joined in.
The original almost $300 million price was insane . And complaints about that and management were met with a public statement by Kusaka that people were just “nitpicking” the deal.
But eventually they dropped the price 70 million and it was still too high, some say as much as twice or more what it was worth. .
The leadership of the Democratic Party in the person of the venerable Turk Tokita had joined the organizing board and when Democrat JoAnn Yukimura joined she squelched DOH documents- despite PNN reports- on our `Ele`ele plant toxic waste dump.
More importantly she gave the board united Democratic Party support. And Republican Kusaka didn’t like it, especially when KIUC top dog Greg Gardiner was being excoriated over his current- and sometimes past- documented deceits and dirty deeds.
Kusaka wanted the deal done. But the council was sitting through hours of televised meetings starring the “nitpickers”- who had adopted the name in a statement of ridicule of Kusaka. They were now credited with “saving” consumers tens of millions and trying to save tens if not a hundred more.
They filed up to have their three or six minutes tirades against the price and not the co-op concept but against “this” co-op- the one with the widely reviled and defamed Gardiner in charge
And Kusaka didn’t care. Her new-found Republican buddies- the ones who put her in office like Charlie King- had a big stake in seeing Republican-leaning, former “Kaua`i Times” newspaper owner, Gardiner look good.
The council was the last obstacle because the self appointed co-op board had essentially put it in their hands. The Council, in an effort to not pay the exorbitant price, actually passed a charter amendment creating a municipal power authority that remains unused today.
Finally the council got Kusaka to come and have her tell them face-to-face why they should take the give or take $225 million deal.
But unbelievably enough it was scheduled on the agenda as a secret executive session (ES) meeting,
The nitpickers and the public in general were outraged. And especially when they met under a Sunshine law provision [HRS 92-5(a)4] supposedly to meet with their “attorney” and there was no lawyer in the room- just the council and Kusaka.
(Correction- Attorney Bill Milks was in the room but was essentially there as camouflage while Kusaka and the council cut the deal.)
That’s when and where Kusaka and the council cut the deal for KIUC’s final approval
They came out of ES and everything was signed, sealed and delivered. No discussion. Vote- 7 ayes, Mr. Chair. Meeting adjoined..
Anthony Sommer, the author of “KPD Blue” and a reporter for the Honolulu Star Bulletin Kaua`i Bureau Chief at the time read the Sunshine law and didn’t believe what he just saw happen.
Having been at The Garden Island for a brief spell he knew that unlike real newspapers TGI doesn’t go to court for open meetings matters and freedom of information type requests. ... ever... at all... as a matter of policy.
But Sommer didn’t know that the Star Bulletin wasn’t going to back him up either by hiring a lawyer to find out what was discussed and just how they could decide a major public policy issue in secret .
So Sommer sued on his own nickel.
He won his case although it took years and of course by then the co-op was a thriving company with the highest rates in the country by a wide margin.
Enjoy Chapter 5- see ya Monday.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
INCIDENTALLY INHUMANE
INCIDENTALLY INHUMANE: The arrest and interrogation of journalist Joan Conrow which she detailed and we analyzed this week has spurred a slew of comments at her web site from various and sundry right-wing trolls as well as some sincere defender.
Most, in all disingenuity, pooh-pooh any allegations of police misconduct and especially the blatant violations of the new Reporters’ Shield Law passed by the Hawai`i legislature this year
And today even libertarian, property rights lawyer-blogger Charley Foster has declared:
There's quite a bit of search and seizure discussion in the 70-plus comments as well as an abortive run at the shield law.
Abortive? Sorry Charley, ‘fraid not.
It’s quite obvious that none of the gut-less anonymous posters nor the owner of the bridge they live under have read and don’t understand what the Hawai`i shield law protects against.
The Hawai`i Shield law reads:
A journalist or newscaster presently or previously employed by or otherwise professionally associated with any newspaper or magazine or any digital version thereof operated by the same organization, news agency, press association, wire service, or radio or television transmission station or network, shall not be required by a legislative, executive, or judicial officer or body, or any other authority having the power to compel testimony or the production of evidence, to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise:
and then it goes on to describe exactly the information Conrow was asked for- essentially information gathered while engaging in gathering news and reporting upon it.
