Yet again, taxpayer funds will be paid to a consultant to come up with a sound business plan for a state-funded program. This time, $250,800 will go to Charles Cosovich, a director at Navigant Consulting, to devise a plan for the financially unstable University of Hawaii Cancer Center.

The Cancer Center is running over budget by approximately $9.5 million a year and could run out of reserve funds in a few years, a task group had concluded. The center’s former director built a new, $100 million facility in Kakaako under the flawed assumption that UH’s share of the cigarette tax would remain steady at nearly $20 million a year. Of course, $250,800 might seem like peanuts — but it’s not; it’s a quarter-million, hard-earned dollars.

A sovereignty march where tourists gather

Tourists looked on as an estimated 10,000 demonstrators carrying Hawaiian flags and clad in red shirts marched through Waikiki to show solidarity on Native Hawaiian issues such as sovereignty and opposition to the planned Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea.

But the Aloha Aina Unity March on Kalakaua Avenue Sunday — which coincided with the International Astronomical Union’s general assembly at the Convention Center hosting some 2,500 astronomers through Aug. 14 — did not appear to spur dialogue between activists and scientists.

Organizers say the $1.4 billion telescope project was the catalyst to mobilize more than 30 Hawaiian groups. Tourists may have been impressed — but the TMT decision-makers? Probably not so much.