JUST PUT IT IN HIS BOW- HE’LL EAT IT. The only mainstream media reporter in Hawai`i trying to make sense out of the nonsensical, rules-are-for-suckers Hawai`i Elections Bureau- the Honolulu Advertiser’s Derrick DePledge- is at it again, this time trying to divine just why so few people chose to use the electronic voting machines known as DREs in September’s primaries
And again he turned to elections observer Bart Dame in the attempt..
But in doing so he just might have exposed why the oft-criticized elections chief Kevin Cronin chose to sign off on a $41 million HartIntercivic contract to provide voting equipment instead of the competing ES&S bid which would have cost less than half that.
In his blog DePledge says that:
Election observers looking at the performance of the state’s new voting machines given the legal challenge to the contract caught an interesting pattern after the September primary.
Voters overwhelmingly opted for paper ballots fed through eScan optical-scanners over the electronic eSlate machines.
On primary day, when voters could choose between the two machines at precincts, only 7.5 percent picked the electronic machines.
Just 14.4 percent voted on the electronic machines during both early voting and primary day a figure one observer — Democratic activist Bart Dame — argues is inflated because voters were only given the choice of electronic machines at three early voting locations on O’ahu.
But it took a comment on the post to give some insight into the statistics. ”Poll Worker” wrote
As a poll worker during the September Primary I am a firsthand witness to what actually took place. We had only one electronic machine assigned to our polling place. It generally took 4 times as long for people using the electronic machine than doing a paper ballot. In fact, more than half of those who initially wanted to use the electronic machine changed their minds because they didn’t want to wait around. The time it took each person to vote using the electronic machine made it pointless to offer voters the electronic option because we knew they would only change their minds after waiting 5-10 minutes
Dame then went further in explaining what happened on the ground
An optical scan machine can handle many more voters than the electronic machine. Voters are given a paper ballot and sent to a canvas voting booth to mark it with a pen. To handle more voters, you just need to provide more canvas voting booths and pens. Regardless of how long it takes for a voter to decide how to mark their ballot, other voters can continue to receive and mark their ballots and flow around them. At the end, the voter waits in a short line to insert their ballot into the optical scan machine. The actual contact of voter with the machine should be about 20-30 seconds per voter....
Voters using the DREs (”electronic voting machines”) each spent several minutes in contact with the machine. To avoid lines, we would need an additional DRE for each waiting voter (as compared to an additional pen for optical scan voters). In locales where they use all DRE voting machines, the lines snake out the door and the waits can be for hours.
The problem is not unique to Hawai`i or this year’s election. Those who followed the theft of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio know that the exclusive use of DREs there, especially in minority and Democratic leaning precincts, caused stupendously long lines that snaked around city blocks, causing many to turn around and go home.
Anyone who has been involved in elections has figured out that there are dozens of reasons why the DREs are far inferior to plain old paper ballots counted via an “optical scan” machine the way SAT tests have been, for the most part, reliably given and scored for 50 years.
But somehow we’ve ended up with a new Chief Elections Officer who was not only not from the islands and therefore is not familiar with people’s voting habits- something any voting administrator will tell you is of utmost importance- but someone who had no experience administrating elections whatsoever
“King” Kevin Cronin- the self proclaimed “de facto” Elections Chief and Wisconsin import- came in earlier this year and apparently decided that DREs were not just to be used for those who needed them due to disability- as the law requires- but for every voter
Perhaps that’s because he’s of a generation that is many times dazzled by computer age gizmos but has no knowledge of how they work or how and when to use them- or, more importantly, how they don’t work and how and when not to use them.
And so rather than provide DREs on special request or for those who really need them and process the rest with easy to use and verifiable, paper ballots he decided to fall for pitch for the stuff with all the bells and whistles... and none of the reliability and simplicity voters clamor for
And, although he reportedly denies favoring one method over the other, it’s apparent from their sole use in most O`ahu early voting locations that rather than providing a single DRE at each location along with paper ballots, he’d prefer to spread them far and wide and force voters to use them whether they want to use them or not.
All the horrors of proprietary codes, lack of verifiable results and other negatives of the DREs aside, just the cost of using them is something that would raise even a simpleton’s eyebrows.
The numbers are apparently there for Cronin’s Elections Bureau to do a real analysis of what the cost is to provide for each vote being cast for both the DREs and the optically scanned paper ballots.
But a quick back of the envelope calculation shows that any comparison between the time-consuming, hassle-ridden, costly DREs and the simplicity, speed and low cost of a pen, some printed paper and a single simple scanning counting machine, makes it not just no contest but could even mean thousands of times the cost for per vote for those who use DREs.
That would explain why one bid was for twice the other, And it would explain why the administrative hearings officer threw out the bid and chastised Cronin whose blinding by science apparently caused him to pick the new expensive model instead of the old reliable one.
Just a little more grist for the bone mill in the labyrinth of the Minotaur.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
GIVE HIM A BISCUIT AD MAYBE HE WON’T BITE YA
GIVE HIM A BISCUIT AD MAYBE HE WON’T BITE YA: Often when people criticize the actions of government they end their rant with the phrase “they must think we’re stupid”.
But that kind of statement implies a falsehood- the proposition that in fact that “we” aren’t... stupid that is. And there’s nothing that makes people stupider than money
And so the town of Kekaha met last night to decide what to do with the bribe that the administration and council came up with to get people on the far Westside to let them expand the landfill by paying them off with about a third of a million dollars “for the community”.
And the residents did what any group of people would do when given a big pile of money- they started squabbling over it.
What’s really going on here is a not-so-hair-brained scheme that assumes- probably rightly- that it’s going to be possible to do what otherwise has been impossible for the last 20 years due to individual community opposition putting a landfill in any neighborhood.
This trial balloon bestows taxpayer money upon Kekaha and according to at least one person in attendance, though the smelly site and rumbling trucks on the highway were unbearably and disgustingly objectionable just last year, now apparently money changes everything.
It seems that no one at the meeting- called to decide how to spend the money- now objects to the landfill anymore. But they do however object to being told how to spend the money.
Because County Engineer Donald Fujimoto revealed the attached strings last night by telling people that the county is forming a “citizen’s advisory board” to decide and the board will contain five members of the county administration and “eight community members” all of whom will be selected not by the community but by the mayor.
“That’s nonsense” says former mayoral candidate Rolf Bieber. “How is that a community process when the people are all selected by the mayor?”
Bieber described another of those PowerPoint presentations we talked about yesterday- a fancy name for 14 pages of big print containing outline subject headings, projected like a slide show on a screen with about enough content to fill one side of a sheet of paper.
In it Fujimoto told the crowd the parameters as to how the people were to be allowed to bicker over how to spend the cash.
Bieber also asked, as many at the meeting did, just what “the Kekaha community” is?
According to residents the worst part of the existence of the landfill in Kekaha is the trucks that rumble through town on their way to the dump. But unaddressed by the county is the fact that everyone along the highway all over the island has four wheels and flies rumbling by in an inversely proportionally diminishing number as the distance from the dump increases.
“So where’s the cash for those living right on the highway in Kekaha” asked residents, failing of course to ask that the money also be distributed to those on the highway outside of Kekaha, although some Waimea people in attendance weren’t happy they weren’t considered part of Kekaha and so not getting any of the new-found riches.
But this whole payoff to Kekaha is really just a way to try to deal with the fact that, though “everyone” wants a new landfill on Kaua`i no one wants it in their backyard.
That’s been the bugaboo for the last 20 years. in which time each attempt to site a new dump has met with such fierce opposition from the “host community” that the county council’s already pathetic lack of political will was diminished seven times over.
The answer to the questions “how dumb do they think we are” may not have a strict quantitative bottom but whatever the level of stupidity is, it apparently increases in direct proportion to the amount of money people are paid to be idiots.
So the plan is obviously to pick a community and pay off those who are on the other side of town so they’ll come out and actually support the siting of a new landfill even though their neighbors don’t want it in their back yard.
Knowing how self absorbed and greedy people are it’s not that bad of a “wool over the eyes" plan.
Suppose they want to put a new dump where the old one was in Kapa`a. You can bet anyone who lives in the area within 1000 yards of it won’t care how much money is thrown at the town- they won’t want it.
And in the past all else being equal their neighbors – even those five miles away- supported them and maybe even turned out en masse at a council meeting and threatened the pols with political oblivion if they put a dump in Kapa`a.
But if Kekaha is any example once there’s cold currency on the table the amount people who care if a dump is placed “in Kapa`a” is inversely proportional to how far away they live- the greater the distance, the less the concern. Someone in Kapahi or Wailua Homesteads or Houselots will probably take their bribe and shut up about it.
Is this how we want our cash-strapped county’s money spent- dividing and conquering our communities by paying them off with a new neighborhood center or swimming pool?
This actually goes back to the question of why the heck we are siting a new landfill in the first place instead of looking at a Zero-Waste program.
The answer, as we described in June, is that the money for another bogus study from favorite consultant RW Beck was recently spent for the third time and so we’re stuck throwing good money after bad for the next 50 years according to the incumbent councilpeople and many of their flummoxed newbie wannabe sycophants in this year’s election like Derik Kawakami, Dickie Chang and Ron Agor.
And its supported by both mayoral candidates.
The real solution- as we’ve said to no avail before- is to ship our trash back where it came from- the mainland.
Landfills in the northwest are fighting over the chance to take the last dribs and drabs of waste that cannot be recycled, reused and composted- and then even burned, if the Beck recommendations are implemented.
But the largess for the companies who run the current system is so great that the pols, who get their campaign cash from them, are bound to kow-tow.
And for more pressure look only as far as the county workers who irrationally fear they will lose jobs- irrationally because the jobs will just be switched over to loading the stuff on a barge rather than trucking it to a landfill.
Though the claim is made that it would be more expensive to ship it back, that contention- made going back to the beginning of the Kusaka administration- is not just shibai but has never been shown to be true in any of the numerous consultant studies. That’s because they have refused to actually quantify it in the Beck reports, despite promises from mayors and councilpeople to study the option.
And if we are going to be paying yearly hush money to a town to accept a new dump, the cost of landfilling is only going up.
Not only that but we now know that the price of the landfill is going to be twice of what the early guesstimates were and are increasing all the time, along with the number and types of expensive EPA requirements for opening maintaining and closing them.
When Honolulu recently started shipping it’s trash back - although only partially and supposedly temporarily- their announced total costs were even less than our current Kaua`i landfill “tipping fee” and that doesn’t include all the extra and hidden costs of the process.
And it doesn’t include the Beck proposed tipping fee increases since the fee doesn’t cover costs now.