When you take out the non-pertinent words it reads, in context:
A journalist ...shall not be required by.. any... authority having the power to compel the production of evidence, to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise:
Note it says “any authority” which undoubtedly includes police officers. And note the “compelling” of the “evidence” is not, as in many states, necessarily in the realm of only “judges” and “subpoenas” but can be “otherwise”. And note of course it doesn’t just cover court “testimony” but “production of evidence”
While merely calling and politely asking a reporter if they will share their newsgathering with police would be far from ”compelling” the reporter to produce what the police consider “evidence”, by all legal definitions the “seizure” of Conrow makes the incident one where a reasonable person would feel compelled to provide that ”evidence”.
When someone is brought into the station house- whether physically “brought in” or whether they came of their own volition when asked doesn’t really matter. For all intent and purpose- and technically according to an ex -KPD officer we spoke to as well as a prominent Kaua`i attorney- Conrow was under arrest whether she was charged or not.
The dictionary defines “compel” as “To make one yield or submit”. "Making” Conrow “yield or submit” to questioning was the whole intent of the interrogation.
When a police officer tells you to do something, you are usually compelled to do so.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. constitution bans unreasonable searches and seizures.
One of the most famous cases of Fourth Amendment law is the Warren Supreme Court case of Terry v Ohio. It hold that:
It must be recognized that, whenever a police officer accosts an individual and restrains his freedom to walk away, he has "seized" that person.
Some have made much of the fact that Conrow may not have asked to be released but that is irrelevant as the standard in Terry and subsequent decisions state only that a reasonable person must have felt they were free to leave.
When an officer tells a person to “stay there” that constitutes “seizure” of that person- and of course that requires probable cause which was totally absent in this case.
There is little doubt that Conrow’s rights as a reporter under the newly enacted shield law were violated.
While some states’ shield laws refer to only subpoenas or court orders the Hawai`i law- said to be one of if not the most progressive- applies to all authorities and covers all methods of compelling information.
And of course it covers bloggers who engage in traditional newsgathering, even though Conrow is and has been a working professional journalist for 30 years.
While the law is new in Hawai`i that’s certainly no excuse for the behavior of the three officers this case. PNN is still awaiting comment from the county as to the status of any investigation.
Most, in all disingenuity, pooh-pooh any allegations of police misconduct and especially the blatant violations of the new Reporters’ Shield Law passed by the Hawai`i legislature this year
And today even libertarian, property rights lawyer-blogger Charley Foster has declared:
There's quite a bit of search and seizure discussion in the 70-plus comments as well as an abortive run at the shield law.
Abortive? Sorry Charley, ‘fraid not.
It’s quite obvious that none of the gut-less anonymous posters nor the owner of the bridge they live under have read and don’t understand what the Hawai`i shield law protects against.
The Hawai`i Shield law reads:
A journalist or newscaster presently or previously employed by or otherwise professionally associated with any newspaper or magazine or any digital version thereof operated by the same organization, news agency, press association, wire service, or radio or television transmission station or network, shall not be required by a legislative, executive, or judicial officer or body, or any other authority having the power to compel testimony or the production of evidence, to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise:
and then it goes on to describe exactly the information Conrow was asked for- essentially information gathered while engaging in gathering news and reporting upon it.
When you take out the non-pertinent words it reads, in context:
A journalist ...shall not be required by.. any... authority having the power to compel the production of evidence, to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise:
Note it says “any authority” which undoubtedly includes police officers. And note the “compelling” of the “evidence” is not, as in many states, necessarily in the realm of only “judges” and “subpoenas” but can be “otherwise”. And note of course it doesn’t just cover court “testimony” but “production of evidence”
While merely calling and politely asking a reporter if they will share their newsgathering with police would be far from ”compelling” the reporter to produce what the police consider “evidence”, by all legal definitions the “seizure” of Conrow makes the incident one where a reasonable person would feel compelled to provide that ”evidence”.
