The Hawaii Legislature went home Friday night arguing over two major tax bills that were promoted by supporters as big revenue streams into state coffers but opposed by critics who described one bill as a potential investment-killer and the other as illegal and a fatal blow to local neighborhoods.

Lawmakers also killed an increase in the minimum wage that was widely expected to pass but allowed a measure decriminalizing marijuana that was widely expected to die to live for another day.

Senate Bill 301, which would impose Hawaii’s 6.2% corporate income tax on real estate investment trusts, was approved unanimously by conferees in the remaining minutes before time ran out on negotiations at 6 p.m.

If the bill passes both houses and is signed by Gov. David Ige, Hawaii would become the first state in 50 years to impose taxes on real estate investment trusts.

But another major tax bill regulating short-term vacation rentals, Senate Bill 1292, went down in a narrow defeat in a late-evening floor session.

It would have required operators of short-term rentals to pay transient accommodation and general excise taxes, with hosting platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway acting as tax collectors on behalf of the state.

Sen. Laura Thielen, one of the lead opponents of Senate Bill 1292, compared the proliferation of unregulated short-term rentals to rapid ohia death. Sen. Glenn Wakai is in the background.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

After brief but earnest debate, senators voted 12 to 12 to kill SB 1292. Thirteen votes were needed to pass the bill on to Ige for his consideration, but Sen. Kurt Fevella — who indicated yesterday evening his strong opposition to the bill — was absent.

The vote was welcomed by members of Unite Here Local 5, which represents hotel workers. The union lobbied senators and were hopeful they had the votes to kill SB 1292. They did.

The mood in the Senate chamber was both upbeat (for opponents of the bill) and somber (for supporters).

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz, a chief proponent of SB 1292, warned of stark fiscal repercussions for legislative funding if the bill did not pass.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The 2019 session is not over yet, and more drama is forecast. Final votes on scores of bills will take place next week before session wraps Thursday.

Looming large is the possible resurrection by the Senate of the water rights bill involving Alexander & Baldwin next week.

‘Just Give Us The Check’

As reported Thursday, the legislation that has been called by some the Airbnb bill has been hotly contested for months.

Under the latest draft of the bill, information collected about home-rental operations would be kept confidential, which opponents said would make the state a participant in illegal rental operations. They said the state taxing plan would encourage more vacation home rentals at a time the state desperately needs affordable housing for residents.

Sen. Gil Riviere, speaking in opposition to B 1292, said vacation rentals are destroying Hawaii.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The evening floor debate showed just how divided the Senate was on SB 1292.

“If all this is is a mindless money grab, I can’t support it,” said Sen. Gil Riviere. “It’s terrible that there are people doing illegal activities … we should not condone it — ‘just give us the check.’”

Riviere said 25,000 homes in Hawaii have been converted to short-term rentals, which he called a “huge societal shift.”

“Half a loaf is better than to starve our state coffers another year.” — Sen. Glenn Wakai

But Sen. Glenn Wakai said Hawaii state government needs the money that can come from the rentals.

“The bill is not perfect, but we need to collet taxes that are rightfully due to the state,” he said. “Half a loaf is better than to starve our state coffers another year.”

The yes votes were from Wakai and Sens. Roz Baker, Donovan Dela Cruz, J. Kalani English, Mike Gabbard, Lorraine Inouye, Gil Keith-Agaran, Dru Kanuha, Michelle Kidani, Maile Shimabukuro, Brian Taniguchi and Ron Kouchi.

The no votes were from Riviere, Stanley Chang, Breene Harimoto, Les Ihara, Kai Kahele, Jarrett Keohokalole, Donna Mercado Kim, Sharon Moriwaki, Clarence Nishihara, Karl Rhoads and Laura Thielen.

Both sides blamed their dilemma on what they called the House’s failure to provide a better enforcement mechanism to reduce the spread of vacation rentals.

‘Huge Step’

The bill to tax REITS, meantime, gained surprising traction after it was proposed by a group of grassroots advocates and local businessmen.

REITs, which entered the Hawaii market only about a decade ago, now own more than $18 billion in Hawaii real estate, including such marquee properties as Ala Moana Center, Hilton Hawaiian Village and the International Market Place in Waikiki.

REITs are securities that distribute at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders annually in the form of dividends. REITs are allowed to deduct those dividends from their taxable income, legally avoiding federal taxes.

Sen. Gil Keith-Agaran, left, and Rep. Angus McKelvey, the lead conferees on the REITs bill, and Rep. Lisa Kitagawa during a recess before the successful vote.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Shareholders, meanwhile, are taxed on dividend income in their own home states or countries, not in the places where the income was generated.
 That means other places receive the tax income that would otherwise go to Hawaii.

A group of grassroots advocates, including Faith Action in Community Equity, became critics of REIT practices in Hawaii, saying they consider it an equity issue, particularly at a time when social needs are so great.

They say that it is unfair that property owners that operate as REITs pay no income taxes to Hawaii while the owners of other properties owned in a more traditional way are required to pay the tax.

“Our natural resource is paradise and REITs are making money off it.” — Rep. Angus McKelvey

Representatives of the REIT industry said imposing taxes on them would stifle investment in Hawaii, and the industry spent heavily on lobbying to block the bill’s passage.

After the conference committee vote Friday, Rep. Angus McKelvey, who had supported the REIT measure, was jubilant and said REIT industry lobbyists fought the bill until the very last minute.

McKelvey said it is not clear how much money the REIT tax will generate. He said he hoped the state tax department would pursue it aggressively.

