To paraphrase those murderous folks in “Game of Thrones” worrying about winter, “Summer is Coming.”
Last summer concluded with a scorching heat wave that broiled our school children and baked the accompanying public school teachers.
It may not have caught the Department of Education unaware, but cooling the schools went from “Yup, got that on the ‘To-Do list,’” to JOB ONE.
Now Gov. David Ige has checked in with his second State of the State speech that highlights the problem and promises a solution.
Specifically, what will be done and how it will be accomplished appear to be works in progress.
Calling the classroom “a sacred learning space,” Ige admitted the state and the DOE should have done a better job of providing rooms at less than 100 degrees.
“There is enough blame to go around. Our children deserve better from us,” Ige said.
Specifically what they are going to get is still undefined.
It will cost more than $100 million, it will cool the schools, but most will not be air conditioned.
Ige said he wanted to cool 1,000 of the state’s 6,500 unair-conditioned classrooms by the end of 2016.
At a news conference after the speech, Ige was asked what is $100 million going to do when the DOE has estimated that air conditioners in all the schools would cost $1.7 billion. The short answer is: We aren’t air-conditioning all the schools, we are putting in all sorts of lights, vents, pipes, repainted roofs and maybe fans.
“Obviously there is lot of infrastructure to upgrade the existing facilities. But if you include energy-saving devices and then the air conditioning, you eliminate a lot of the electrical upgrades which are a huge cost,” Ige said.
The catch is, “It is about being smart and the program only works if you make the commitment to reduce energy demand.”
To be precise, Ige clarified that this is not an air-condition-the-schools project, it is “a heat-abatement program.”
If upon examination, chilling the schools appears somewhat less than revolutionary, some of the other hallmarks of Ige’s speech, such as rebuilding the Hawaii State Hospital in Kaneohe, may be just illusionary.
It may seem that Ige and Rep. Sylvia Luke, chairwoman of the Finance Committee, are working on different calendars — maybe one is lunar and the other Gregorian, who knows. But, Ige on Monday said he is working with the Legislature to “accelerate the design and construction of this critically needed facility.”
During committee hearings this year, Luke already said the project has been funded and on the books for years, so the state has until the end of this legislative session to start demolition or the funding is gone.
Sen. Jill Tokuda, chairwoman of the Ways and Means Committee, reminded reporters Monday that demolition money was appropriated two years ago “and it is still not done.”
If there was a hardy legislative perennial in Ige’s speech, it was another round of tearing down, replanning, studying or just do something with the Oahu Community Correctional Center, which the state has been wanting to tear down since at least 2001. Ige added his name to a list of Hawaii governors who have said “something must be done.”
The list of governors who actually did something with the prison system remains at zero.
As for Ige and the Legislature, “Game of Thrones” could be right — maybe winter is coming.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