And in an ecological sense shipping it back make perfect sense. Once you remove the greenwaste, 100% of our trash came from off island to begin with,. Does it make more sense to use our tiny island area and throw all the stuff we bring in into a hole or to send it back to where it came from where land is 1/100th the price and 100 times more available?
But instead of doing something that makes sense and is ecologically sound – and arguably would cost less money- we still act like the Minotaur- we “will do what’s wrong as long as we can”.
How stupid do they think we are? We’re not sure why but somehow the words to the following Bobby Dylan seem appropriate.
On The Road Again
Well, I wake up in the morning
There's frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she's a-hidin'
Inside the icebox
Your daddy walks in wearin'
A Napoleon Bonarparte mask
Then you ask why I don't live here
Honey, do you have to ask ?
Well, I go to pet your monkey
I get a face full of claws
I ask who's in the fireplace
And you tell me Santa Claus
The milkman comes in
He's wearing a derby hat
And you ask why I don't live here
Honey, how come you have to ask me that ?
Well, I asked for something to eat
I'm hungry as a hog
So I get brown rice, seaweed
And a dirty hot dog
I've got a hole
Where my stomach disappeared
Then you ask why I don't live here
Honey, I gotta think you're really weird.
Your grandpa's cane
It turns into a sword
Your grandma prays to pictures
That are pasted on a board
Everything inside my pockets
Your uncle steals
And you ask me why I don't live here
Honey, I can't believe that you're for real.
Well, there's fist fight in the kitchen
They're enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in
Even he's gotta take a side
Even the butler
He's got something to prove
Then you ask me why I don't live here
Honey, how come you don't move ?
But that kind of statement implies a falsehood- the proposition that in fact that “we” aren’t... stupid that is. And there’s nothing that makes people stupider than money
And so the town of Kekaha met last night to decide what to do with the bribe that the administration and council came up with to get people on the far Westside to let them expand the landfill by paying them off with about a third of a million dollars “for the community”.
And the residents did what any group of people would do when given a big pile of money- they started squabbling over it.
What’s really going on here is a not-so-hair-brained scheme that assumes- probably rightly- that it’s going to be possible to do what otherwise has been impossible for the last 20 years due to individual community opposition putting a landfill in any neighborhood.
This trial balloon bestows taxpayer money upon Kekaha and according to at least one person in attendance, though the smelly site and rumbling trucks on the highway were unbearably and disgustingly objectionable just last year, now apparently money changes everything.
It seems that no one at the meeting- called to decide how to spend the money- now objects to the landfill anymore. But they do however object to being told how to spend the money.
Because County Engineer Donald Fujimoto revealed the attached strings last night by telling people that the county is forming a “citizen’s advisory board” to decide and the board will contain five members of the county administration and “eight community members” all of whom will be selected not by the community but by the mayor.
“That’s nonsense” says former mayoral candidate Rolf Bieber. “How is that a community process when the people are all selected by the mayor?”
Bieber described another of those PowerPoint presentations we talked about yesterday- a fancy name for 14 pages of big print containing outline subject headings, projected like a slide show on a screen with about enough content to fill one side of a sheet of paper.
In it Fujimoto told the crowd the parameters as to how the people were to be allowed to bicker over how to spend the cash.
Bieber also asked, as many at the meeting did, just what “the Kekaha community” is?
According to residents the worst part of the existence of the landfill in Kekaha is the trucks that rumble through town on their way to the dump. But unaddressed by the county is the fact that everyone along the highway all over the island has four wheels and flies rumbling by in an inversely proportionally diminishing number as the distance from the dump increases.
“So where’s the cash for those living right on the highway in Kekaha” asked residents, failing of course to ask that the money also be distributed to those on the highway outside of Kekaha, although some Waimea people in attendance weren’t happy they weren’t considered part of Kekaha and so not getting any of the new-found riches.
But this whole payoff to Kekaha is really just a way to try to deal with the fact that, though “everyone” wants a new landfill on Kaua`i no one wants it in their backyard.
That’s been the bugaboo for the last 20 years. in which time each attempt to site a new dump has met with such fierce opposition from the “host community” that the county council’s already pathetic lack of political will was diminished seven times over.
The answer to the questions “how dumb do they think we are” may not have a strict quantitative bottom but whatever the level of stupidity is, it apparently increases in direct proportion to the amount of money people are paid to be idiots.
So the plan is obviously to pick a community and pay off those who are on the other side of town so they’ll come out and actually support the siting of a new landfill even though their neighbors don’t want it in their back yard.
Knowing how self absorbed and greedy people are it’s not that bad of a “wool over the eyes" plan.
Suppose they want to put a new dump where the old one was in Kapa`a. You can bet anyone who lives in the area within 1000 yards of it won’t care how much money is thrown at the town- they won’t want it.
And in the past all else being equal their neighbors – even those five miles away- supported them and maybe even turned out en masse at a council meeting and threatened the pols with political oblivion if they put a dump in Kapa`a.
But if Kekaha is any example once there’s cold currency on the table the amount people who care if a dump is placed “in Kapa`a” is inversely proportional to how far away they live- the greater the distance, the less the concern. Someone in Kapahi or Wailua Homesteads or Houselots will probably take their bribe and shut up about it.
Is this how we want our cash-strapped county’s money spent- dividing and conquering our communities by paying them off with a new neighborhood center or swimming pool?
This actually goes back to the question of why the heck we are siting a new landfill in the first place instead of looking at a Zero-Waste program.
The answer, as we described in June, is that the money for another bogus study from favorite consultant RW Beck was recently spent for the third time and so we’re stuck throwing good money after bad for the next 50 years according to the incumbent councilpeople and many of their flummoxed newbie wannabe sycophants in this year’s election like Derik Kawakami, Dickie Chang and Ron Agor.
And its supported by both mayoral candidates.
The real solution- as we’ve said to no avail before- is to ship our trash back where it came from- the mainland.
Landfills in the northwest are fighting over the chance to take the last dribs and drabs of waste that cannot be recycled, reused and composted- and then even burned, if the Beck recommendations are implemented.
But the largess for the companies who run the current system is so great that the pols, who get their campaign cash from them, are bound to kow-tow.
And for more pressure look only as far as the county workers who irrationally fear they will lose jobs- irrationally because the jobs will just be switched over to loading the stuff on a barge rather than trucking it to a landfill.
Though the claim is made that it would be more expensive to ship it back, that contention- made going back to the beginning of the Kusaka administration- is not just shibai but has never been shown to be true in any of the numerous consultant studies. That’s because they have refused to actually quantify it in the Beck reports, despite promises from mayors and councilpeople to study the option.
And if we are going to be paying yearly hush money to a town to accept a new dump, the cost of landfilling is only going up.
Not only that but we now know that the price of the landfill is going to be twice of what the early guesstimates were and are increasing all the time, along with the number and types of expensive EPA requirements for opening maintaining and closing them.
When Honolulu recently started shipping it’s trash back - although only partially and supposedly temporarily- their announced total costs were even less than our current Kaua`i landfill “tipping fee” and that doesn’t include all the extra and hidden costs of the process.
And it doesn’t include the Beck proposed tipping fee increases since the fee doesn’t cover costs now.
And in an ecological sense shipping it back make perfect sense. Once you remove the greenwaste, 100% of our trash came from off island to begin with,. Does it make more sense to use our tiny island area and throw all the stuff we bring in into a hole or to send it back to where it came from where land is 1/100th the price and 100 times more available?
But instead of doing something that makes sense and is ecologically sound – and arguably would cost less money- we still act like the Minotaur- we “will do what’s wrong as long as we can”.
How stupid do they think we are? We’re not sure why but somehow the words to the following Bobby Dylan seem appropriate.
On The Road Again
Well, I wake up in the morning
There's frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she's a-hidin'
Inside the icebox
Your daddy walks in wearin'
A Napoleon Bonarparte mask
Then you ask why I don't live here
Honey, do you have to ask ?
Well, I go to pet your monkey
I get a face full of claws
I ask who's in the fireplace
And you tell me Santa Claus
The milkman comes in
He's wearing a derby hat
And you ask why I don't live here
Honey, how come you have to ask me that ?
Well, I asked for something to eat
I'm hungry as a hog
So I get brown rice, seaweed
And a dirty hot dog
I've got a hole
Where my stomach disappeared
Then you ask why I don't live here
Honey, I gotta think you're really weird.
Your grandpa's cane
It turns into a sword
Your grandma prays to pictures
That are pasted on a board
Everything inside my pockets
Your uncle steals
And you ask me why I don't live here
Honey, I can't believe that you're for real.
Well, there's fist fight in the kitchen
They're enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in
Even he's gotta take a side
Even the butler
He's got something to prove
Then you ask me why I don't live here
Honey, how come you don't move ?
Monday, October 6, 2008
SAME KENNEL, NEW DOG
SAME KENNEL, NEW DOG: After eight years of rule by the village idiot it appears the presidency will go to someone who has at least a modicum of pia mater although if it somehow is John McCain it will be neurons that are addled by a combination of mindless militarism, post traumatic stress disorder and creeping crotchety-old-man syndrome.
But though the country might escape a continuation our recent fate, as promulgated by the ultimate application of The Peter Principle, the county isn’t so lucky.
Because unless JoAnn Yukimura suddenly grows a pair and delineates his fraudulency, Bernard Carvalho, she will lose to the dumbest man ever elected to pubic office on Kaua`i... and that’s saying a lot.
Seemingly it’s a well kept secret that not only is Carvalho vapidly mindless in his campaign, he has spent the last six years being the lack of brains behind the insipidly destructive Bryan Baptiste administration.
Though it boggles the mind of outside observers that Kaua`i voters continually vote for the least competent mayoral candidate every fours years, apparently Kaua`i voters’ complaints over our crumbling infrastructure, lack of housing, decrepit and often disgusting parks and recreational facilities are forgotten when they step into the voting booth.
Because when you look down the list of the worst of our problems and the lack of government response over the last six years you’ll see one name in charge of almost all of them- Barnard Carvalho.
A little recent history. As soon as Batiste was elected he immediately took all the “agencies” in the county- those not created by the County Charter- and smushed together all these “loose end departments” that were created as a loophole of unaccountability from past administrations.
It was called the Community Assistance “Department” (CAD) although technically it wasn’t a department at all.
It encompassed those administrative functions that had answered directly to the mayor’s office under former Mayor Marianne Kusaka in order to make sure power was enhanced in her office.
Unfortunately that also added accountability and that was one thing Baptiste would never stand for.
Now when Baptiste took over he needed to reward one of his chief campaign supporters, his buddy from hamabada days (little kid time for all you malahini) Carvalho and also isolate himself from blame for screwing up when it came time for reelection.