“Our natural resource is paradise and REITs are making money off it,” he said. “This is a huge step in instilling a political philosophy of using our natural resources to give our people tax relief.”

McKelvey said lawmakers added a four-year sunset to the bill so it could be reviewed and repealed in the future.

Will Weed Be Decriminalized?

Hawaii may move to decriminalize small amounts of pakalolo after a conference committee between House and Senate lawmakers agreed on a bill Friday that would replace criminal penalties for possessing 3 grams or less of marijuana with a $130 fine.

House Bill 1383 is one of the last marijuana-related measures left alive this session. Measures attempting to legalize pakalolo for recreational use failed earlier this year.

Sen. Karl Rhoads, left, and Rep. Chris Lee talk before voting on the marijuana decriminalization bill, which passed.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

House Judiciary Chair Chris Lee proposed a similar draft to the one passed Friday after a meeting of House Democrats in February. That version carried a $200 fine.

Lee and Sen. Karl Rhoads, his Senate counterpart, agreed to lower the fine amount.

If the measure passes a final vote in the House and Senate and is signed into law, Hawaii will decriminalize the smallest amount of marijuana in the U.S. Maryland decriminalized 10 grams or less of marijuana last year.

Hawaii will join 22 other states and the District of Columbia in removing criminal penalties for small amounts of weed, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

When Lee first wrote the bill, he originally included a more robust schedule of fines that included removing criminal penalties for possessing up to 1 pound of marijuana. Fines ranged between $200 and $500 depending on how much weed someone possessed.

Lawmakers also agreed to a draft of House Bill 673 that would allow medical marijuana licenses to transfer if a licensee dies or becomes unable to continue working.

The measure would have provided workplace protections that prohibited discrimination against marijuana cardholders, but the conference committee led by Rep. John Mizuno and Sen. Roz Baker made a compromise to remove it.

Baker wanted to include the discrimination protection, but the House didn’t agree. They were concerned that employers would have no way of actually determining whether someone is too impaired to work or not.

No Ranked Choice Voting

Lee and Rhoads weren’t able to come to an agreement Friday on proposals that would have implemented a ranked choice voting system for empty U.S. representative spots, vacant county council seats and special federal elections.

Lee said during a hearing Friday that Senate Bill 427 and House Bill 626 did not receive clearance from the House Finance Committee to move forward.

Two measures that would have made registering for voting easier are both dead.

Senate Bill 412 would have automatically registered anyone to vote who applies for a drivers license. And House Bill 1485 would have allowed high schoolers to pre-register to vote.

No Hike In Moorage Fees

A controversial bill affecting state small boat harbors, opposed by boat owners and keenly sought by the Department of Land and Natural Resources, Senate Bill 1257, died Friday after the House and Senate failed to reach an agreement on the wording of the bill.

The bill would have raised moorage fees for boaters at the Ala Wai Boat Harbor and Keehi Lagoon Harbor, something DLNR’s harbor administrators say is long overdue and that would allow them to make much-needed repairs.

Boaters said that the state has starved the marinas of funds and allowed them to badly deteriorate. Some liveaboards said they were unable to afford any increase in fees and could become homeless if they faced steep increases.

Child Sex Abuse Bill Fails

A measure repealing statutory limitations on the time in which survivors of childhood sexual abuse may file suit was killed Friday — even though it sailed through the session with zero opposition.

Still, House Majority Leader Della Au Belatti said that the House would defer House Bill 18 to take more time to look at the statute of limitations involving child sex assault.

Overflow at a conference committee hearing Friday morning at the Capitol.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

“Next to murder and rape, the most heinous crime is child sex abuse,” she said.

But Rep. Cynthia Thielen, the bill’s author, said, “This is a sad day for childhood victims of sexual abuse. These keiki didn’t have the chance to ‘defer’ their sexual abuse when they were minors. This is a win for pedophiles.”

More Tax Credits For Films

Lawmakers did agree to increase the cap on film tax credits, from $35 million a year to $50 million. Assuming Senate Bill 33 is approved next week, the legislation will sunset in 2024.

The bill also requires that the University of Hawaii and the Hawaii Technology Development Corporation craft a memorandum of understanding for a no-cost lease agreement of UH West Oahu campus land.

The post Lawmakers Shoot Down Airbnb Tax But Agree To Tax Big Real Estate Investments appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Our Office of Hawaiian Affairs formed some limited liability companies a while ago and dropped significant assets into them, including some 1,875 acres in Waimea Valley on Oahu that were conveyed to Hiipaka LLC in 2007.

The LLCs’ governing documents all say that they are to be managed by individuals holding specified administrative positions at OHA, specifically the CEO, COO, and CFO.

Over time, however, it became increasingly evident that the LLCs were being run like fiefdoms accountable to no one. The State Auditor’s Report No. 18-03 brought to light concerns about spending irregularities, for example, including finding several occasions in which OHA’s CEO funded sponsorships contrary to board-adopted guidelines and staff recommendations.

The Board of Trustees of OHA engaged the accounting firm CliftonLarsenAllen LLP to conduct a forensic accounting examination “to identify and quantify potential areas of waste, abuse, and fraud … for OHA and its LLCs.”

As of Nov. 30, 2018, however, a memo from one of the OHA trustees observed: “The LLCs have refused to provide any information to CLA. OHA’s failure and the LLCs’ refusal to honor the Board’s will[,] have led to substantial and unwarranted delays. … It is now unclear whether CLA will be able to complete the audit at all.”

