SB 1543 gave qualified challengers a fighting chance to compete, and this seemed to be the year; the jailing of Sen. J. Kalani English and Rep. Ty Cullen shocked legislators into at least acting like they took corruption seriously.
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I was impressed by state Rep. Della Au Belatti on the opening day of her first session in 2007, when she stood and excoriated then-House Speaker Calvin Say for being power-obsessed and weak on policy.
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City Council Chair Tommy Waters hasn’t exactly led major progress on Honolulu’s pressing problems: rampant homelessness, crushing living costs, capricious property taxes, rail dysfunction, dilapidated parks, rutted roads.
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It’s the last Sunday in April and time to “flASHback” on the month’s news that amused and confused:
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A key rule of government transparency is that substantial public funds shouldn’t be committed without the clear and public approval of elected officials.
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Former Gov. Neil Abercrombie was quoted as saying the Legislature runs the state three months a year and the administration the remaining nine.
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The Office of Hawaiian Affairs has made many costly misjudgments in decades of attempts to settle its ceded-lands dispute with the state, and trustees may have made another by too hastily rejecting a new proposal from House Speaker Scott Saiki.
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You knew state Senate confirmation for Gov. Josh Green’s Cabinet nominees would be nasty from the unusually hostile reception they got at their first budget hearings before the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
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It’s the last Sunday in March and time to “flASHback” on the month’s news that amused and confused:
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To understand the tone-deafness of our elected officials for the realities facing their constituents, look at the effort by Mayor Rick Blangiardi and the City Council to massively increase their salaries.
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Who knows when the University of Hawaii will ever play football in a new Aloha Stadium, but the tangled project is serving endlessly as a political football.
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Having helped introduce the “Dilbert” comic strip to Hawaii readers in the 1990s, I took no pleasure in seeing its creator, Scott Adams, self-immolate in a racist tirade that caused the Honolulu Star- Advertiser and many other newspapers to discontinue the strip.
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It’s the last Sunday in February and time to “flASHback” on the month’s news that amused and confused:
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I wrote last week arguing for term limits on state legislators: “Some amass money and power over decades, lording over state agencies like personal fiefdoms — often acting out of favoritism or grudge.”
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Predictably, state House members put on their dancing shoes and moonwalked around the call of their government reform panel for term limits on state legislators.
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There appears to be broad agreement among the public and political leaders that the record 10 million visitors to Hawaii in 2019 was near the maximum we can comfortably handle, and that we must better manage tourism to preserve our quality of life.
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It’s the last Sunday in January and time to “flASHback” on the month’s news that amused and confused:
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News of incomprehensible violence driven by psychopathic grievance has become so commonplace in our country that we’re almost numb to it.
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Most disturbing is a suggestion by City Council Budget Chairman Calvin Say that the high assessments were the result of pressure from lawmakers or public worker unions to increase the revenue pool for collective bargaining pay raises.
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It’s a new year, and we at Volcanic Ash continue our tradition of starting fresh by offering public officials we may have offended in 2022 inspirational quotations from the world’s great minds to lift them to greater heights.
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Before we forget 2022, let’s review its most befuddling news “flASHback” style:
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