And as luck would have it - and perhaps not so strangely because they were subject to lessened accountability and transparency- some the worst problems on Kaua`i were regulated by those agencies.
The CAD was created as an added layer of bureaucracy and combined the Agency on Elderly Affairs, the Housing Agency and the Transportation Agency.
And for good measure, because Carvalho wasn’t qualified for those- or any- areas of oversight, the Division of Parks & Recreation from the Public Works Department. was added.
Carvalho was Kusaka’s politically appointed recreation chief at the time but his having never been an administrator before didn’t seem to phase Baptiste. The Mayor actually left some park functions in the DPW, creating the typical split-function nightmare of dual administration.
And Carvalho proceeded to take the already orphan and neglected areas of executive management and run them into the ground.
It’s not a secret that there was- and is and will be for a quite a while- a housing crisis on Kaua`i. It was a crisis in the 2002 election when Baptiste was first elected and after Carvalho’s reign it has become an un-addressed calamity.
Not only has the county failed to provide housing but it took six years just to develop a policy and the policy was developed through the first of Carvalho’s infamous “tasks forces”.
These task forces were generally groups of county employees, revolving-door-connected business honchos and assorted good old boys who held closed door meetings, never took public input and presented thin gruel to the council for approval when they were done.
The results of Carvalho’s housing efforts are self apparent- Kaua`i is still the only county that has no public housing and the whole effort has been comprised of trying to allow developers to not comply with zoning, planning and permitting.
And perhaps worst of all it was solely designed to create for-sale “affordable” housing that even the housing chief acknowledged to the council wasn’t affordable- or even appropriate- especially for those who needed it most.
There is an even worse result of this- the feds have had the housing agency on a short leash because they are not serving the people who they’re supposed to serve- those who need rental housing and make less than 50% of the median income.
There is some for-sale so-called “affordable” housing “ that’s been created- all by developers, not the county, although some was required during development and subdivision.
But the only people who can afford it are those making more than 120%, many times even 160% of the median income although it’s really supposed to serve those making 100% or less, preferably 80% by law.
But it’s set up so that no one at the lower levels can get a loan for the price of these “affordable” houses so they go to those who make more.
And of course the Baptiste administration with Carvalho in charge of the Housing Agency did not create, start to finish, one unit of rental housing, the greatest need of all on Kaua`i.
But every time the council- which is certainly not blameless- called in Carvalho to explain, when they eventually got him there he would bring some simplistic “PowerPoint presentation”.
These glorified slide shows would inevitably detail the bare bones of a future plan and try to hide what everyone knew already- we weren’t doing diddley-squat for anyone who needed it.
Carvalho has become the tongue-in-cheek “King of the PowerPoint”, proudly presenting his useless and uninspiring pages of large print banalities, usually bestowed after delaying any report to the council for months on end, only to not really answer any questions much less provide any info when the long awaited “answers” finally came.
Year after year it’s been the same, with the council asking “what have you done” and Carvalho answering “here’s what we are going to do.”
The conditions of our parks and county facilities is infamous across the world with newspaper and magazine articles and word of mouth disparagements that make tourism official cringe- all detailing our disgusting bathrooms, trash filled parks and other neglected facilities.
And with Carvalho in chare it’s only gotten worse.
But perhaps Carvalho’s biggest fiasco was his biggest project- the costly corruption-plagued boondoggle of the “Bike Path” project, the “jewel” in Baptiste’s tarnished crown.
From start to non-finish the path has been a plague of problems from wasted funds to un-permitted structures and a plethora of violations of county code and state and federal law, all detailed at county council meetings .
The “29 bike path questions” for Carvalho and his people that the county council asked years ago remain unanswered and apparently will since the ones who wouldn’t let the list die- Mel Rapozo and Shaylene Iseri-Carvalho- will no longer be on the council two months from now.
Again Bernard Carvalho’s answer to all the problems was to, after he delayed appearances and answers as long as he could, form another secretive “task force” which never did answer the questions.
Carvalho even managed to dodge and weave so long that Baptiste’s sycophant Councilmember Tim “don’t confuse me with the facts” Bynum- who was responsible for many of the bike path abuses as a civilian before being elected- got so impatient he seemed to have forgotten that the questions hadn’t already been answered, saying in fact they had been and using as evidence the fact that it had taken so long to get answers..... that and those magnificent PowerPoint presentations..
But the task force did help do one thing- they lent a hand in creating the dog walking ignominy by apparently getting Carvalho to implement a secret “declaration” of the path as a “linear park”, causing an uproar in the community and packed council chambers for months.
The secret bike path task force hasn’t said where the money is going to come from to finish the path- a path originally funded as a bike path but which now has somehow morphed into a “multi-use path”, in violation of the policy for distribution of the federal funding that declares the path must be “primarily for transportation (and) not recreation”.
That’s the reason that despite the fact that the original $40 million in federal funds is long gone- having in part been wasted on amenities along the path, many illegally constructed without permits or required shoreline certifications- they must complete the whole 16 miles to make true their “transportation” claim that got them the money in the first place.
It’s also the reason for the beach-side path’s mauka detour as described in the local paper Sunday.
The article says that “Phase III” is now ready for launch and in order to complete the segment the ocean-hugging path is now going to go through the parking lots of Safeway and Foodland and across the highway twice- once trough the busiest most congested intersection on Kaua`i, the focal point of the infamous Kapa`a traffic jumble..
Another part of the reason for that bit of insanity is that the “county matching” for the $40 million has been in the form of donated land and they’ve run out of land to be donated.
So they essentially eliminated most of a 30-year-old requirement that the two shopping centers build a bridge connecting them so they could get the bike path land in the parking lot to fulfill the rest of the “match”.
Perhaps the most striking of Carvalho’s idiocies was his creation of the Lydgate camping area were he cost the county big bucks by failing to ask anybody that mattered how to both do it and comply with the law.
Instead he and his again secret “task force” didn’t bother to comply with the minimal requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act and actually built the campground in violation of that and other laws before eventually having to tear it out and build it again..
It might have come to light in time to stop it but Carvalho’s penchant for secrecy made sure no one even knew about it before it was built... except for those in his secret group.
Transportation? Do you have to ask what Bernard is done? If so perhaps you haven’t driven in Kapa`a or tried to depend on the Kauai Bus which hasn’t “gone anywhere” in Carvalho’s years in charge.
And his Elderly Affairs Agency has decreased services such as meals on wheels and other programs under his tutelage.
And this is the front runner in our mayoral race. And that may be because Carvalho’s opponent seems to be happily skipping her way to a loss to this babooze without actually talking about his and the Baptiste administrations corruption and general incompetence.
In the year of the ”change” election she apparently refuses to allude to the need for it locally.
Even knowing that Carvalho will continue the policies – and more importantly retain the appointed personnel- of the Baptiste administration there’s not a word out JoAnn Yukimura about “cleaning house”, especially in the Planning Department where her nemesis Ian Costa has run a rubber stamp operation and where the word “planning” is not what they do but merely the name of the department.
Will JoAnn wake up and delineate the issues? Or will she just sit back and let Bernard coast into office.
Maybe the JoAnn of 20 years ago might have fought for the community she says she loves but don’t hold your breath nowadays.
According to some close to her campaign she wants others to criticize Bernard for her.
But no one in the mainstream media is going to repeat the rantings of a Kapa`a blogger or anyone else. If she’s going to play this game of letting others speak for her she’s most assuredly going to lose because that’s not the way the press works.
She’s got the only megaphone that matters. Because the media- and the voters for that matter- always need to hear it from the candidates themselves. And that goes double for Kaua`i where the press is a joke to begin with.
If she continues to snooze her way toward November 4 we’ll all be in for a rude awakening on December 1.
But though the country might escape a continuation our recent fate, as promulgated by the ultimate application of The Peter Principle, the county isn’t so lucky.
Because unless JoAnn Yukimura suddenly grows a pair and delineates his fraudulency, Bernard Carvalho, she will lose to the dumbest man ever elected to pubic office on Kaua`i... and that’s saying a lot.
Seemingly it’s a well kept secret that not only is Carvalho vapidly mindless in his campaign, he has spent the last six years being the lack of brains behind the insipidly destructive Bryan Baptiste administration.
Though it boggles the mind of outside observers that Kaua`i voters continually vote for the least competent mayoral candidate every fours years, apparently Kaua`i voters’ complaints over our crumbling infrastructure, lack of housing, decrepit and often disgusting parks and recreational facilities are forgotten when they step into the voting booth.
Because when you look down the list of the worst of our problems and the lack of government response over the last six years you’ll see one name in charge of almost all of them- Barnard Carvalho.
A little recent history. As soon as Batiste was elected he immediately took all the “agencies” in the county- those not created by the County Charter- and smushed together all these “loose end departments” that were created as a loophole of unaccountability from past administrations.
It was called the Community Assistance “Department” (CAD) although technically it wasn’t a department at all.
It encompassed those administrative functions that had answered directly to the mayor’s office under former Mayor Marianne Kusaka in order to make sure power was enhanced in her office.
Unfortunately that also added accountability and that was one thing Baptiste would never stand for.
Now when Baptiste took over he needed to reward one of his chief campaign supporters, his buddy from hamabada days (little kid time for all you malahini) Carvalho and also isolate himself from blame for screwing up when it came time for reelection.
And as luck would have it - and perhaps not so strangely because they were subject to lessened accountability and transparency- some the worst problems on Kaua`i were regulated by those agencies.
The CAD was created as an added layer of bureaucracy and combined the Agency on Elderly Affairs, the Housing Agency and the Transportation Agency.
And for good measure, because Carvalho wasn’t qualified for those- or any- areas of oversight, the Division of Parks & Recreation from the Public Works Department. was added.
Carvalho was Kusaka’s politically appointed recreation chief at the time but his having never been an administrator before didn’t seem to phase Baptiste. The Mayor actually left some park functions in the DPW, creating the typical split-function nightmare of dual administration.
And Carvalho proceeded to take the already orphan and neglected areas of executive management and run them into the ground.
It’s not a secret that there was- and is and will be for a quite a while- a housing crisis on Kaua`i. It was a crisis in the 2002 election when Baptiste was first elected and after Carvalho’s reign it has become an un-addressed calamity.
Not only has the county failed to provide housing but it took six years just to develop a policy and the policy was developed through the first of Carvalho’s infamous “tasks forces”.
These task forces were generally groups of county employees, revolving-door-connected business honchos and assorted good old boys who held closed door meetings, never took public input and presented thin gruel to the council for approval when they were done.
The results of Carvalho’s housing efforts are self apparent- Kaua`i is still the only county that has no public housing and the whole effort has been comprised of trying to allow developers to not comply with zoning, planning and permitting.