Andrew Walden, publisher of Hawaii Free Press, submitted a request to turn over financial records and was told that the LLCs were independent entities to which public records laws didn’t apply.

In the resulting lawsuit, David Laeha, then OHA’s CFO and one of the managers of the LLCs, stated in court papers: “As a matter of practice, the Managers restrict [OHA] access to the information of the [LLCs] so as to reserve managerial powers in the Managers, as contemplated in Respondents’ operating agreements. Managers have explicitly limited OHA’s access to information, and reserved their right to continue to do so.”

Waimea Valley, Oahu. OHA controls part of the property.

Flickr: Daniel Ramirez

But now the noose is closing around the LLCs from several different angles, threatening to end the fiefdom and the shroud of secrecy surrounding it.

On March 29, Circuit Judge Jeffrey Crabtree entered a Minute Order in Walden’s case ruling that the LLCs cannot avoid the public records laws. The final order hasn’t been entered yet, but the direction in which the judge is heading appears clear.

On April 12, the Senate adopted Senate Resolution 151, which urges OHA to complete the financial audit and management review of OHA and its subsidiaries.

House Bill 172, now awaiting final floor votes in the House and Senate, contains a budget proviso appropriating funds for the CLA audit, requiring the auditor to submit its report 20 days before the 2020 legislative session starts, and preventing any of the $6.4 million appropriated in the bill for fiscal year 2020-2021 from being released until the legislature receives a copy of the audit report.

‘We The People’

The fiefdom must end. We the People of Hawaii created OHA in the Hawaii Constitution and have specified that it be run by trustees elected by the people.

The lands and the vast sums of money that OHA controls (now in excess of $660 million) are assets belonging to the people of Hawaii. Their use cannot be shielded from accountability (to both the trustees and the general public) simply by tossing them into LLCs. Those who have created or perpetuated this charade must be challenged.

The dealings of the LLCs must be disclosed. If the audit discovers any misappropriation of those assets, appropriate remedial action must be taken. Not only do the beneficiaries of OHA deserve this, all the people of Hawaii deserve this.

The post Tom Yamachika: The Noose Is Tightening On OHA’s LLCs appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

It was no fluke this month when the voyaging canoe Hokulea, wrapping up six years of intense sailing to rally for healthier oceans, docked in Hawaii’s most notoriously polluted waterway.

Cleaning the Ala Wai Canal and the streams that feed it remains one of the state’s most daunting environmental challenges. The Ala Wai runs across Hawaii’s most densely populated watershed. Any fish caught from its murky waters aren’t safe to eat. Any paddlers better pray they don’t fall in.

“When we succeed at cleaning the Ala Wai, what we can tell the young people and to the world (is) we can do anything,” Polynesian Voyaging Society President Nainoa Thompson told an audience at the Hawaii Convention Center shortly after crews moored the Hokulea there. 

“That’s what’s at stake.”

Now, a local coalition has set a bold goal to make the Ala Wai’s waters fishable and swimmable again within seven years. They also aim to restore what ecological balance they can to the surrounding 19-square-mile Ala Wai watershed.

Canoe clubs line the shores of the Ala Wai Canal, where paddlers often try to avoid getting splashed or falling in as they train on the water.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Whether this broad effort led by the nonprofit Hawaii Exemplary State Foundation succeeds will largely depend on the help and buy-in of local schools and community groups, organizers say.

But the restoration plan comes as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers advances its own congressionally approved infrastructure project for the Ala Wai watershed: A $345 million flood mitigation effort to protect Waikiki and the crowded neighborhoods around the canal from severe damage in a major storm.

Previously, habitat restoration was a chief component of the corps’ project but the agency later scrapped it. Now, its sole focus is to control fast-moving flood waters.

Restoration advocates say that limited scope is short-sighted. They worry some of the flood control infrastructure poised to take shape across the watershed might be at odds with their separate efforts and temper the community support they need.

“If the Army Corps plan was allowed to go forward, it would mean a major rethinking of what we had planned for the restoration project,” said Kenneth Kaneshiro, the foundation’s president. “It would sort of disrupt our plan.”

On the other hand, if the corps were to rethink the plan and include restoration it might be able to reduce the impacts, particularly the basins and walls that have caused so much recent controversy, Kaneshiro and others say.

Restoration and flood control, they argue, should go hand-in-hand.

“They went ahead with half a project,” said Karen Ah Mai, executive director for the nonprofit Ala Wai Watershed Association. “Half the toolbox is missing.”

Local corps officials say they might still pursue smaller, isolated restoration efforts within the watershed. However, the flood project’s scope is locked in based on what Congress approved. There’s no going back, they say.

A New Plan To Restore From Mountains To Ocean

The Exemplary State Foundation and its partners hope to launch multiple restorative projects in the area, from the upland forests to the ocean, that would work together. They aim to raise between $150 million and $250 million from federal agencies to make that happen, Kaneshiro said.

“We’re taking the whole ahupuaa watershed approach,” he said, referring to the traditional Hawaiian division of land from mountain to coast.

It’s an ambitious goal, he acknowledged, but with the community’s support “it’s potentially doable.”

Signs warn the public to neither fish nor swim in the contaminated waters of the Ala Wai Canal.

Marcel Honore/Civil Beat

To cleanse the century-old 1.5-mile canal, the partnership will test innovative techniques that have succeeded elsewhere but haven’t been used in the Ala Wai. That includes introducing cages of native Hawaiian oysters to filter the water of heavy metals and harmful chemicals, plus dropping scores of softball-sized mud balls filled with special bacteria in the canal to digest the organic sludge that’s settled there.