When someone is brought into the station house- whether physically “brought in” or whether they came of their own volition when asked doesn’t really matter. For all intent and purpose- and technically according to an ex -KPD officer we spoke to as well as a prominent Kaua`i attorney- Conrow was under arrest whether she was charged or not.
The dictionary defines “compel” as “To make one yield or submit”. "Making” Conrow “yield or submit” to questioning was the whole intent of the interrogation.
When a police officer tells you to do something, you are usually compelled to do so.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. constitution bans unreasonable searches and seizures.
One of the most famous cases of Fourth Amendment law is the Warren Supreme Court case of Terry v Ohio. It hold that:
It must be recognized that, whenever a police officer accosts an individual and restrains his freedom to walk away, he has "seized" that person.
Some have made much of the fact that Conrow may not have asked to be released but that is irrelevant as the standard in Terry and subsequent decisions state only that a reasonable person must have felt they were free to leave.
When an officer tells a person to “stay there” that constitutes “seizure” of that person- and of course that requires probable cause which was totally absent in this case.
There is little doubt that Conrow’s rights as a reporter under the newly enacted shield law were violated.
While some states’ shield laws refer to only subpoenas or court orders the Hawai`i law- said to be one of if not the most progressive- applies to all authorities and covers all methods of compelling information.
And of course it covers bloggers who engage in traditional newsgathering, even though Conrow is and has been a working professional journalist for 30 years.
While the law is new in Hawai`i that’s certainly no excuse for the behavior of the three officers this case. PNN is still awaiting comment from the county as to the status of any investigation.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
THE DOG ATE MY VOTE
THE DOG ATE MY VOTE: We tend to think of outright election fraud as something that happens in faraway places like Florida and Ohio done by secretive Republican moles and operatives in places where the laws and rules of the state combine with unregulated proprietary soft-ware-using electronic-gizmos to “flip” the votes.
But that was in a different era- one before the reign “King” Kevin “The Minotaur” Cronin as Hawai`i Chief Elections Officer, whose exploits we’ve detailed many times for many months now as a search of his name in the box at the top of the page will reveal.
A month ago we detailed how despite the fact that there are absolutely no required HRS Chapter 91 Administrative Rules Cronin has made some up arbitrarily and capriciously- and illegally- and a judge has ruled that, although Cronin was grossly negligent if not guilty of malfeasance in selecting the electronic voting machines in the Hart InterCivic contract that was struck down by an administrative hearings officer, the election will proceed with the equipment they provided... and of course no rules for their use
But we thought, at least if people want their votes to actually count they can shun the DRE - direct electronic recording- devices and mark their choice on a piece of paper to be read by an optical scanner as Hawai`i voters have done for many years
But an article in yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser dashed all hopes of that because it reports almost all of the walk-in absentee polling locations in O`ahu will contain no paper and optical scan opportunities and force those voting to use the unregulated, un-transparent highly hackable and rigable machines.
Buried deep in the article- and of no particular interest in terms of potential voter fraud to Advertiser Staff Writer Gordon Y.K. Pang- he reports
One thing O'ahu absentee walk-in voters will notice is that electronic voter machines are more prevalent than in the past. Glen Takahashi, the city's election administrator, said only electronic machines will be available to absentee walk-in voters who show up at the Kapolei Hale, Aiea Shopping Center and University of Hawai`i-Manoa Campus Center locations....
Those wishing to conduct absentee walk-in voting on O'ahu and who want to fill in a more traditional paper ballot can only do so at Honolulu Hale or Windward Mall, Takahashi said.
You’d think that the issue of the electronic machines’ reliability- brought up in court as part of a lawsuit on Maui over the lack of any regulations- would be discussed next but Pang prefers to bury his head up the butt of election officials by reporting
Election officials also prefer the electronic system, (Voter Services Section Chief Rex) Quidilla said. The machines don't allow for overvotes, which occur when someone incorrectly punches more than one vote, or more than one party ballot in the primary, he said.
Additionally, it's easier for a voter to correct mistakes before turning in final selections, Quidilla said.
