News, Reviews, Opinions from Hawaii

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.

I received an email from Kevin Chang who said he enjoys reading Hawaii Blogger. Even my mom hasn’t said that.

Kevin works for The Trust for Public Land. They acquire land for conservation, with the goal of reconnecting people with the land; whatever that means.

As you might suspect, Kevin’s organization is supporting the Campaign to Protect Turtle Bay. Turtle Bay is considered Oahu’s last slice of country; beaches, surfing, landscapes (are those windmills still up there on the North Shore?), habitat of endangered species (turtles, seals, and land developers), local agriculture, and Hawaiian ancestral burial grounds.

Governor Linda Lingle and many others want to buy the Turtle Bay resort and surrounding property, about 850 acres, to preserve it for the future. No one is doing much with the land these days, though the Turtle Bay owner has plans. Everyone has plans for developing something.

I am curious, though, and curiosity begets questions.

What will happen to the land if the state buys it from the current owners? If the developers have their way, North Shore residents will have more jobs available and a much shorter commute to the jobs they have now. I can’t imagine how traffic on the North Shore could get worse.

Will a few additional resort buildings on the owner’s property harm the seals and turtles and Hawaiian burial places? If the state buys the land will Hawaii residents still be able to use the land? If so, how?

Another question that I haven’t heard answered is, ‘If you owned the land, what would you do with it?‘ How would you feel if you were told you could not do with your land what you planned, and was legal when you bought it?

A typical house on Oahu costs about $600,000. A typical condo goes for almost $400,000. After enduring a few decades of rising property costs, people are clamoring for affordable housing.

At prices like that, who can blame people for clamoring. It’s what they do when things don’t go as they want.

What can the state do to provide affordable housing? Change the definition of what is ‘affordable.’

If you can’t afford what’s considered affordable by the state’s definition, then the deficiency is your own fault. Earn more. Somehow or another, affordable means about $450,000 to $550,000. Think about how much money a family must earn to afford a monthly mortgage, even with 10-percent down payment.

But, hey. It’s affordable.

There’s a condominium conversion down the street with prices in the $300,000 range. The building is closer to what used to be called ‘the projects’ or ‘low income housing.’ It’s a very old apartment building that was converted to become a condominium.

For many buyers, it’s also affordable. So, why isn’t it selling like hotcakes? Even those who can afford $300,000 aren’t buying because the building still looks like ‘the projects’ or ‘low income housing’, therefore, appreciation isn’t likely to occur.

But it’s affordable.

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.

Despite reports to the contrary, cheerleading is not a sport. Otherwise, Bill Clinton would be a professional athlete, right?

There’s little doubt that cheerleaders have a place in American sports. Football and basketball teams have cheerleaders. Baseball does not. I wish they did. Maybe attendance at the ball park would go up if scantily clad female ‘athletes’ bounced and jiggled on deck.

The Advertiser headline screamed, “Cheerleading Gaining Popularity as a Sport.’ Only cheerleaders can say that. Gone is sis boom bah, hello acrobats, stunts, dancing and tumbling. This is a sport?

First, it can’t be a sport unless there’s a ball of some kind. Baseball, football, basketball all have a ball. All are sports. The same holds true with golf, tennis, volleyball, even soccer. Balls, balls, balls.

Fishing is not a sport. It’s entertainment. Who wins? The fish? The fisherman? Who keeps score? Everyone knows that fishermen lie about their catches, that’s why there’s no score.

What’s the latest score in cheerleading? Who’s in first place? Who’s got the best tumbling percentage? If those questions can’t be answered, then cheerleading isn’t a sport. It’s a diversion. Nothing more, nothing less. Alright, maybe it’s a dance competition but without high heels and good music.

Cheerleading has degraded through the years. Guys are cheerleaders these days. What’s with that? What kind of guy wants to be a cheerleader? Guys want to watch cheerleaders, not be a cheerleader.

Cheerleading is not a sport.

Starbuck’s is not the place to go for lunch. For free coffee, go to Starbuck’s Tuesday, April 8th, starting at 9:00 am and get a free cup of Pike Place Roast.

Pike Place Roast is named after the first Starbuck’s location, Seattle’s Pike Place Market, which opened back in 1971. Today, Starbuck’s has 1.4-million locations, or so it seems. But no free lunch.

Lunch at Nordstrom’s Cafe, in the bottom level of Nordstrom’s new Ala Moana Center store is not free, either. Lunch at Nordstrom’s Cafe is surprising, though. The lunch menu is varied. Lunch prices are affordable. The salmon and veggies lunch I ordered was tasty. Lunch service was quick and friendly.

True to form, Nordstrom’s cafe attracts the same kind of customer found elsewhere in the store; upscale and attractive females. I think of it as a free lunch for the eyes.

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?

I saw a Hawaiian Electric commercial on television last week which said something to the effect that ‘we need to reduce our need for imported oil’ in Hawaii.

Unless I’m mistaken, all the oil we use in our refineries in Hawaii is imported, and barring a huge deposit of oil found somewhere in the Hawaiian archipelago, we are unlikely to reduce our need for imported oil, despite the continued search for energy alternatives.

What energy alternatives do we have available? Solar energy sounds good since Hawaii has an abundance of, well, solar energy. Capturing that energy and converting it to anything more than running a water heater seems to be a technology challenge that has gone unanswered.

There’s thermal energy, using the heat from volcanoes on the Big Island. It sounded promising when gasoline was under $1.00 a gallon in Hawaii over 25 years ago. With oil prices four times what they were back then, thermal energy would seem more feasible.

There’s wave energy, though no one seems to have figured out how to convert that energy into something we can use in our cars.

Whatever happened to wind energy? I see a few windmills on Oahu and the Big Island, perhaps elsewhere. Whatever they’re doing to reduce the island’s dependency on imported oil doesn’t seem to have had much effect.

If energy conservation is the objective, there’s one sure-fire alternative that will meet the goal to reduce the amount of fossil fuel we use in Hawaii. Higher taxes. In England, the Brits pay about $9.00 for a gallon of gasoline. We pay less than $4.00 a gallon in Hawaii. The $5-difference is the amount of taxes they pay in England, Europe, Japan and elsewhere.

Higher taxes means fewer trips to the pump. Now, if we could just figure out a way to produce a solar-powered, hydrogen-powered hybrid automobile for the price of a Camry.