In large enough numbers, the organizers of those separate initiatives say, those resources could make a sizable dent in the Ala Wai’s pollution problems.

The first several hundred native oysters are poised to enter the canal in the next two weeks, said Rhiannon Tereari’i Chandler-’Iao, executive director of the nonprofit Waterkeepers Hawaiian Islands. The project mirrors similar efforts on the U.S. East Coast, such as the Billion Oyster Project, which aims to help clean New York Harbor.

The mud ball, or “Genki-ball” initiative, meanwhile, is similar to a proposal suggested two years ago by Punahou School students for the University of Hawaii’s Ala Wai Challenge. Genki Ala Wai, the group that aims to test the balls in the canal over the next two years, plans to meet with state health officials this week to try and secure the necessary permits.

Researchers from UH’s Gates Coral Lab also plan to monitor the coral near where the canal empties into the ocean, monitoring for any improvements there.

But most of the issues at odds with the corps project originate upstream, particularly where restoration partners aim to eradicate the invasive albizia trees that blanket the Manoa Valley.

A canopy of albizia trees hovers over homes in the Manoa Valley. The fast-growing, invasive species has spread across the area and its branches comprise much of the debris in heavy flooding.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The fast-growing alien trees were planted across Hawaii about a century ago around the same time developers built the Ala Wai canal to drain the Waikiki wetlands for building. Since then, the trees have proliferated to infest about 20,000 acres across Oahu, local experts say.

Albizia branches fall easily, and they’ve wreaked havoc in recent storms. In 2004, they comprised much of the debris that clogged the Manoa Stream during heavy rains and led to $85 million in damage.

They’re also costly to remove at about $15,000 per tree, estimated Kaneshiro, who directs the Center for Conservation Research and Training at UH Manoa.

The Exemplary State Foundation looks to replace the Manoa albizia with kukui nut trees, which aren’t native to Hawaii either but would be far more compatible with the local ecology, Kaneshiro said. The goal is to burn the discarded albizia and then the steady supply of kukui nuts as an alternative energy source that could power a micro-grid, he added.

Removing a chief source of storm debris in Manoa as part of habitat restoration could also reduce the corps’ need for so many basins to catch that debris, Kaneshiro and Ah Mai said.

“The main problem is the Army Corps’ plan is strictly an engineering solution,” Kaneshiro said. 

Further down the watershed, projects to replace much of the impenetrable concrete surface that coats Makiki, McCully-Moiliili and other urban strongholds with permeable ground to absorb rainwater would help alleviate the need for flood engineering too, he said.

However, Jeff Herzog, the corps’ project manager for Ala Wai flood control, said even if there wasn’t any storm debris the basins would still be needed to hold back fast-rushing flood waters.

Corps Could Pursue Smaller Habitat Projects

At a recent Ala Wai restoration summit — the same meeting Thompson addressed — many participants were eager to strategize how they might sway the corps to alter its project rather than further discuss their own restoration plans.

Watershed restoration was part of the corps’ original scope in 2001 but it was cut in 2012 because the agency didn’t find sufficient benefits on a national level for the costs involved, Herzog said Thursday.

“We weren’t able to justify it on a system-wide approach,” he said.

The corps’ environmental impact statement from 2017 states: “An analysis of biological resource significance determined that the resources within the Ala Wai Watershed are significant at a regional level (versus at a national level). As such, ecosystem restoration was removed from the scope of the study.”

To cap six years of sailing for stronger environmental protections, the Hokulea docked this month at the Ala Wai Canal and rallied efforts to clean Hawaii’s most polluted waterway.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Water quality was also removed as an objective from the Army Corps’ study, according to the EIS.

“We sat through years of those discussions and it suddenly got chopped off,” recalled Ah Mai of the Ala Wai Watershed Association. “They proceeded to try to get their structural improvements … but there’s a whole half of the equation missing or more.”

Herzog said he wasn’t sure whether the corps’ project might conflict with any of the watershed-wide restoration efforts “just because my scope has been flood risk mitigation.”

The flood-control-only focus doesn’t preclude the corps from pursuing smaller, separate restoration efforts as “a parallel effort to the construction project that’s already going on,” Herzog said. The corps has committed to the Department of Land and Natural Resources that it would look at those projects, he added.

They might include converting part of the Ala Wai Golf Course into loi wetlands, or restoring concrete channels in Makiki to natural stream beds, Herzog said.

He and local corps officials plan to hold a June 17 meeting at the Honolulu Country Club with local nonprofit groups, academics and industry professionals to discuss how they might improve the design, reducing community impacts and concerns.

Floating debris along the Ala Wai Canal during king tides in April 2017.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

“We are looking at engineering in nature where we can,” Herzog said.

However, despite any fine-tuning “we’re locked into these features,” he added.

For some in the watershed, restoring the natural system should be the first step toward flood protection.

“It was the genius of our ancestors who engineered the perfect water system — they called it the ahupuaa,” Imaikalani Winchester, a teacher at the Makiki-based Halau Ku Mana Public Charter School, said at a March 19 town hall on the project in Manoa.

“I can save everybody here millions and millions of dollars. All we need to do is get our community, our schools, our keiki, our generations to buy into taking care of what we have. If we protect our sheds, if we protect our streams … we can be prepared.”

The post Ala Wai Canal: Flood Control Project Will Do Little To Clean Up the Polluted Waterway appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Marielena Hincapie is executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She was in Honolulu for a series of events including an address at the University of Hawaii Manoa and joins Pod Squad host Chad Blair for this week’s episode.

