Entries Tagged 'News' ↓

It’s always interesting to see where the state spends money. New laws usually mean money out the door in the form of appropriations.

Governor Linda Lingle signed a bill which appropriated $38-million for the expenses of state government. A month later she signed a bill, an emergency appropriation at that, for $270,000 to pay for electricity, sewer, and insurance for The Aloha Stadium.

Non-appropriation laws include granting automated teller machine owners to charge a transaction fee to international cardholders. That bill was so important that Governor Lingle didn’t sign it, granting Lt. Governor Duke Aiona something to do.

Curiously, another law changed the name of the Board of Medical Examiners to the Hawaii Medical Board.

Legislators engage in all kinds of activity, and occasionally, some accomplishment. That Medical Examiner name has bothered me for years.

Hawaii’s charter schools are about to receive a smaller slice of the state’s budget pie, and they’re not happy about it.

Who could blame them.

Governor Lingle’s budget, approved by legislators, cuts funding of Charter School students by an estimated $400 to $900 per student, per year. Before you stand up and yell out, ‘Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war‘ and scurry toward the state capitol building to protest, or click to another site with more photos of Paris and news of Britney, hear me out. I have some questions.

Is that a lot of money?

Some estimates put the state’s Department of Education spending at over $11,000 a year per student in public education. I read it in the paper so it must be true. Assume that Charter Schools spend a comparable amount on each student. The cut represents a drop of about 4-percent to 8-percent. In a classroom of 20 students, that’s not even one additional student.

A better question to ask is, ‘What’s happening to all that money?’ At $11,000 (or, $8,000; estimates vary) per student, and 20 to 30 students per classroom, that’s $220,000 to $330,000 per classroom each year.

Assume the teacher gets an $80,000 cut of that total (salary, benefits, insurance, etc.). What happened to the other $140,000 per classroom? It can’t be the annual cost of the classroom itself, can it? Have you seen a classroom recently?

It appears that the state’s education pie has an awful lot of slicers, and the slices are getting thin.

Renewable energy. That’s what bio-fuels like ethanol promise. Unlike petroleum, which is rather finite, sits in the ground until pumped, then disappears into pollution and landfills, bio-fuels can be grown again and again. Right?

Right. Mostly.

Somewhere there’s a spreadsheet that started it all, and convinced the powers that be that growing fuel was less expensive than pumping it from the ground. So, let’s blame the spreadsheet for what has happened to the price of oil and the price of corn. Both are at record levels. Farmers, corn growers in the midwest, are profiting as never before in a rapidly growing bio-fuel economy that has just begun to take root and grow, so to speak.

I had the pleasure of using one of the first spreadsheets on a personal computer well over 25 years ago. A spreadsheet is a wonderful tool to track information, sort information, display information. Modern spreadsheets are so go that numbers can be manipulated to show anything is possible, and people will believe it because that’s what the numbers say. Uh huh. See the problem?

If anyone comes across the spreadsheet that started it all, that moved the country down the bio-fuel path, please send me a copy. I simply want to know how it is that a gallon of something that costs money to grow is less expensive than a gallon of something that costs nothing to grow.

If you haven’t noticed, the Honolulu Advertiser has re-designed their web site. At first, I didn’t like. It was difficult to find what I wanted because everything moved.

In the past week I’ve become more accustomed to the new design, and my initial impression needs to be withdrawn. The NEW Advertiser online has entered the 21st century with a new face, new features, more graphics and video, and more reader involvement– all the prerequisites of success for a newspaper in the 21st century.

There’s video reports. There’s blogs (the same thing as HawaiiBlogger but the writers actually get paid). There’s photo galleries.

Even more important, there’s Forums and Comments sections. That means readers can become somewhat involved in creating additional content for the online newspaper. The Advertiser site does one thing that used to be taboo, but is the norm these days– it requires a web browser user to scroll down to find more information.

The Calendar of Events is excellent, providing a point and click to what’s happening and when. Highlighted home page articles get their own photos, usually three at a time (I’d prefer more), and a quick link to the rest of the story.

All in all, well done. There’s only one thing missing. Charlie Memminger. He writes for the rival paper, the Star-Bulletin. Their web site is not as attractive or modern, though it loads into the web browser faster. I read the Star-Bulletin because of Charlie Memminger.

I never thought I would say this, but the air in Honolulu is bad today. Very bad. It was bad yesterday. It will be bad tomorrow.

No, I don’t live near a landfill. The garbage men are not on strike. The sewer hasn’t backed up.

It’s not smog. It’s vog. Volcanic smog, from the Big Island is in the wind and the rain and it’s all over Honolulu these days. You can smell it. You can taste it. Those with asthma complain about it. Those without asthma complain about it.

Residents and tourists around Kilauea Volcano and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island have been evacuated because the fumes are dangerous to human health. Health officials tell us that the air on Oahu is well within federal guidelines.

It’s time to revisit those guidelines. Paradise is awful today.