But though we were pretty livid over this next questionable act by self proclaimed “de facto” Election Chief Cronin, attorney Lance Collins who is representing the plaintiffs in the lack of “ad rules” case isn’t shocked in the least. When asked for comment yesterday and he told us:
“Reports about the lack of optical scanners at walk-in voting precincts is not surprising. When a state agency is required to comply with rule making and fails to comply with rule making, there is nothing to stop the agency from changing its rules whenever it wants to.”
Although the current ongoing walk-in voting- at the Historic County Building- the only location on Kaua`i- will be providing paper ballots watch out for the vote eating DRE behemoths... that is if you want your vote to count.
But that was in a different era- one before the reign “King” Kevin “The Minotaur” Cronin as Hawai`i Chief Elections Officer, whose exploits we’ve detailed many times for many months now as a search of his name in the box at the top of the page will reveal.
A month ago we detailed how despite the fact that there are absolutely no required HRS Chapter 91 Administrative Rules Cronin has made some up arbitrarily and capriciously- and illegally- and a judge has ruled that, although Cronin was grossly negligent if not guilty of malfeasance in selecting the electronic voting machines in the Hart InterCivic contract that was struck down by an administrative hearings officer, the election will proceed with the equipment they provided... and of course no rules for their use
But we thought, at least if people want their votes to actually count they can shun the DRE - direct electronic recording- devices and mark their choice on a piece of paper to be read by an optical scanner as Hawai`i voters have done for many years
But an article in yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser dashed all hopes of that because it reports almost all of the walk-in absentee polling locations in O`ahu will contain no paper and optical scan opportunities and force those voting to use the unregulated, un-transparent highly hackable and rigable machines.
Buried deep in the article- and of no particular interest in terms of potential voter fraud to Advertiser Staff Writer Gordon Y.K. Pang- he reports
One thing O'ahu absentee walk-in voters will notice is that electronic voter machines are more prevalent than in the past. Glen Takahashi, the city's election administrator, said only electronic machines will be available to absentee walk-in voters who show up at the Kapolei Hale, Aiea Shopping Center and University of Hawai`i-Manoa Campus Center locations....
Those wishing to conduct absentee walk-in voting on O'ahu and who want to fill in a more traditional paper ballot can only do so at Honolulu Hale or Windward Mall, Takahashi said.
You’d think that the issue of the electronic machines’ reliability- brought up in court as part of a lawsuit on Maui over the lack of any regulations- would be discussed next but Pang prefers to bury his head up the butt of election officials by reporting
Election officials also prefer the electronic system, (Voter Services Section Chief Rex) Quidilla said. The machines don't allow for overvotes, which occur when someone incorrectly punches more than one vote, or more than one party ballot in the primary, he said.
Additionally, it's easier for a voter to correct mistakes before turning in final selections, Quidilla said.
But though we were pretty livid over this next questionable act by self proclaimed “de facto” Election Chief Cronin, attorney Lance Collins who is representing the plaintiffs in the lack of “ad rules” case isn’t shocked in the least. When asked for comment yesterday and he told us:
“Reports about the lack of optical scanners at walk-in voting precincts is not surprising. When a state agency is required to comply with rule making and fails to comply with rule making, there is nothing to stop the agency from changing its rules whenever it wants to.”
Although the current ongoing walk-in voting- at the Historic County Building- the only location on Kaua`i- will be providing paper ballots watch out for the vote eating DRE behemoths... that is if you want your vote to count.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
THE INTIMIDATION OF THE INVECTIVE INCISORS
THE INTIMIDATION OF THE INVECTIVE INCISORS: Despite shield laws such as the one passed in Hawai`i this year journalists and their news gathering efforts are under assault, from the arrest of Amy Goodman at last week’s Republican convention all the way to Kaua`i journalist Joan Conrow’s locked door question by the KPD.
The incident, as Conrow details at her popular local blog KauaiEclectic, describes her interrogation by the three top-ranking officers investigating a simple trespass case.
They locked her in a room and demanded she tell them what she saw, did and heard while reporting on a protest on Aug 7 when eight people pipe-locked themselves together with a “blackbear” device in the Naue seaside graveyard where a vacation-rental is under construction.