Hincapie recaps where she believes the country is on key immigration and social justice issues under the Trump administration, which has a zero-tolerance position.

Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, with Civil Beat’s Chad Blair.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

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The post Pod Squad: Meeting Trump’s Immigration Policies With ‘ Resistance and Resilience’ appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

State legislators say a bill that would have required county police departments to release details of misconduct when an officer is suspended as well as fired was too complex to finish this session. 

Now, unlike other public employees, officers who are disciplined enjoy a veil of privacy while their cases are investigated by the department or are going through a similarly secretive union arbitration process. Police departments must disclose records on those who are ultimately discharged but not those who are suspended.

House Bill 285 sought to change that by subjecting police to the same disclosure requirements other public employees adhere to.

“They wanted amendments,” Sen. Clarence Nishihara said, referring to the state House. “But time became the culprit.”

The Kauai Police Department would be one of four county police agencies required to disclose more disciplinary information if HB 285 had passed.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Rep. Chris Lee told Civil Beat on Friday that he was assigned to the bill just a few days before a crucial deadline for bills on Thursday and was asked to look at several issues that could complicate HB 285.

“We get only one crack at this,” Lee said. “Rather than everything getting swept under the rug, how can we get some transparency there.”

He said he needed to figure out how this new law would jive with existing state laws and the procedures each county police department already has in place. He said he also considered how the bill would affect the departments going forward, as well as how it could affect current police investigations and union arbitrations.

“There’s a lot of working parts there,” he said.

The bill came to a conference committee late, state lawmakers said, and rather than rush everything, legislative leaders decided to put it on hold til next year.

“I think this is the kind of issue, if we are going to do it, we should do it right,” Rep. Aaron Johanson, the House conference committee chair, told his counterpart Nishihara Thursday night.

Johanson said during a committee meeting Thursday that he considered moving forward with one of the House’s version of the bill which required the chief of each county police department to disclose information on cops once they were suspended or fired.

The Senate changed that to include a starting date — March 2020 — for the requirement to disclose information about suspensions to take effect and to include the names of officers in the annual summaries to the Legislature beginning with the 2021 session.

Johanson was out of the office early Friday afternoon and couldn’t be reached, but Nishihara told Civil Beat that the Senate didn’t plan on making any further changes to the bill during the conference committee hearings.

“If the House really wanted to get it passed they wouldn’t have waited so long to hear it,” Nishihara said, adding that he doesn’t think Johanson or Lee wanted to kill the bill.

Nishihara also said that State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers, the police union, had been pressuring lawmakers for some time on the bill.

Hawaii’s police union strongly opposed HB 285.

Nathan Eagle/Civil Beat

Nishihara said that SHOPO believes publishing the names of bad cops could hurt morale, embarrass them and possibly lead to recruitment trouble for the police departments.

“I don’t know how valid that is, but that is their argument,” Nishihara said.

Similar bills to close the disclosure exemption for police officers, which was put in place in 1996, have been introduced in the Legislature since at least 2014, primarily championed by former Sen. Will Espero. Two sessions ago, lawmakers agreed to require a bit more information on the annual legislative summaries, including whether the incident had been referred for prosecution and whether a grievance procedure had been initiated or concluded.

Since 1996, the Hawaii Supreme Court has ruled on the issue a couple of times, including finding that a union contract does not take precedence over Hawaii’s public records law. More recently, in 2016, the high court ruling in a case brought by Civil Beat found that disciplinary files can be made public if the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs the privacy interest of the officer.

But the effort to bring police in line with other public employees when it comes to disclosure of misconduct and disciplinary records has failed year after year at the Legislature, largely due to pressure from the union.

SHOPO has been lobbying heavily on HB 285 this year as well.

The union president, Malcolm Lutu, submitted seven pages of written testimony on HB 285 in which he first outlined several incidents that endangered the safety of police officers in the state before explaining SHOPO’s stance against the bill.

“Publicly disclosing an officer’s name adds absolutely nothing to the multi-layered disciplinary procedures and protocols that are already in place which holds each and every officer responsible for his/her actions under the highest scrutiny,” Lutu said.

Brian Black, executive director of the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest, has also been lobbying in favor of the bill’s passage.

Black and the state Office of Information Practices were among numerous supporters of HB 285.

“The long history of police discipline reflected in the annual legislative reports shows that suspended police officers have committed exceptionally troubling conduct,” Black said in written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in March. “The public deserves clear and timely access to information about suspended police officers.”

The inaction on HB 285 comes in the same week as Darren Cachola, a Honolulu police sergeant, was charged with domestic abuse and subsequently lost his police powers.

Cachola was previously investigated for a 2014 incident in which he repeatedly punched his girlfriend outside a Waipahu restaurant. He was put on leave, but got his job back last year after arbitration.

Civil Beat politics editor Chad Blair contributed to this report.

The post Why The Police Misconduct Bill Failed To Pass The Legislature — Again appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

A longtime Honolulu acupuncturist, a primary architect of the state’s regulation of his profession, has agreed to stop practicing to settle a complaint by a patient who accused him of touching her genitals.

The settlement between Mike Hashimoto and the Regulated Industries Complaints Office, was approved earlier this month by the Hawaii Board of Acupuncture. Hashimoto served on that board for 21 years, with his last term ending in 2018.