And perhaps worst of all it was solely designed to create for-sale “affordable” housing that even the housing chief acknowledged to the council wasn’t affordable- or even appropriate- especially for those who needed it most.
There is an even worse result of this- the feds have had the housing agency on a short leash because they are not serving the people who they’re supposed to serve- those who need rental housing and make less than 50% of the median income.
There is some for-sale so-called “affordable” housing “ that’s been created- all by developers, not the county, although some was required during development and subdivision.
But the only people who can afford it are those making more than 120%, many times even 160% of the median income although it’s really supposed to serve those making 100% or less, preferably 80% by law.
But it’s set up so that no one at the lower levels can get a loan for the price of these “affordable” houses so they go to those who make more.
And of course the Baptiste administration with Carvalho in charge of the Housing Agency did not create, start to finish, one unit of rental housing, the greatest need of all on Kaua`i.
But every time the council- which is certainly not blameless- called in Carvalho to explain, when they eventually got him there he would bring some simplistic “PowerPoint presentation”.
These glorified slide shows would inevitably detail the bare bones of a future plan and try to hide what everyone knew already- we weren’t doing diddley-squat for anyone who needed it.
Carvalho has become the tongue-in-cheek “King of the PowerPoint”, proudly presenting his useless and uninspiring pages of large print banalities, usually bestowed after delaying any report to the council for months on end, only to not really answer any questions much less provide any info when the long awaited “answers” finally came.
Year after year it’s been the same, with the council asking “what have you done” and Carvalho answering “here’s what we are going to do.”
The conditions of our parks and county facilities is infamous across the world with newspaper and magazine articles and word of mouth disparagements that make tourism official cringe- all detailing our disgusting bathrooms, trash filled parks and other neglected facilities.
And with Carvalho in chare it’s only gotten worse.
But perhaps Carvalho’s biggest fiasco was his biggest project- the costly corruption-plagued boondoggle of the “Bike Path” project, the “jewel” in Baptiste’s tarnished crown.
From start to non-finish the path has been a plague of problems from wasted funds to un-permitted structures and a plethora of violations of county code and state and federal law, all detailed at county council meetings .
The “29 bike path questions” for Carvalho and his people that the county council asked years ago remain unanswered and apparently will since the ones who wouldn’t let the list die- Mel Rapozo and Shaylene Iseri-Carvalho- will no longer be on the council two months from now.
Again Bernard Carvalho’s answer to all the problems was to, after he delayed appearances and answers as long as he could, form another secretive “task force” which never did answer the questions.
Carvalho even managed to dodge and weave so long that Baptiste’s sycophant Councilmember Tim “don’t confuse me with the facts” Bynum- who was responsible for many of the bike path abuses as a civilian before being elected- got so impatient he seemed to have forgotten that the questions hadn’t already been answered, saying in fact they had been and using as evidence the fact that it had taken so long to get answers..... that and those magnificent PowerPoint presentations..
But the task force did help do one thing- they lent a hand in creating the dog walking ignominy by apparently getting Carvalho to implement a secret “declaration” of the path as a “linear park”, causing an uproar in the community and packed council chambers for months.
The secret bike path task force hasn’t said where the money is going to come from to finish the path- a path originally funded as a bike path but which now has somehow morphed into a “multi-use path”, in violation of the policy for distribution of the federal funding that declares the path must be “primarily for transportation (and) not recreation”.
That’s the reason that despite the fact that the original $40 million in federal funds is long gone- having in part been wasted on amenities along the path, many illegally constructed without permits or required shoreline certifications- they must complete the whole 16 miles to make true their “transportation” claim that got them the money in the first place.
It’s also the reason for the beach-side path’s mauka detour as described in the local paper Sunday.
The article says that “Phase III” is now ready for launch and in order to complete the segment the ocean-hugging path is now going to go through the parking lots of Safeway and Foodland and across the highway twice- once trough the busiest most congested intersection on Kaua`i, the focal point of the infamous Kapa`a traffic jumble..
Another part of the reason for that bit of insanity is that the “county matching” for the $40 million has been in the form of donated land and they’ve run out of land to be donated.
So they essentially eliminated most of a 30-year-old requirement that the two shopping centers build a bridge connecting them so they could get the bike path land in the parking lot to fulfill the rest of the “match”.
Perhaps the most striking of Carvalho’s idiocies was his creation of the Lydgate camping area were he cost the county big bucks by failing to ask anybody that mattered how to both do it and comply with the law.
Instead he and his again secret “task force” didn’t bother to comply with the minimal requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act and actually built the campground in violation of that and other laws before eventually having to tear it out and build it again..
It might have come to light in time to stop it but Carvalho’s penchant for secrecy made sure no one even knew about it before it was built... except for those in his secret group.
Transportation? Do you have to ask what Bernard is done? If so perhaps you haven’t driven in Kapa`a or tried to depend on the Kauai Bus which hasn’t “gone anywhere” in Carvalho’s years in charge.
And his Elderly Affairs Agency has decreased services such as meals on wheels and other programs under his tutelage.
And this is the front runner in our mayoral race. And that may be because Carvalho’s opponent seems to be happily skipping her way to a loss to this babooze without actually talking about his and the Baptiste administrations corruption and general incompetence.
In the year of the ”change” election she apparently refuses to allude to the need for it locally.
Even knowing that Carvalho will continue the policies – and more importantly retain the appointed personnel- of the Baptiste administration there’s not a word out JoAnn Yukimura about “cleaning house”, especially in the Planning Department where her nemesis Ian Costa has run a rubber stamp operation and where the word “planning” is not what they do but merely the name of the department.
Will JoAnn wake up and delineate the issues? Or will she just sit back and let Bernard coast into office.
Maybe the JoAnn of 20 years ago might have fought for the community she says she loves but don’t hold your breath nowadays.
According to some close to her campaign she wants others to criticize Bernard for her.
But no one in the mainstream media is going to repeat the rantings of a Kapa`a blogger or anyone else. If she’s going to play this game of letting others speak for her she’s most assuredly going to lose because that’s not the way the press works.
She’s got the only megaphone that matters. Because the media- and the voters for that matter- always need to hear it from the candidates themselves. And that goes double for Kaua`i where the press is a joke to begin with.
If she continues to snooze her way toward November 4 we’ll all be in for a rude awakening on December 1.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
KPD Blue- Chapter 9 : Officer Nelson Gabriel
KPD Blue
By Anthony Sommer
Chapter 9 : Officer Nelson Gabriel
It’s impossible to tell the story of the lengthy campaign by Mayor Maryanne Kusaka and the middle management in KPD to oust Chief George Freitas without first understanding the strange case of Officer Nelson Gabriel.
Gabriel was a KPD officer. In 1999, he was indicted on 22 felony charges stemming from the alleged sexual assault of his teenage step-daughter between May 1998 and April 1999.
He was not tried until two years later in October 2001. The right to a speedy trial is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Rule 48 of the Hawaii criminal court procedures but it often appears that no one on Kauai ever actually has read the U.S. Constitution.
The verdict (issued by Circuit Judge George Masuoka— Gabriel had waived his right to a jury trial) was not rendered until January 2002. Gabriel was acquitted three months after his trial ended and almost three years after he was indicted.
Masuoka said he delayed his ruling because he didn’t want to influence the outcome of the investigation into charges against Freitas that was in progress over at the Kauai Police Commission. The accusations against Freitas, which ultimately proved to be a farce, directly involved the Nelson Gabriel trial.
But, in the end, Freitas, who fought to keep his department from violating Gabriel’s rights, ultimately lost his job as a direct result of the verdict in Gabriel’s trial.
The investigating officer in the allegations against Gabriel was Lt. Alvin Seto. It was Seto and his supervisor, Inspector Melvin Morris, who filed complaints against Freitas.
Seto and Morris were among the KPD middle management digging in its heels every time Freitas moved to modernize KPD.
When Gabriel was indicted and while he was awaiting trial, he was taken off the road and given a desk job in the dispatcher’s office located in a rented office almost a mile away from police headquarters.
While he was working at the dispatch office, one of the women dispatchers, annoyed by too much attention from Gabriel, asked for a transfer to a different shift.
At first, she did not file a complaint against Gabriel. But Lt. Seto pressured her until she did.
Seto later said in an interview that he had “run into the dispatcher’s mother in a bookstore and advised her that her daughter could file a formal complaint.”
Seto insisted he did nothing beyond that to convince the dispatcher to file a complaint against Gabriel.
But that isn’t the way the dispatcher remembered it when she filed her lawsuit against Seto and the County of Kauai.
She said her supervisor went to Seto—who worked in the Investigations Division and had no role or responsibility in dispatcher operations—and told Seto about her request for a shift change.
The supervisor knew Seto was the investigating officer in the molestation case against Gabriel.
“Lt. Seto, in turn, contacted my mother and began pressuring her to pressure me to file criminal charges against Mr. Gabriel,” the dispatcher said in her civil complaint. “Seto was not even supposed to have known about my administrative complaint,” she added.
Seto sent two detectives to the dispatcher’s father’s house (her father was a retired KPD officer and a friend of Seto’s) to obtain a formal complaint from her. They also set up a recorded conversation between the dispatcher and Gabriel in hopes Gabriel would say something incriminating.
According to court documents, Gabriel made some admissions that were taped but exactly what he said never was specified in the record and they fell far short of a confession that could be used in court.
The dispatcher said in her lawsuit she was annoyed by Gabriel’s attentions.
But she was terrified by Seto’s threats.
“At this point, I was afraid to resist the detectives. I was afraid that I would be fired or otherwise disciplined if I did not now fully yield to the criminal investigation,” the dispatcher wrote.
She also said Seto had urged her to lie to the detectives, but she refused to do so.
“Lt. Seto urged me to tell the detectives that Nelson Gabriel had kissed me on my neck at work. He stated: ‘Make sure you tell them about Gabriel kissing your neck.’
“The problem was that Nelson Gabriel had never kissed my neck, and I had never stated that he had done so,” she said.
“Being pressured to lie in a criminal case by a powerful uniformed man was a terrifying proposition. I did not lie in my statement to the detectives; however, I became sickened with anxiety,” she wrote.
The harassment charges involving the dispatcher were misdemeanors and they weren’t immediately pursued. They just remained in Seto’s back pocket.
Gabriel’s trial on the charges of sexually assaulting his step-daughter was rapidly approaching.
Seto was aware that Gabriel’s wife planned to testify on her husband’s behalf, telling the court her daughter had a long history of being a chronic liar and that she had frequently falsely accused others with whom she became angry of molesting her.