Conrow described it this way:
So there I was, with the three top officers in the Patrol Services Bureau arrayed in a semi-circle around me, all armed, in their badges and uniforms, and Arinaga starts off by saying they wanted to talk to me about the Aug. 7 protest over the burials at Naue because they had a lot of photographs taken at the site with people they couldn’t identify, and I was there, wasn’t I? And then he added, before I could waffle, we were just reading your website where you wrote all about it.
I asked if I’d be incriminating myself if I answered and Arinaga said, no, we’re just having a little chat here, so I said, yes, I was there. Then they wanted to know how I’d heard about it, and were other reporters contacted, too, and did I know who had brought the “blackbears” that the protesters used to link themselves together and did I know all the people at the protest or the guys who came from other islands and was Palikapu Dedman a “personal acquaintance” of mine — whatever that means, because aren’t all acquaintances inherently personal? — and finally, did I cover all the protests on the island and was I planning to cover the court hearing on the motion for an injunction to stop construction of Joe Brescia’s house at Naue?
And all the while I'm wondering if they going to arrest me, and if so, did I have enough cash in my purse to post bail, and I was hungry and shaking cold from the AC and I needed to pee. After about 30 or 40 minutes, Ollie walked me to the door, unlocked it and I was free.
Though the protesters left by themselves, Joan reports and we’ve confirmed that at least three of those protesters were arrested at home Friday night after they were threatened with being subject to an arrest warrant in the press the day after the event- a story Conrow broke..
As the protesters worried would happen, despite their requests to let them know when and if they were charged and expressed willingness to come in to pay a $50 bail, they arrested them- unannounced, at they homes, after 5 p.m. on a Friday night.
One of those arrested, Jim Huff of Kapa`a, heard about the first arrest on the North shore and had his wife call the department while he took a shower saying he’d be there right away.
She said she was assured by KPD office Rezentes that he would be allowed to turn himself in. But minutes later officers showed up, handcuffed him and took him to be booked, refusing to even let him drive his own car so he wouldn’t need a chauffeur..
Conrow describes her experience in harrowing detail, not knowing what to do although knowing she was being questioned like she was some kind of co-conspirator in a federal case.
Most journalists like to think they’d have their wits about them and not be taken off guard, We’d hope to be self-aware and unrattled and remind them of a journalist’s ethics regarding unpublished newsgathering- it’s not something one shares with the police.
And the news shield law supposedly protects journalists against this type of abuse and harassment.
The theory behind shield laws is that if people thought the press was working for the police few would ever talk to a journalist. There would be no reporting, just press releases.
If this type of question methodology isn’t a violation of KPD policy one would have to wonder why not... and think “what exactly is?”.
If the three officers are not at least reprimanded for interrogating a woman with the door closed and no other woman present it won’t be a surprise to ex-Kaua`i reporter Anthony Sommer whose new book has KPD and the rest of the county government on edge.
“KPD Blue”, which was finally released in full on Monday, describes all sorts of sexism, racism, bigotry and downright corrupt behavior that make this incident seem routine. PNN’s serializing of the book continues with Chapter 5 this weekend.
As in his book Sommer doesn’t pull any punches in his analysis of this incident either. In a email he told us:
"The sad part is that the KPD middle management is only proving that by winning their long political battle to rid themselves of outsiders and place one of 'their own' in the chief's office the end result is maintaining a very ugly status quo.
"There will be no change, there will be no reform, there will be no respect for the rule of law and the rights of individuals. The KPD middle management is and will remain simply a gang of thugs in blue.
"For a senior KPD officer and his swaggering sidekicks to gang up on her (or any reporter) behind locked doors after business hours in police headquarters and attempt to mentally rubber hose her into giving them the names of her news sources is something out of a 1930s gangster movie (probably used as training films at the KPD Academy).
"And as a tactic for gaining police intelligence, it's pretty damned stupid. A reporter may swap information but never will burn a source by revealing the source's name.
"A smart cop should know it's a violation of Hawaii's Reporter Shield Law to even ask the question.
"For Arinaga to then tell her what a nice guy he is because he could have had her arrested and hauled in for questioning is an unconscionable lie. What's the crime? Where's the probable cause to justify the arrest? And where are her Miranda rights? Total macho bullshit. And all too typical.