The settlement allows Hashimoto to retain his license only for the purposes of providing clinical instruction to acupuncture students. It requires him to shut down his business, just off of Kapahulu Avenue, by June 4 and no longer treat patients.

The settlement avoided a full hearing before Hashimoto’s former board to settle the question of whether he engaged in gross carelessness and unprofessional conduct.

The disciplinary action was the first one against a Hawaii acupuncturist since 2010. More than 700 acupuncturists are licensed in Hawaii, by far the highest concentration in the United States.

Acupuncturist Mike Hashimoto agreed to stop seeing patients as part of a settlement with the board that regulates his profession.

John Hill/Civil Beat

In the agreement, Hashimoto did not admit to violating any laws or rules, but acknowledged that RICO had sufficient cause to seek a disciplinary action.

In 2016, patient Janet Moya accused Hashimoto of stroking her groin, touching her vagina and performing what he called “clitoral engorgement” with a vibrating tool.

He denied the accusations. Prosecutors declined to file charges.

But RICO continued to look into the case, eventually taking almost three years to reach a resolution. Moya, a Shiatsu massage therapist, told Civil Beat earlier this year that she was frustrated the process took so long.

She questioned whether Hashimoto was getting preferential treatment because of his long tenure on the board.

RICO officials told Civil Beat that they generally wait for the conclusion of any criminal proceedings against a licensee before taking their own action. Prosecutors may not want the licensing authority involved until the case is resolved, and licensees’ attorneys may tell them not to cooperate with RICO because of the pending criminal action.

Forty-five years ago, Hashimoto pushed for the regulation of a profession in which, he said, practitioners served mostly their own ethnic groups by word-of-mouth with no oversight. He said he worked with then U.S. Rep. Spark Matsunaga, the future senator whose father was an acupuncturist, to write the first regulatory law for acupuncturists.

During his many years on the board, he helped shape Hawaii’s laws and regulations regarding acupuncture, as well as deciding on individual license applications.

Hashimoto had been appointed to the board most recently by Gov. David Ige in 2016. It was a four-year term, but Hashimoto left in 2018, apparently because he had hit the limit of how many consecutive years board members can serve.

Hashimoto continued to serve on the board for more than two years after Moya made her accusation. The governor’s office said it did not know about it until Civil Beat asked about it and that there is no mechanism allowing the governor to find out that an appointee is facing such charges.

The post Longtime Acupuncturist Agrees To Stop Practicing To Settle Patient Complaint appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Binary gender designations (such as male or female) on identification documents fail to represent the diversity of human experience. In Hawaii, that may change soon.

An effort headed by Lambda Law Student Association has brought Hawaii one step closer to adding an “X” gender-neutral marker to driver’s licenses. Students united with community organizers, elected officials, as well as the LGBTQ community and its allies to bring us to this point.

Students led the way by participating in a Lobby Day at the Hawaii Legislature, submitting testimony, and participating in a panel discussion on how an “X” (gender-neutral) marker will affect their lives.

The personal stories communicated by youth were especially notable because of Hawaii’s large high school trans-identified population, which a 2018 Department of Health study estimates is 1,260 students.

House Bill 1165 is about more than adding a gender-neutral designation on our driver’s licenses. Adding an “X” gender marker acknowledges and embraces our transgender and gender-nonconforming community members.

Inaccurate documents with only M (male) or F (female), heighten discrimination and impose barriers upon people who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming. Transgender and gender nonconforming people often face invasive questioning about their gender, and driver’s licenses can be used as a weapon to demean and invalidate them.

Hawaii Driver License

The “X” marker adds a layer of protection for one’s gender identity, which is a private matter. A gender-neutral “X” marker will ensure privacy and provide recognition for those who identify outside the gender binary.

We hope that Gov. David Ige will recognize our efforts by signing HB 1165 into law and are grateful for the support of the Hawaii Department of Transportation, the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women, as well as many community organizations such as GLSEN Hawaii, Hawaii Health and Harm Reduction, the ACLU of Hawaii, and the LGBT Hawaii Caucus.

We also thank the collaborative leadership of Sens. Lorraine Inouye and Karl Rhoads and Reps. Chris Lee and Henry Aquino. We especially thank Rep. Nadine Nakamura for introducing the house version and Sen Rhoads for introducing the senate version of the measures or, as we like to call them, “No License to Discriminate.”

The post Why Gender-Neutral Driver’s Licenses Are So Important appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Hawaii leads the nation in the number of teens who have attempted suicide at least once in high school. According to data from the U.S. Office of Adolescent Health, one out of every 10 Hawaii teens has already tried to commit suicide.

As someone who has both seen and stopped several friends from committing suicide, I can say first hand that the key to saving our youth is to make suicide prevention everyone’s responsibility.

The Legislature has taken a very helpful step forward this session with the passage of House Bill 330 last week, a measure which appropriates $150,000 to support youth suicide early intervention, prevention and education initiatives. While this is a small amount invested toward a big problem, it is an immensely welcome help for a mental health crisis that is tearing our communities apart.

Prevention Requires Understanding

In my life, six of my friends have attempted suicide. But when I was in a Texas high school in the early 1990s, part of our freshman year core curriculum included a semester of “orientation,” which was really a mental health class in disguise that addressed pertinent topics like suicide, drug use, peer pressure, depression, bullying and so on.

At the time, teen suicide was given lip service and pejoratively characterized as a behavior that only losers engaged in.

We were told that suicide was often a cry for help used by people who were passive-aggressive, and that the best way to prevent suicide was to engage in positive thinking; preoccupy ourselves with athletic and scholarly activities; and aim for a “whole person concept.”