According to court documents in a series of lawsuits filed later, Seto planned to try to force Gabriel’s wife to testify against her husband in the molestation case. If Gabriel’s wife did not cooperate and testify for the prosecution instead of her husband, Seto planned to play her the police-taped conversation between the dispatcher and Gabriel.
Seto believed that tape would make Mrs. Gabriel angry at her husband and she would testify against him in his trial.
Seto went to the County Prosecutor’s Office and asked the attorney handling Gabriel’s case to send a request to the KPD asking that a detective again interview Mrs. Gabriel who, through her lawyer, already had refused to talk to them. Seto intended to be the detective conducting the interview of Mrs. Gabriel.
All interdepartmental requests cross the police chief’s desk and when Freitas saw the request from the Prosecutor’s Office, he refused to forward it to Seto.
“A sexual harassment complaint is, by law, totally confidential,” Freitas later said.
“If I allowed Seto to try to use a confidential harassment complaint in an attempt to coerce Mrs. Gabriel to change her testimony, the whole effort would be blatantly illegal. I wasn’t about to allow that.”
Freitas cleared his decision to block Seto’s use of the tape with the County Attorney’s Office.
The same County Attorney’s Office later advised the mayor and Kauai Police Commission to punish Freitas for exactly the action they told him was legal.
Unable to use the tape to sway Mrs. Gabriel, Seto went shopping for a way to retaliate against Chief Freitas.
Seto first attempted to convince the County Prosecutor’s Office to charge the police chief with interfering with a police investigation. The prosecutors told him there was no basis for such a charge.
Seto and his boss Morris then went to Mayor Maryanne Kusaka and the Kauai Police Commission and filed a list of charges against Freitas.
The most serious charge was “hindering prosecution” of Gabriel, the same charge the lawyers at the prosecutor’s office refused to pursue.
Seto found an attentive audience. The mayor had never supported Freitas. The police commissioners who hired him were long gone, replaced now by Kusaka’s appointees.
Meanwhile, the trial of Nelson Gabriel began and a parade of witnesses, including her teachers, testified his step-daughter was a chronic liar. Over a period of years she had accused a number of men with whom she was angry, including her grandfather, of molesting her.
She also lied about a burglary that never took place in an attempt to cover up some damage she had caused at home.
Seto’s attempt to blackmail Mrs. Gabriel to testify against her husband blew up in Seto’s face.
Michael Green, Gabriel’s Honolulu-based attorney, told Seto that if he took the stand he would be cross-examined about his efforts to coerce a witness: Mrs. Gabriel.
Seto decided not to testify. He was not seen again in the courtroom.
It is almost unheard of for an investigating officer to not testify about the evidence he obtained in a criminal case. No one explained his decision—made just minutes before he was scheduled to take the stand—but no one had to. Everyone on the island knew the true story.
Just as interesting was what was going on out in the audience.
Every day of the trial, Elizabeth Goynes, who was both the police chief’s fiancé and a retired Richmond (Calif.) Police Department detective, was in the audience, and she purposely sat behind Gabriel’s defense table as sign of support.
Also every day, a group of KPD plain clothes detectives appeared in the audience. They all hugged Goynes and sat with her behind Gabriel.
“This whole case is absolute bullshit,” one of the detectives said outside the courtroom. “I don’t know what that moron (Seto) is doing because those charges against Gabriel never should have been filed.”
Gabriel was acquitted of the 22 felony counts of molesting his step-daughter.
A misdemeanor harassment charge was filed against Gabriel in the case involving the dispatcher. He was given probation and put back on the road as a KPD patrol officer. Later, Seto retired from KPD and signed on as a supervisor with the civilian security company contracted to guard the U.S. Navy Pacific Missile Range on Kauai. Ultimately, the dispatcher settled with Kauai County for $100,000—$86,000 in damages, $11,500 for future psychological counseling and $3,000 to settle a worker’s compensation claim.
The Council, as usual, approved the settlement in an executive session, even though it is forbidden by the Open Meeting Law from voting on expenditure of public funds behind closed doors.
Kauai County also didn’t announce the settlement until a year after the Council approved it. Under law (except on Kauai), amounts paid out by the government to settle litigation are public record as soon as the legislative body approves them.
The county also refused to reveal how much it paid the private attorney who ultimately lost the case for them (and the taxpayers who paid both the lawyer and the settlement). Those expenditures are supposed to be public record.
But, not a single newspaper or TV or radio station filed any complaints about violations of open meetings and public records laws. And, at the next election, Kauai voters returned to office all Council incumbents seeking another term.
By Anthony Sommer
Chapter 9 : Officer Nelson Gabriel
It’s impossible to tell the story of the lengthy campaign by Mayor Maryanne Kusaka and the middle management in KPD to oust Chief George Freitas without first understanding the strange case of Officer Nelson Gabriel.
Gabriel was a KPD officer. In 1999, he was indicted on 22 felony charges stemming from the alleged sexual assault of his teenage step-daughter between May 1998 and April 1999.
He was not tried until two years later in October 2001. The right to a speedy trial is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Rule 48 of the Hawaii criminal court procedures but it often appears that no one on Kauai ever actually has read the U.S. Constitution.
The verdict (issued by Circuit Judge George Masuoka— Gabriel had waived his right to a jury trial) was not rendered until January 2002. Gabriel was acquitted three months after his trial ended and almost three years after he was indicted.
Masuoka said he delayed his ruling because he didn’t want to influence the outcome of the investigation into charges against Freitas that was in progress over at the Kauai Police Commission. The accusations against Freitas, which ultimately proved to be a farce, directly involved the Nelson Gabriel trial.
But, in the end, Freitas, who fought to keep his department from violating Gabriel’s rights, ultimately lost his job as a direct result of the verdict in Gabriel’s trial.
The investigating officer in the allegations against Gabriel was Lt. Alvin Seto. It was Seto and his supervisor, Inspector Melvin Morris, who filed complaints against Freitas.
Seto and Morris were among the KPD middle management digging in its heels every time Freitas moved to modernize KPD.
When Gabriel was indicted and while he was awaiting trial, he was taken off the road and given a desk job in the dispatcher’s office located in a rented office almost a mile away from police headquarters.
While he was working at the dispatch office, one of the women dispatchers, annoyed by too much attention from Gabriel, asked for a transfer to a different shift.
At first, she did not file a complaint against Gabriel. But Lt. Seto pressured her until she did.
Seto later said in an interview that he had “run into the dispatcher’s mother in a bookstore and advised her that her daughter could file a formal complaint.”
Seto insisted he did nothing beyond that to convince the dispatcher to file a complaint against Gabriel.
But that isn’t the way the dispatcher remembered it when she filed her lawsuit against Seto and the County of Kauai.
She said her supervisor went to Seto—who worked in the Investigations Division and had no role or responsibility in dispatcher operations—and told Seto about her request for a shift change.
The supervisor knew Seto was the investigating officer in the molestation case against Gabriel.
“Lt. Seto, in turn, contacted my mother and began pressuring her to pressure me to file criminal charges against Mr. Gabriel,” the dispatcher said in her civil complaint. “Seto was not even supposed to have known about my administrative complaint,” she added.
Seto sent two detectives to the dispatcher’s father’s house (her father was a retired KPD officer and a friend of Seto’s) to obtain a formal complaint from her. They also set up a recorded conversation between the dispatcher and Gabriel in hopes Gabriel would say something incriminating.
According to court documents, Gabriel made some admissions that were taped but exactly what he said never was specified in the record and they fell far short of a confession that could be used in court.
The dispatcher said in her lawsuit she was annoyed by Gabriel’s attentions.
But she was terrified by Seto’s threats.
“At this point, I was afraid to resist the detectives. I was afraid that I would be fired or otherwise disciplined if I did not now fully yield to the criminal investigation,” the dispatcher wrote.
She also said Seto had urged her to lie to the detectives, but she refused to do so.
“Lt. Seto urged me to tell the detectives that Nelson Gabriel had kissed me on my neck at work. He stated: ‘Make sure you tell them about Gabriel kissing your neck.’
“The problem was that Nelson Gabriel had never kissed my neck, and I had never stated that he had done so,” she said.
“Being pressured to lie in a criminal case by a powerful uniformed man was a terrifying proposition. I did not lie in my statement to the detectives; however, I became sickened with anxiety,” she wrote.
The harassment charges involving the dispatcher were misdemeanors and they weren’t immediately pursued. They just remained in Seto’s back pocket.
Gabriel’s trial on the charges of sexually assaulting his step-daughter was rapidly approaching.
Seto was aware that Gabriel’s wife planned to testify on her husband’s behalf, telling the court her daughter had a long history of being a chronic liar and that she had frequently falsely accused others with whom she became angry of molesting her.
According to court documents in a series of lawsuits filed later, Seto planned to try to force Gabriel’s wife to testify against her husband in the molestation case. If Gabriel’s wife did not cooperate and testify for the prosecution instead of her husband, Seto planned to play her the police-taped conversation between the dispatcher and Gabriel.
Seto believed that tape would make Mrs. Gabriel angry at her husband and she would testify against him in his trial.
Seto went to the County Prosecutor’s Office and asked the attorney handling Gabriel’s case to send a request to the KPD asking that a detective again interview Mrs. Gabriel who, through her lawyer, already had refused to talk to them. Seto intended to be the detective conducting the interview of Mrs. Gabriel.
All interdepartmental requests cross the police chief’s desk and when Freitas saw the request from the Prosecutor’s Office, he refused to forward it to Seto.
“A sexual harassment complaint is, by law, totally confidential,” Freitas later said.
“If I allowed Seto to try to use a confidential harassment complaint in an attempt to coerce Mrs. Gabriel to change her testimony, the whole effort would be blatantly illegal. I wasn’t about to allow that.”
Freitas cleared his decision to block Seto’s use of the tape with the County Attorney’s Office.
The same County Attorney’s Office later advised the mayor and Kauai Police Commission to punish Freitas for exactly the action they told him was legal.
Unable to use the tape to sway Mrs. Gabriel, Seto went shopping for a way to retaliate against Chief Freitas.
Seto first attempted to convince the County Prosecutor’s Office to charge the police chief with interfering with a police investigation. The prosecutors told him there was no basis for such a charge.
Seto and his boss Morris then went to Mayor Maryanne Kusaka and the Kauai Police Commission and filed a list of charges against Freitas.
The most serious charge was “hindering prosecution” of Gabriel, the same charge the lawyers at the prosecutor’s office refused to pursue.
Seto found an attentive audience. The mayor had never supported Freitas. The police commissioners who hired him were long gone, replaced now by Kusaka’s appointees.