Has Honolulu’s city council and the Mayor been unduly influenced by campaign contributions from companies bidding on the Honolulu mass transit system?

What a novel thought.

The city (Mayor and council members), for whatever the reasons, plan to plunge Oahu’s residents deep into debt with a much-ballyhooed and costly mass transit system that will compete with The Bus instead of compete against cars. 

Unless the city council acts otherwise, the technology companies who will compete for and eventually build the Honolulu mass transit system will be allowed to continue to contribute to local political campaigns. If construction of the hen house is awarded to the fox, what of the future of the chickens?

Does anybody see anything wrong with that picture?

First Aloha Airlines, now ATA. This has been a bad week for anyone associated with airlines in Hawaii.

In an odd sort of way, it didn’t come as much of a surprise when Aloha Airlines finally closed the doors, and parked the planes. The airline struggled for much of the past 20 years, and was involved in several near-death experiences in recent years.

What about ATA?

I flew back and forth from Hawaii to the mainland a few times on ATA, and I admit the experience was poor each time. All airline seats and services are not created equal. There is something to the saying that ‘you get what you pay for.’ I paid for a seat. That’s about all I got. A seat. A small seat. An unclean seat. And transportation from here to there.

Other than the timing, it did not come as a surprise that ATA went belly up. The surprise was two airlines serving Hawaii going belly up in the same week.

Local folks say that ‘death comes in threes.’ Who’s next?

Hawaii has too many men and women in prison. It’s not that they shouldn’t be there. They probably should be in prison for whatever crimes they committed. 

The problem is that so many of Hawaii’s men and women go into prison in the first place. The cost is staggering, often estimated at over $30,000 per year, per inmate. The number of prison inmates is growing at an alarming rate, too, around 4-percent per year in Hawaii since 2000, 20-percent faster than the national average.

Why?

It would be interesting to see the difference in prison inmate numbers as a percentage of population between states where the cost of living is high vs. those near average vs. those states well below average. 

Hawaii has over 2,200 people who guard Hawaii’s over 5,500 prison inmates. That’s two inmates for each job. $12 and shipping costs will get you a book about profiting from prisoners, “Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration.”

Apparently, prisons are big business. Not for taxpayers, but for businesses which use the cheap labor found in prisons. Being in prison in paradise cannot be a good experience for anyone, though victims of violence or theft may not agree. What can be done to help offset the cost of maintaining Hawaii’s prisons?

When local prisoners are sent to prisons on the mainland does Hawaii get a cut of whatever labor revenue they bring in?

The Niu Valley home of Nainoa Thompson and his wife Kathy Muneno was destroyed recently by a fire, possibly caused by a malfunction in or near an electric tankless water heater. We’re saddened to hear of their loss and thankful that neither Nainoa nor Kathy was injured.

My wife asked me if we should get our water heater checked. It’s the second time in a couple of weeks that my wife heard of a water heater causing a home fire. Things happen. When things happen in twos or threes, it’s a trend.

The water heater in our condo is the tank variety, unlike the Thompson-Muneno water heater, which heats water quickly and does not store water in a tank. Fire department officials said the fire started due to an electrical short in the crawl space under the house.

Rats? Or, Gecko? Bad wires? Or, a faulty water heater?

What we need to know, and what should be reported in the local newspapers and on television news is, well, ‘what happened?’ What caused the problem? How can it be prevented?

Inquiring minds want to know.

On most weekdays I drop my wife off at work in downtown Honolulu. I tell people that I work at home but have a 90-minute commute. Both are true. I pick her up from work, too.

Each afternoon there’s a local woman polishing a brass knob which opens an automatic door for people who need wheel chair access to a building downtown. I vary the time I’m downtown by 20 to 30 minutes, yet, there she is, day after day, polishing that brass knob.

Assume that the woman’s job costs some company about $15 an hour, including hourly salary, insurance, taxes, social security, vacations, and so on. Also assume that she devotes only 30-minutes a day to knob polishing. Keeping that brass knob polished results in some staggering numbers over the years.

Maintenance for the knob polishing is $38 a week. On average, $165 a month, and almost $2,000 a year. If the same knob has been in use in the building for only 10 years, the maintenance cost is now $20,000.

That’s $20,000 to polish a knob on a building door, and doesn’t include the rags or polishing cream costs.

Extend that same kind of math to mowing the lawn and trimming weeds around a state building in Honolulu. Assume the building’s lawn area requires four hours of lawn care– mower, trimming, fertilizer, and whatever else is needed– each week, and the maintenance worker costs the state $25 an hour. That’s $100 a week, $5,200 a year, or $52,000 over a 10 year period, and doesn’t include materials costs, or equipment.

It’s likely that some of our government buildings in downtown Honolulu have lawn care every week and it’s been that way for many decades. Maintenance costs may not be much of a total annual budget, but it never ceases. I’m all in favor of grassy areas and shiny knobs, but I wonder if anyone pays attention to the costs of such glitter.