Worse yet, no effort to circulate help hotline phone numbers was made. We were simply told to talk to our counselor or a teacher.

The problem then, and now, is that we have a culture that hesitates to intervene on behalf of people.

Instead of helping my friends become “whole people,” messages like that only served to make teens who were struggling with life issues feel more incomplete. As most of my friends were the children of high-ranking military officers or affluent business owners in the community, they already were saturated at home by pressures to be leaders who were clean cut and successful in school.

Few, if any, actually went to our guidance counselor or teacher when they were so depressed as to experience suicidal ideation, because they feared getting judged by an authority figure. When I had a problem and thought to talk to my high school counselor, I was simply told to “suck it up” and given a liquid-crystal thermometer stress card to self-manage my tension.

My first encounter with teen suicide came in the form of a friend, who I will refer to here as J.F., whose biological father was a Marine that had served in Vietnam. J.F.’s father had always struggled with inner demons as a result of the war, feeling guilt over people he had killed and friends he had lost.

J.F.’s father had constantly talked about honor and impressed on his son how everything he did had to revolve around honor, or else he would be nothing. In effect, J.F.’s father was compensating for his experience in Vietnam by trying to deter his son from ever engaging in dishonorable actions.

At age 8,  J.F. came home one day to find his father had committed suicide in the garage by shooting himself in the head. When J.F.’s mother remarried soon thereafter, he grew up intensely missing his father, feeling like a reject, and because he felt no one understood him, he ended up hanging around people who didn’t care about their direction in life.

At the time, these kinds of “moral injuries” were poorly understood by behavioral scientists, and by society in general, so people like J.F. suffered without limit within the prison walls of their heart.

At age 16, after a breakup with a girl he’d fallen in love with, J.F. himself attempted to commit suicide in the bathroom by slitting his wrists with a knife, but fortunately, I caught him before he was successful. He never attempted suicide again after that.

Another friend, C.P., was the only child of a Navy chief. As one of the few other Filipinos at our school, he was aggressively mocked by classmates for being awkward, who made fun of his hair, the way he talked, and other aspects of his unique Asian-Pacific Islander personhood.

C.P. later attempted suicide by taking an overdose of over-the-counter sleeping pills. While I was not present to stop him, he survived the incident, and he’s doing much better today.

I could go on and on, but in all of these incidents, nearly everyone who attempted suicide was doing the best they could in life, trying to take every day one step at a time. But pressures eventually crushed them to the point of having no hope at all.

Contrary to pop culture, none of my friends who attempted suicide ever composed a note, or openly warned others that they were going to kill themselves. In every case, they were going to die without anyone knowing, because they felt no one cared for them anyway.

The problem then, and now, is that we have a culture that hesitates to intervene on behalf of people. Many people feel awkward asking other people if they’re feeling okay, or if they need help, which perpetuates isolation and the perception that no one cares.

In a world where we wrestle over how much time is appropriate before we text or call someone back, or where randomly giving someone a hug, buying someone a get-well card, or just being compassionate is deemed “going too far,” respecting personal space is sometimes the fastest way to keep a suffering person marching toward annihilation.

How To Fight Teen Suicide

 As someone who has a degree in ministry as well as experience in counseling the depressed, I believe that all of us need to be proactive in saving lives. Teachers, counselors, and health professionals can be trained to deter teen suicide, but by the time they become aware of it, things may already be too late. They need our help, and here’s a few steps we can take:

—Teach children to exercise empathy and concern for others

Grade school is a very competitive environment, and teens are experiencing developmental changes in their bodies that adds additional stress to an already stressful environment. While it is good for parents to encourage kids to be competitive and tough, it is more important for them to be considerate, mindful of others and capable of exercising empathy.

These values not only reduce incidents of bullying and harassment, but they create an environment of understanding where the first line of defense against suicide becomes one’s peers.

—Dare to care

As mentioned earlier, sometimes minding your own business is the worst thing that anyone can do. It is sometimes necessary to overstep society’s self-imposed rules and to ask people if they need help, to offer assistance, and to just be a source of comfort or strength in someone’s time of need.

—Take mental health issues seriously as a matter of public safety

Professional intervention is sometimes necessary, and mental health is a vital matter of public safety that cannot be overlooked. Far too many people incorrectly assume that all or most cognitive problems can be solved by positive thinking or willpower changes to lifestyle.

—Make sure everyone knows how to get help

Last but not least, every teacher, every parent and every student in Hawaii needs to know about suicide prevention resources. On Oahu, the 24/7 Crisis Line of 832-3100, and on the Neighbor Islands, 1-800-753-6879, is a must for anyone experiencing a mental health crisis. And when in doubt, always call 911 if someone you know is thinking of committing suicide.

Hawaii, as the Aloha State, should be a place where suicides don’t have to happen. Aloha family values means everyone is family, and everyone has value. Let’s all do our part to save our teens and raise up a generation of stronger, more confident and healthy Hawaii residents.

The post Danny De Gracia: Teen Suicide Is A Big Problem In Hawaii appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

(AP) — A Honolulu police sergeant says he was trying to help a childhood friend when he gave her information from a confidential database.

Sgt. Daniel Sellers was sentenced to a year of probation Monday for disclosing confidential information to Katherine Kealoha, a former deputy city prosecutor who is fighting corruption-related charges along with her husband, former police chief Louis Kealoha. They’re accused of framing Katherine Kealoha’s uncle for theft of their home mailbox.