Meanwhile, the trial of Nelson Gabriel began and a parade of witnesses, including her teachers, testified his step-daughter was a chronic liar. Over a period of years she had accused a number of men with whom she was angry, including her grandfather, of molesting her.
She also lied about a burglary that never took place in an attempt to cover up some damage she had caused at home.
Seto’s attempt to blackmail Mrs. Gabriel to testify against her husband blew up in Seto’s face.
Michael Green, Gabriel’s Honolulu-based attorney, told Seto that if he took the stand he would be cross-examined about his efforts to coerce a witness: Mrs. Gabriel.
Seto decided not to testify. He was not seen again in the courtroom.
It is almost unheard of for an investigating officer to not testify about the evidence he obtained in a criminal case. No one explained his decision—made just minutes before he was scheduled to take the stand—but no one had to. Everyone on the island knew the true story.
Just as interesting was what was going on out in the audience.
Every day of the trial, Elizabeth Goynes, who was both the police chief’s fiancé and a retired Richmond (Calif.) Police Department detective, was in the audience, and she purposely sat behind Gabriel’s defense table as sign of support.
Also every day, a group of KPD plain clothes detectives appeared in the audience. They all hugged Goynes and sat with her behind Gabriel.
“This whole case is absolute bullshit,” one of the detectives said outside the courtroom. “I don’t know what that moron (Seto) is doing because those charges against Gabriel never should have been filed.”
Gabriel was acquitted of the 22 felony counts of molesting his step-daughter.
A misdemeanor harassment charge was filed against Gabriel in the case involving the dispatcher. He was given probation and put back on the road as a KPD patrol officer. Later, Seto retired from KPD and signed on as a supervisor with the civilian security company contracted to guard the U.S. Navy Pacific Missile Range on Kauai. Ultimately, the dispatcher settled with Kauai County for $100,000—$86,000 in damages, $11,500 for future psychological counseling and $3,000 to settle a worker’s compensation claim.
The Council, as usual, approved the settlement in an executive session, even though it is forbidden by the Open Meeting Law from voting on expenditure of public funds behind closed doors.
Kauai County also didn’t announce the settlement until a year after the Council approved it. Under law (except on Kauai), amounts paid out by the government to settle litigation are public record as soon as the legislative body approves them.
The county also refused to reveal how much it paid the private attorney who ultimately lost the case for them (and the taxpayers who paid both the lawyer and the settlement). Those expenditures are supposed to be public record.
But, not a single newspaper or TV or radio station filed any complaints about violations of open meetings and public records laws. And, at the next election, Kauai voters returned to office all Council incumbents seeking another term.
Friday, October 3, 2008
OVERKILL FOR THE UNDERDOG
OVERKILL FOR THE UNDERDOG: Sometimes you’ve gotta wonder if people who attended a meeting were in the same room or on different planets.
And supposedly that’s why we have people who call themselves reporters. Their job is to figure out what the “news” is as it occurs, news being not the usual Dog Bites Man” but the unexpected “Man Bites Dog”.
But in this age of corporate newsrooms and busy if not jaded reporters, journalists often have their stories written- at least in their minds- before going in.
Many have apparently forgotten how to, or don’t have the time to, do the job and so often it falls to the alternative press- both professionals and every day citizens- to let us know what actually happened.
And yesterday’s coverage of the meeting of the Kaua`i Burial Council is a case study in how preconceptions can make reporters blind to the overarching “news”.
One could avoid taking their bedtime dose of Ambien by they reading the three mainstream press articles from the attending scribes.
Oh there was plenty of the perfunctory reporting of “five hours of testimony” and “emotion packed, anger-fueled blah-de-blah” and the like as well as tons of regurgitation of background info.
But we had to learn of the fact that the place was filled with armed state “conservation” cops from eyewitness bloggers Katy Rose and Joan Conrow.
Katy describes the scene that greeted her
When I arrived at the meeting at 9:45 a loud debate had broken out about the presence of armed DOCARE officers in the room. The outcry against having guns in the room was so intense that Mark Hubbard, the Burial Council chair, requested that the officers be asked to leave. Pua Aiu, the SHPD administrator, explained that the armed officers were called in because of "unruly meetings" in the past, but she did honor the request to remove them from the room.
As inappropriate as their presence was, it is an indication of the power of the people that the State felt so threatened by emotional testimony that it felt it necessary to call them in the first place.
Joan was even more outraged and provided a little more detail.
I’ll start with the words uttered by Pua Aiu, administrator of the State Historic Preservation Division, when several people asked why men with guns were in the room. She replied that she had requested DOCARE officers because of “unruly meetings in the past” and noted: “They come with guns. That’s how they come equipped.”
As Sharon Pomroy ironically observed, standing up and holding the traditional wood staff carried by Hale Mawae: “Guns are here because there’s a Hawaiian with a stick in the room.”
At the request of Chair Mark Hubbard, the three state enforcement officers did leave the Council Chambers and spent the rest of the day hanging out in the heat and humidity on the front steps of the Historic County Building. Some Kauai cops also showed up because people had called them to complain about the DOCARE officers. It was not only an utter waste of da guys with guns’ time and taxpayer money, but a tragic commentary on the climate of fear that seems to pervade the state when it comes to Hawaiians and their issues.
The last time I saw armed officers at a meeting was when Office of Hawaiian Affairs hit the road to explain to folks why its proposed settlement with the state was such a good deal. Strange, that the two state agencies that deal most closely with Hawaiian issues are so quick to call in the guns. Could it be because they know best how badly the kanaka are getting screwed?
As Tracey Schavone, who is not a kanaka, noted in her testimony to the Council: “It’s very disturbing to think, this is a Hawaiian issue, and oh my god, they think they need to have guns in the room.”
It’s hard to say what’s more appalling, the fact that lawbreakers like Grove Farm VP, Chair Hubbard (he also being the Chair of the unethical Kaua`i Ethics Board) along with dufusses like State Archeologist Nancy McMahon and her coconut overlord Aiu (who caused the whole mess in the first place by skirting the law) though they needed armed guards to protect them at the meeting, or the fact that it went unreported in the mainstream press.
We’ve probably been to well over a thousand meetings in that room, many regarding issues just as, if not more, contentious and have never seen armed guards.
Perhaps that’s what happens when you have a para-military force that isn’t subject to regulation by a citizen panel, only to Land and Natural Resources Chief Laura Thielen.
Her private “Conservation Enforcement” crew is comprised in large part of people who were too unstable to continue being real law enforcement officers... just the type of people we want holding guns at an emotion-packed meeting.. .
But perhaps it’s another chapter in the truly perplexing recent response of the thieves who stole these islands to challenges of their authority to rape the very land they stole.
In the 30 some-odd years since the native Hawaiian cultural and political renaissance the worst thing that the authorities might have physically suffered at the hands of kanaka maoli is a paper cuts from the documents the Hawaiians routinely waive under their arrogant noses.
This disproportionate response is even more bewildering when you look at the words of the common beneficiaries of the genocide who see the theft of Hawai`i as a fait accompli.
To hear them tell it in comment sections of newspapers and blogs throughout the state they don’t seem to be worried that their land deeds may be worthless and that they are illegal immigrants, according to the UN and international law.
They know that crooked Amerikan courts and the yield of bloated military budgets are standing in wait behind the curtain to support and carry out their nefarious piracy.
These worthless slugs laugh like the maniacal James Bond villains they are when someone dares to suggest that their morally bankrupt value system is being challenged by a bunch of peaceful lava-lave clad victims of their genocide.
And perhaps it’s because no matter how restless the natives are it isn’t like anyone can think of even one incident of armed insurrection in this or the last century in response to their “you and what army” challenges.
But obviously these western condo-conquerors either don’t know something their militaristic overlords do or the “authorities” are insanely overreacting to a threat that their minions on the other hand pooh-pooh.
In one way, like Joan and Katy say, it’s a complement to the Hawaiian sovereignty movement that the Amerikan powers that be think they need to arm themselves in response to kanaka demands for justice.
Lately it hasn’t been enough to have the cops and courts harass peaceful non violent protesters like those whose plight we’ve detailed or those in yesterday’s show trial for the handful of Maui denizens who were arraigned yesterday for their actions at Iolani Palace this summer, both in attempts to peacefully highlight injustices.
Now they are bringing armed guards to community meetings where both cultural and ethnic non-westerners might show up to challenge the very idea of their authority to desecrate, denigrate and commit genocide.
What’s next?- an naval armada to accompany a unwanted ferry boat and attack surfers and kayakers who are armed with only bathing suits and surfboards?.
Oh, wait...
And supposedly that’s why we have people who call themselves reporters. Their job is to figure out what the “news” is as it occurs, news being not the usual Dog Bites Man” but the unexpected “Man Bites Dog”.
But in this age of corporate newsrooms and busy if not jaded reporters, journalists often have their stories written- at least in their minds- before going in.
Many have apparently forgotten how to, or don’t have the time to, do the job and so often it falls to the alternative press- both professionals and every day citizens- to let us know what actually happened.
And yesterday’s coverage of the meeting of the Kaua`i Burial Council is a case study in how preconceptions can make reporters blind to the overarching “news”.
One could avoid taking their bedtime dose of Ambien by they reading the three mainstream press articles from the attending scribes.
Oh there was plenty of the perfunctory reporting of “five hours of testimony” and “emotion packed, anger-fueled blah-de-blah” and the like as well as tons of regurgitation of background info.
But we had to learn of the fact that the place was filled with armed state “conservation” cops from eyewitness bloggers Katy Rose and Joan Conrow.
Katy describes the scene that greeted her
When I arrived at the meeting at 9:45 a loud debate had broken out about the presence of armed DOCARE officers in the room. The outcry against having guns in the room was so intense that Mark Hubbard, the Burial Council chair, requested that the officers be asked to leave. Pua Aiu, the SHPD administrator, explained that the armed officers were called in because of "unruly meetings" in the past, but she did honor the request to remove them from the room.
As inappropriate as their presence was, it is an indication of the power of the people that the State felt so threatened by emotional testimony that it felt it necessary to call them in the first place.
Joan was even more outraged and provided a little more detail.
I’ll start with the words uttered by Pua Aiu, administrator of the State Historic Preservation Division, when several people asked why men with guns were in the room. She replied that she had requested DOCARE officers because of “unruly meetings in the past” and noted: “They come with guns. That’s how they come equipped.”
As Sharon Pomroy ironically observed, standing up and holding the traditional wood staff carried by Hale Mawae: “Guns are here because there’s a Hawaiian with a stick in the room.”