"Even more sad is that all you'll hear is silence from those public officials on Kauai who should be criticizing the police for their conduct in this situation and disciplining those responsible.
"Has His Interim Honor the interim mayor voiced his concern? Has the new, improved Police Chief hauled Arinaga on the carpet for a butt-chewing? Has the watch dog Police Commission promised an investigation? Is the ever-vigilant Ethics Commission looking into it? What about The Great Police Reformer currently running for mayor?
"On Kauai, only the sounds of silence (with apologies to Paul Simon)."
PNN has learned through reliable sources that the KPD also contacted The Garden Island (TGI) newspaper asking for pictures and information gathered at the protest. Editor Adam Harju told us today he cannot comment at this time.
Kaua`i county spokesperson Mary Daubert said she was unable to get a response by press time to an email sent this morning asking for comment from KPD on the incident.
No one minds sharing information with the police of the “they went that-a-way”. nature after a bank robbery.
But this incident appears to be way beyond the pale. Bringing a journalist into a little locked room with three big men in blue- no matter how “nice” they were- and asking for more details of a story she covered as a reporter violates the state shield law and can’t have been KPD policy before the law went into effect this year either.
The irony is that Joan has been one of new KPD Chief Darryl Perry’s biggest supporters since he became Chief last year.
Recently, community activists got into a verbal battle in the press over what people said was his over-militarization of the force through the recent purchases of tasers, riot gear and a mobile incident command center vehicle.
Conrow stood by Perry as a reformer and someone who would never condone this type of activity from his officers but the dust up resulted in columnist Juan Wilson’s firing from TGI after he criticized the martial marshaling.
The chief has a weekly column too where he takes questions from the public. So hey-Darryl, we gotcha question right hea.
The incident, as Conrow details at her popular local blog KauaiEclectic, describes her interrogation by the three top-ranking officers investigating a simple trespass case.
They locked her in a room and demanded she tell them what she saw, did and heard while reporting on a protest on Aug 7 when eight people pipe-locked themselves together with a “blackbear” device in the Naue seaside graveyard where a vacation-rental is under construction.
Conrow described it this way:
So there I was, with the three top officers in the Patrol Services Bureau arrayed in a semi-circle around me, all armed, in their badges and uniforms, and Arinaga starts off by saying they wanted to talk to me about the Aug. 7 protest over the burials at Naue because they had a lot of photographs taken at the site with people they couldn’t identify, and I was there, wasn’t I? And then he added, before I could waffle, we were just reading your website where you wrote all about it.
I asked if I’d be incriminating myself if I answered and Arinaga said, no, we’re just having a little chat here, so I said, yes, I was there. Then they wanted to know how I’d heard about it, and were other reporters contacted, too, and did I know who had brought the “blackbears” that the protesters used to link themselves together and did I know all the people at the protest or the guys who came from other islands and was Palikapu Dedman a “personal acquaintance” of mine — whatever that means, because aren’t all acquaintances inherently personal? — and finally, did I cover all the protests on the island and was I planning to cover the court hearing on the motion for an injunction to stop construction of Joe Brescia’s house at Naue?
And all the while I'm wondering if they going to arrest me, and if so, did I have enough cash in my purse to post bail, and I was hungry and shaking cold from the AC and I needed to pee. After about 30 or 40 minutes, Ollie walked me to the door, unlocked it and I was free.
Though the protesters left by themselves, Joan reports and we’ve confirmed that at least three of those protesters were arrested at home Friday night after they were threatened with being subject to an arrest warrant in the press the day after the event- a story Conrow broke..
As the protesters worried would happen, despite their requests to let them know when and if they were charged and expressed willingness to come in to pay a $50 bail, they arrested them- unannounced, at they homes, after 5 p.m. on a Friday night.
One of those arrested, Jim Huff of Kapa`a, heard about the first arrest on the North shore and had his wife call the department while he took a shower saying he’d be there right away.