At the request of Chair Mark Hubbard, the three state enforcement officers did leave the Council Chambers and spent the rest of the day hanging out in the heat and humidity on the front steps of the Historic County Building. Some Kauai cops also showed up because people had called them to complain about the DOCARE officers. It was not only an utter waste of da guys with guns’ time and taxpayer money, but a tragic commentary on the climate of fear that seems to pervade the state when it comes to Hawaiians and their issues.
The last time I saw armed officers at a meeting was when Office of Hawaiian Affairs hit the road to explain to folks why its proposed settlement with the state was such a good deal. Strange, that the two state agencies that deal most closely with Hawaiian issues are so quick to call in the guns. Could it be because they know best how badly the kanaka are getting screwed?
As Tracey Schavone, who is not a kanaka, noted in her testimony to the Council: “It’s very disturbing to think, this is a Hawaiian issue, and oh my god, they think they need to have guns in the room.”
It’s hard to say what’s more appalling, the fact that lawbreakers like Grove Farm VP, Chair Hubbard (he also being the Chair of the unethical Kaua`i Ethics Board) along with dufusses like State Archeologist Nancy McMahon and her coconut overlord Aiu (who caused the whole mess in the first place by skirting the law) though they needed armed guards to protect them at the meeting, or the fact that it went unreported in the mainstream press.
We’ve probably been to well over a thousand meetings in that room, many regarding issues just as, if not more, contentious and have never seen armed guards.
Perhaps that’s what happens when you have a para-military force that isn’t subject to regulation by a citizen panel, only to Land and Natural Resources Chief Laura Thielen.
Her private “Conservation Enforcement” crew is comprised in large part of people who were too unstable to continue being real law enforcement officers... just the type of people we want holding guns at an emotion-packed meeting.. .
But perhaps it’s another chapter in the truly perplexing recent response of the thieves who stole these islands to challenges of their authority to rape the very land they stole.
In the 30 some-odd years since the native Hawaiian cultural and political renaissance the worst thing that the authorities might have physically suffered at the hands of kanaka maoli is a paper cuts from the documents the Hawaiians routinely waive under their arrogant noses.
This disproportionate response is even more bewildering when you look at the words of the common beneficiaries of the genocide who see the theft of Hawai`i as a fait accompli.
To hear them tell it in comment sections of newspapers and blogs throughout the state they don’t seem to be worried that their land deeds may be worthless and that they are illegal immigrants, according to the UN and international law.
They know that crooked Amerikan courts and the yield of bloated military budgets are standing in wait behind the curtain to support and carry out their nefarious piracy.
These worthless slugs laugh like the maniacal James Bond villains they are when someone dares to suggest that their morally bankrupt value system is being challenged by a bunch of peaceful lava-lave clad victims of their genocide.
And perhaps it’s because no matter how restless the natives are it isn’t like anyone can think of even one incident of armed insurrection in this or the last century in response to their “you and what army” challenges.
But obviously these western condo-conquerors either don’t know something their militaristic overlords do or the “authorities” are insanely overreacting to a threat that their minions on the other hand pooh-pooh.
In one way, like Joan and Katy say, it’s a complement to the Hawaiian sovereignty movement that the Amerikan powers that be think they need to arm themselves in response to kanaka demands for justice.
Lately it hasn’t been enough to have the cops and courts harass peaceful non violent protesters like those whose plight we’ve detailed or those in yesterday’s show trial for the handful of Maui denizens who were arraigned yesterday for their actions at Iolani Palace this summer, both in attempts to peacefully highlight injustices.
Now they are bringing armed guards to community meetings where both cultural and ethnic non-westerners might show up to challenge the very idea of their authority to desecrate, denigrate and commit genocide.
What’s next?- an naval armada to accompany a unwanted ferry boat and attack surfers and kayakers who are armed with only bathing suits and surfboards?.
Oh, wait...
Thursday, October 2, 2008
WATCH OUT WHERE THE HUSKIES GO
WATCH OUT WHERE THE HUSKIES GO: “Are ya gonna watch?” someone said as CNN announced “the most important debate of the year” this morning.
And although normally we’d rather drink four day old vomit than listen to Sarah Palin speak, in the same rubber-necking way we watch plane crashes and can’t look away from the Kaua`i council meetings, we’re finding it hard to resist, if for no other reason than the comic entertainment value.
But really what we are anxious to see is the next installment of the ultimate dumbing down of the once secret PR tactic of feigning outage at, first the question and then the questioner.
As a journalist you get used to it. Everyone wants more investigative reporting and tougher questions... until it’s their ox being gored. Then you’re just a mean old man asking question no one wants the answers to anyway.
It used to be that in order to exercise the ability to turn the tables on a reporter asking a question that would make you look like the dirty lyin’ dirtbag you are, you needed skill.
But then again those were times when people had critical reading and listening skills and hadn’t been completely anesthetized by Burger King commercials and Sudoku.
It used to take time to learn how to BS anyone anytime anywhere but once you mastered the skill you could work for crooks like big tobacco, “clean” coal or pharmaceutical pill-pushers... or even- if you’re really good and willing to take six showers a day to wash out the moral stank- a press secretary for the president.
But when John McCain sat down to join Palin in trying to answer Katie Couric's second round of questions last week- after Palin had done her dodge and weave the day before- it turned out Palin didn’t need McCain to help her answer substantive questions, he needed her to learn how to not answer them.
And in the end all McCain- he of the all-BS-all-the-time Straight Talk Express- could do is sit and smugly smile at his “excellent” choice of someone who simply complained and counter-attacked Couric for asking “gotcha” questions all the time (like naming one specific, in answer to any one of her questions) “just like you reporters are always doing”.
We’re used to the professional spinmeister giving BS answers and not answering questions when 60 minutes marches in and busts them.
But the secret is out and it’s the favored tactic of anyone who doesn’t want to talk about any subject.
We’ve been working on an investigative report that we hope to finish next week where getting information from the people in charge has been exercise in futility.
And every time we try to pin down the unofficial associate morons they complain that we are looking for the information they don’t want to give us.
Every time we refuse to swallow some laughable misdirection and cut through the crap, they accuse of us not reporting what they want to lie about and accuse us of instead “focusing on the bad stuff”, as if it’s our job to make stuff up to make them look good.
As we’ve gotten accustomed to saying over the years, especially during our Parxist Conspiracy” TV newsmagazine years, “oh- you have us confused with Dickie Chang”
Perhaps it’s that, especially on Kaua`i, they’re expecting what they always get from the press- a fluff story that puts their contrived convolutions and preposterous parsing into an incoherent distraction from the facts, serving to further blur the line between news and pubic relations.
Everyone has seen how it’s done so often, anyone set on serving up a crap sandwich has learned how to do it, monkey-see-monkey-do style.
It’s the song and dance of the phony-baloney. It goes “we may be stupid or we may be incompetent. But until you prove which we’ll just criticize you for not knowing.”
“We’ll just avoid the question as long as we can and once we’ve ignored it at least three times we’ll attack the person asking the question for hounding us over it.”
We bet this scene is not uncommon these days.
“Did you do your homework little Johnnie?”
“I told you yesterday I’m not answering gotcha questions mom- why are you parents so interested in my homework anyway”
“Did you do it?”
“Of course I’ve done homework.”
“Did you do it today?
“Why are you so focused on my homework- don’t you have something better to do”
“Alright tell me one specific homework assignment you did”
“I do homework all the time- why I can see my homework from this desk”
“OK- show me your homework- today’s homework- the homework you were assigned in class.”
“I look at every piece of homework that’s put in front of me. I see math homework, I see science homework, I see English homework, I see history ho...
“SHOW ME YOUR COMPLETED HOMEWORK”
“Well that’s it- I’ve had it answering questions like it’s the Spanish Inquisition. This is nothing but a witch hunt. You don’t like my answers because they don’t support you liberal parents agenda. You parents are all the same- no wonder everyone hates parents.... uh, what’s for dinner?”
And although normally we’d rather drink four day old vomit than listen to Sarah Palin speak, in the same rubber-necking way we watch plane crashes and can’t look away from the Kaua`i council meetings, we’re finding it hard to resist, if for no other reason than the comic entertainment value.
But really what we are anxious to see is the next installment of the ultimate dumbing down of the once secret PR tactic of feigning outage at, first the question and then the questioner.
As a journalist you get used to it. Everyone wants more investigative reporting and tougher questions... until it’s their ox being gored. Then you’re just a mean old man asking question no one wants the answers to anyway.
It used to be that in order to exercise the ability to turn the tables on a reporter asking a question that would make you look like the dirty lyin’ dirtbag you are, you needed skill.
But then again those were times when people had critical reading and listening skills and hadn’t been completely anesthetized by Burger King commercials and Sudoku.
It used to take time to learn how to BS anyone anytime anywhere but once you mastered the skill you could work for crooks like big tobacco, “clean” coal or pharmaceutical pill-pushers... or even- if you’re really good and willing to take six showers a day to wash out the moral stank- a press secretary for the president.
But when John McCain sat down to join Palin in trying to answer Katie Couric's second round of questions last week- after Palin had done her dodge and weave the day before- it turned out Palin didn’t need McCain to help her answer substantive questions, he needed her to learn how to not answer them.
And in the end all McCain- he of the all-BS-all-the-time Straight Talk Express- could do is sit and smugly smile at his “excellent” choice of someone who simply complained and counter-attacked Couric for asking “gotcha” questions all the time (like naming one specific, in answer to any one of her questions) “just like you reporters are always doing”.
We’re used to the professional spinmeister giving BS answers and not answering questions when 60 minutes marches in and busts them.
But the secret is out and it’s the favored tactic of anyone who doesn’t want to talk about any subject.
We’ve been working on an investigative report that we hope to finish next week where getting information from the people in charge has been exercise in futility.
And every time we try to pin down the unofficial associate morons they complain that we are looking for the information they don’t want to give us.
Every time we refuse to swallow some laughable misdirection and cut through the crap, they accuse of us not reporting what they want to lie about and accuse us of instead “focusing on the bad stuff”, as if it’s our job to make stuff up to make them look good.
As we’ve gotten accustomed to saying over the years, especially during our Parxist Conspiracy” TV newsmagazine years, “oh- you have us confused with Dickie Chang”
Perhaps it’s that, especially on Kaua`i, they’re expecting what they always get from the press- a fluff story that puts their contrived convolutions and preposterous parsing into an incoherent distraction from the facts, serving to further blur the line between news and pubic relations.
Everyone has seen how it’s done so often, anyone set on serving up a crap sandwich has learned how to do it, monkey-see-monkey-do style.
It’s the song and dance of the phony-baloney. It goes “we may be stupid or we may be incompetent. But until you prove which we’ll just criticize you for not knowing.”
“We’ll just avoid the question as long as we can and once we’ve ignored it at least three times we’ll attack the person asking the question for hounding us over it.”
We bet this scene is not uncommon these days.
“Did you do your homework little Johnnie?”
“I told you yesterday I’m not answering gotcha questions mom- why are you parents so interested in my homework anyway”
“Did you do it?”
“Of course I’ve done homework.”
“Did you do it today?
“Why are you so focused on my homework- don’t you have something better to do”
“Alright tell me one specific homework assignment you did”
“I do homework all the time- why I can see my homework from this desk”
“OK- show me your homework- today’s homework- the homework you were assigned in class.”
“I look at every piece of homework that’s put in front of me. I see math homework, I see science homework, I see English homework, I see history ho...
“SHOW ME YOUR COMPLETED HOMEWORK”
“Well that’s it- I’ve had it answering questions like it’s the Spanish Inquisition. This is nothing but a witch hunt. You don’t like my answers because they don’t support you liberal parents agenda. You parents are all the same- no wonder everyone hates parents.... uh, what’s for dinner?”
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
CAN A THREE-LEGGED DOG COUNT TO FOUR?
CAN A THREE-LEGGED DOG COUNT TO FOUR? There actually are ongoing local Kaua`i political campaigns but with a little more than a month go you wouldn’t know it from the coverage by the local newspaper.
In the last two days they’ve told us the explosive “news” about quilting, Easter Seals (in October), baking, the bold-faced name-dropping exploits of the Happy Camper, promos for the Mokihana Festival, student music programs, Jewish New Years and new bus routes but nary a word about the doings, statements and activities of the 16 people running for council and mayor on Kaua`i.
Though we’re not expecting much at least they have, after a little PNN prodding, re-scheduled their formerly cancelled “forum” (look for it way way way down at the bottom buried in a separate article) we reported on last week, even now calling it a “debate”.
99% of their political coverage has been comprised of fluff pieces of basically free advertising for all the candidates (the first one’s free) and a batch of laughably-naive, softball questions and rote, stump-speech non-answers to their candidates’ questionnaire.
The one recent attempt at analysis was a somewhat strange district by district analysis of the precinct reports – an out of context examination of the numbers with no exhibited knowledge or analysis of Kaua`i demographics and no island-wide comparisons at all, just some random, useless regurgitation of the stats within artificially drawn state house districts.
And we certainly haven’t seen any analysis or even mention of campaign contributions and expenditures in this or any election year from the local paper despite the fact that they are now readily available on-line and, as we were reminded today, carry heavier fines for non-compliance this year.
According to Derrick DePledge’s blog post today
(S)ome may have overlooked that the bill passed by the state Legislature last session also included increases in the penalties for filing late campaign-finance reports.
Brian Schatz, chairman of the Democratic Party of Hawai`i, said he has been hit with a $500 fine for a late report for his old campaign committee. “We made an error in missing the deadline,” he explained.
The state Campaign Spending Commission has posted a warning about the larger fines on its Web site.
The fine for a late report is $50 per day for the first seven days and then $200 per day thereafter. The fine is $300 per day for filing late second preliminary primary and preliminary general election reports for candidates and late preliminary primary and general election reports for PACs. There is a cap on fines so as not to exceed 25 percent of the contributions or expenditures in the report, whichever is greater.
But our local newspaper seems fixated on serving its advertisers, rather than the electorate with not one mention of the campaign spending reports that pour in every few weeks..
But that s tradition at the local paper as was evidenced in the way for years Kaua`i candidates routinely broke the law by buying votes from non-profit organizations via the illegal disbursing of more money than the limits allow or actually doing it during campaign season.... until Bryan Baptiste was caught doing it on a massive level never seem before in the state.
It’s just one example of what can happen when a newspaper doesn’t do its job.
Seems that although contributions to community organizations and non-profits from campaign coffers are limited to $4000 a year in total and “no contribution from campaign funds shall be made from the date the candidate files nomination papers to the date of the general election.” Baptiste “spread it around” while on the campaign trail nonetheless
And the commission didn’t fool around (remove tongue from cheek). After Baptiste was safely ensconced in a second term in office they fined him “$6,000 for exceeding the state limit for contributions to community groups by $17,255 over four years.” according to a one and off article in the local paper in 2007.
As the campaign spending commission found in a 2007 “Conciliation Agreement”
7. Mr. Baptiste filed nomination papers for office on July 18, 2006.
8. The Respondents made contributions of $21,226.14 to various community groups, during the election period.
9. Respondents made $17,226.14 in contributions to community groups which exceeded the $4,000 “cap” in sections 11-200(b)(3) and 11-206(c)(3), HRS.CA 07-14
10. Respondents made seven contributions totaling $730 to community groups after filing nomination papers.
According to the article:
Barbara Wong, executive director of the Campaign Spending Commission, said the group had the authority to levy a fine three times that of the excess amount donated.“He could have paid $51,000 (in fines),” she said, adding that many of the contributions in question were between $10 and $15.
But as usual, despite its responsibility as the only newspaper in town to delve into these things TGI once again didn’t live up to it’s professional obligations.
Almost all real newspapers routinely assign reporters to take the time to peruse the records and dig out this kind of thing- and do it while it matters, in the middle of the campaign, not just report on the actions taken to punish the perpetrators years later
This was not easy in the past- records were slow in being filed and were not available on-line. But that was true everywhere yet newspapers across the country would routinely do the leg work to uncover these kinds of things as they were happening.
But now that half the leg work is “click work” there is no excuse for this kind of slap in the face to the community the local paper supposedly “serves”, according to it’s masthead
Why? Well as we said last week anyone who can add 2 and 2 can see that the lack of investigative efforts is one “2” and the revenue generated by candidate ads in the paper every day for months on end is the other “2”.
Baptiste’s $6000 slap on the wrists was nothing compared to what a story about him buying votes from community groups would have done if it was discovered during the campaign.
When all you need to pull the wool over the electorate’s eyes is a compliant lap dog in the watch dog’s house, it again makes us ask “can’t anyone play this game”.
In the last two days they’ve told us the explosive “news” about quilting, Easter Seals (in October), baking, the bold-faced name-dropping exploits of the Happy Camper, promos for the Mokihana Festival, student music programs, Jewish New Years and new bus routes but nary a word about the doings, statements and activities of the 16 people running for council and mayor on Kaua`i.
Though we’re not expecting much at least they have, after a little PNN prodding, re-scheduled their formerly cancelled “forum” (look for it way way way down at the bottom buried in a separate article) we reported on last week, even now calling it a “debate”.
99% of their political coverage has been comprised of fluff pieces of basically free advertising for all the candidates (the first one’s free) and a batch of laughably-naive, softball questions and rote, stump-speech non-answers to their candidates’ questionnaire.
The one recent attempt at analysis was a somewhat strange district by district analysis of the precinct reports – an out of context examination of the numbers with no exhibited knowledge or analysis of Kaua`i demographics and no island-wide comparisons at all, just some random, useless regurgitation of the stats within artificially drawn state house districts.
And we certainly haven’t seen any analysis or even mention of campaign contributions and expenditures in this or any election year from the local paper despite the fact that they are now readily available on-line and, as we were reminded today, carry heavier fines for non-compliance this year.
According to Derrick DePledge’s blog post today
(S)ome may have overlooked that the bill passed by the state Legislature last session also included increases in the penalties for filing late campaign-finance reports.
Brian Schatz, chairman of the Democratic Party of Hawai`i, said he has been hit with a $500 fine for a late report for his old campaign committee. “We made an error in missing the deadline,” he explained.
The state Campaign Spending Commission has posted a warning about the larger fines on its Web site.
The fine for a late report is $50 per day for the first seven days and then $200 per day thereafter. The fine is $300 per day for filing late second preliminary primary and preliminary general election reports for candidates and late preliminary primary and general election reports for PACs. There is a cap on fines so as not to exceed 25 percent of the contributions or expenditures in the report, whichever is greater.
But our local newspaper seems fixated on serving its advertisers, rather than the electorate with not one mention of the campaign spending reports that pour in every few weeks..
But that s tradition at the local paper as was evidenced in the way for years Kaua`i candidates routinely broke the law by buying votes from non-profit organizations via the illegal disbursing of more money than the limits allow or actually doing it during campaign season.... until Bryan Baptiste was caught doing it on a massive level never seem before in the state.
It’s just one example of what can happen when a newspaper doesn’t do its job.
Seems that although contributions to community organizations and non-profits from campaign coffers are limited to $4000 a year in total and “no contribution from campaign funds shall be made from the date the candidate files nomination papers to the date of the general election.” Baptiste “spread it around” while on the campaign trail nonetheless
And the commission didn’t fool around (remove tongue from cheek). After Baptiste was safely ensconced in a second term in office they fined him “$6,000 for exceeding the state limit for contributions to community groups by $17,255 over four years.” according to a one and off article in the local paper in 2007.
As the campaign spending commission found in a 2007 “Conciliation Agreement”
7. Mr. Baptiste filed nomination papers for office on July 18, 2006.
8. The Respondents made contributions of $21,226.14 to various community groups, during the election period.
9. Respondents made $17,226.14 in contributions to community groups which exceeded the $4,000 “cap” in sections 11-200(b)(3) and 11-206(c)(3), HRS.CA 07-14
10. Respondents made seven contributions totaling $730 to community groups after filing nomination papers.
According to the article:
Barbara Wong, executive director of the Campaign Spending Commission, said the group had the authority to levy a fine three times that of the excess amount donated.“He could have paid $51,000 (in fines),” she said, adding that many of the contributions in question were between $10 and $15.
But as usual, despite its responsibility as the only newspaper in town to delve into these things TGI once again didn’t live up to it’s professional obligations.
Almost all real newspapers routinely assign reporters to take the time to peruse the records and dig out this kind of thing- and do it while it matters, in the middle of the campaign, not just report on the actions taken to punish the perpetrators years later
This was not easy in the past- records were slow in being filed and were not available on-line. But that was true everywhere yet newspapers across the country would routinely do the leg work to uncover these kinds of things as they were happening.
But now that half the leg work is “click work” there is no excuse for this kind of slap in the face to the community the local paper supposedly “serves”, according to it’s masthead
Why? Well as we said last week anyone who can add 2 and 2 can see that the lack of investigative efforts is one “2” and the revenue generated by candidate ads in the paper every day for months on end is the other “2”.
Baptiste’s $6000 slap on the wrists was nothing compared to what a story about him buying votes from community groups would have done if it was discovered during the campaign.
When all you need to pull the wool over the electorate’s eyes is a compliant lap dog in the watch dog’s house, it again makes us ask “can’t anyone play this game”.
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