She said she was assured by KPD office Rezentes that he would be allowed to turn himself in. But minutes later officers showed up, handcuffed him and took him to be booked, refusing to even let him drive his own car so he wouldn’t need a chauffeur..
Conrow describes her experience in harrowing detail, not knowing what to do although knowing she was being questioned like she was some kind of co-conspirator in a federal case.
Most journalists like to think they’d have their wits about them and not be taken off guard, We’d hope to be self-aware and unrattled and remind them of a journalist’s ethics regarding unpublished newsgathering- it’s not something one shares with the police.
And the news shield law supposedly protects journalists against this type of abuse and harassment.
The theory behind shield laws is that if people thought the press was working for the police few would ever talk to a journalist. There would be no reporting, just press releases.
If this type of question methodology isn’t a violation of KPD policy one would have to wonder why not... and think “what exactly is?”.
If the three officers are not at least reprimanded for interrogating a woman with the door closed and no other woman present it won’t be a surprise to ex-Kaua`i reporter Anthony Sommer whose new book has KPD and the rest of the county government on edge.
“KPD Blue”, which was finally released in full on Monday, describes all sorts of sexism, racism, bigotry and downright corrupt behavior that make this incident seem routine. PNN’s serializing of the book continues with Chapter 5 this weekend.
As in his book Sommer doesn’t pull any punches in his analysis of this incident either. In a email he told us:
"The sad part is that the KPD middle management is only proving that by winning their long political battle to rid themselves of outsiders and place one of 'their own' in the chief's office the end result is maintaining a very ugly status quo.
"There will be no change, there will be no reform, there will be no respect for the rule of law and the rights of individuals. The KPD middle management is and will remain simply a gang of thugs in blue.
"For a senior KPD officer and his swaggering sidekicks to gang up on her (or any reporter) behind locked doors after business hours in police headquarters and attempt to mentally rubber hose her into giving them the names of her news sources is something out of a 1930s gangster movie (probably used as training films at the KPD Academy).
"And as a tactic for gaining police intelligence, it's pretty damned stupid. A reporter may swap information but never will burn a source by revealing the source's name.
"A smart cop should know it's a violation of Hawaii's Reporter Shield Law to even ask the question.
"For Arinaga to then tell her what a nice guy he is because he could have had her arrested and hauled in for questioning is an unconscionable lie. What's the crime? Where's the probable cause to justify the arrest? And where are her Miranda rights? Total macho bullshit. And all too typical.
"Even more sad is that all you'll hear is silence from those public officials on Kauai who should be criticizing the police for their conduct in this situation and disciplining those responsible.
"Has His Interim Honor the interim mayor voiced his concern? Has the new, improved Police Chief hauled Arinaga on the carpet for a butt-chewing? Has the watch dog Police Commission promised an investigation? Is the ever-vigilant Ethics Commission looking into it? What about The Great Police Reformer currently running for mayor?
"On Kauai, only the sounds of silence (with apologies to Paul Simon)."
PNN has learned through reliable sources that the KPD also contacted The Garden Island (TGI) newspaper asking for pictures and information gathered at the protest. Editor Adam Harju told us today he cannot comment at this time.
Kaua`i county spokesperson Mary Daubert said she was unable to get a response by press time to an email sent this morning asking for comment from KPD on the incident.
No one minds sharing information with the police of the “they went that-a-way”. nature after a bank robbery.
But this incident appears to be way beyond the pale. Bringing a journalist into a little locked room with three big men in blue- no matter how “nice” they were- and asking for more details of a story she covered as a reporter violates the state shield law and can’t have been KPD policy before the law went into effect this year either.
The irony is that Joan has been one of new KPD Chief Darryl Perry’s biggest supporters since he became Chief last year.
Recently, community activists got into a verbal battle in the press over what people said was his over-militarization of the force through the recent purchases of tasers, riot gear and a mobile incident command center vehicle.
Conrow stood by Perry as a reformer and someone who would never condone this type of activity from his officers but the dust up resulted in columnist Juan Wilson’s firing from TGI after he criticized the martial marshaling.
The chief has a weekly column too where he takes questions from the public. So hey-Darryl, we gotcha question right hea.
Monday, September 8, 2008
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.
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.
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