Sellers says he regrets looking up information about the uncle’s vehicles and passing it along to Kealoha. At the time, he a member of the Honolulu Police Department’s elite Criminal Intelligence Unit.

Sellers was indicted with the Kealohas in 2017. After initially pleading not guilty to several charges, he accepted a plea deal. In exchange for pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disclosing confidential information, prosecutors agree to drop the other charges.

He also agreed to cooperate with a continuing FBI investigation into alleged corruption in the police department and the Honolulu city prosecutor’s office.

Former HPD Sgt. Daniel Sellers was sentenced to a year’s probation on Monday.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

In court for his plea change earlier this year, Sellers told the judge he knew what he did was wrong.

“I came to court to own up to what I’ve done wrong, taking responsibility for what I’ve done and to continue to tell the truth and do the right thing,” Sellers said in court.

Sellers’ sentencing is the newest development in the slowly emerging narrative behind a complicated and wide-ranging case against the Kealohas and several cops that stretches from charges of bank fraud and forgery to identity theft and felony conspiracy.

The Kealohas and three other officers — Minh-Hung “Bobby” Nguyen, Derek Hahn, Gordon Shiraishi — are scheduled for trial on the charges relating to the mailbox theft in May.

The Kealohas face a separate trial on bank fraud stemming from Katherine Kealoha’s alleged bilking of funds from a guardianship of two minor children.

Katherine Kealoha and her brother, Big Island Dr. Rudolph Puana, have also been charged with selling powerful opioid painkillers illegally prescribed by Puana, covering it up from police and thwarting the prosecution of the case.

Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Keith Kaneshiro — another target in the wide-range federal corruption investigation — stepped down temporarily in March after becoming the subject of a target letter, indicating that he his a suspect in the ongoing probe.

Kaneshiro’s purported wrongdoing isn’t clear.

The post Former HPD Sergeant Gets 1-Year Probation In Mailbox Theft Case appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

A list of endangered bills that once appeared assured of passage is circulating around the Hawaii Legislature — essentially a hit list of bills backed by senators who voted last week against taxing the revenues from short-term vacation rentals.

A legislative maneuver could force senators to vote again on the so-called Airbnb bill Tuesday, even though it was killed in dramatic fashion Friday night. This time, the fate of 15 other measures, which cover issues ranging from creating new oversight for the Department of Public Safety to burial grants for Filipino American World War II veterans, hangs in the balance.

The bills singled out for review have been passed by their respective committees and are awaiting a final vote Tuesday. Most are either authored by or important to senators who voted against Senate Bill 1292 known as the Airbnb bill.

Short-term rentals of less than 30 days are generally illegal in the state and many owners are operating them outside the law without paying taxes. Many lawmakers are eager to tap into that money stream.

If the bills are forced back to their respective committees — a procedure known as recommital — they would be killed for this session, which ends Thursday.

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz during floor session in March.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The senator leading the charge to resurrect SB 1292 is Donovan Dela Cruz, chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee. He came out in strong support of the bill Friday night, warning his colleagues that highly sought legislation could be jeopardized if they did not vote for the bill, which would give the state an estimated $46 million in annual revenue.

On Sunday, in an interview with Civil Beat, Dela Cruz underscored his view that the bill’s defeat would mean less revenue for the state, and that if individual senators did not reverse their positions on the bill, other measures that cost money would need to be eliminated.

“If you want to cut bills, you can cut bills,” Dela Cruz said. “If you want to keep bills, you need 1292.”

SB 1292 would require operators of short-term rentals to pay transient accommodation and general excise taxes, with hosting platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway acting as tax collectors on behalf of the state. The information collected, including the names and addresses of short-term rental proprietors, would be kept confidential.

As the measure moved through the House and Senate, enforcement measures that would have made it easier to track and control the growth of short-term rentals were stripped from the bill.

The vote Friday night exposed widespread discomfort with the AirBnB bill. Of the 12 who voted for it, four voiced their support as “aye with reservations,” indicating they did not wholeheartedly endorse it. They included Sens. Mike Gabbard, Dru Kanuha, Maile Shimabukuro and Brian Taniguchi.

The eight senators who gave the measure their full support were Dela Cruz, Roz Baker, J. Kalani English, Lorraine Inouye, Gil Keith-Agaran, Michelle Kidani, Ronald Kouchi and Glenn Wakai.

Opponents included Gil Riviere, Stanley Chang, Breene Harimoto, Les Ihara, Kai Kahele, Jarrett Keohokalole, Donna Mercado Kim, Sharon Moriwaki, Clarence Nishihara, Karl Rhoads and Laura Thielen.

Sen. Kurt Fevella had voted against the bill on Thursday but was ill Friday night and did not vote. On Monday, his legislative assistant, Kayla Whitley, said he intended to vote the bill down.

“The senator’s position is no,” she said.

That means that 13 senators are on record as opposed to the measure, four are reluctantly in support and eight are full supporters.

But now some senators are dealing with the uncomfortable knowledge that the vote they took last week could have negative implications for them. There is a legislative option to induce a recount. If one of the senators who voted no were to seek a motion to reconsider the vote, something that could happen during the floor session Tuesday, the issue could be forced into a do-over.

It would not require the standard 48-hour notice for votes on bills, meaning the re-vote could be done right away.

On The Chopping Block

On the floor on Friday night, Dela Cruz specifically mentioned that funding for burial grants for Filipino-American World War II veterans could be placed at risk.

The top item on the list circulating around the Legislature is SB 1417, which would provide burial funding for Filipino-American World War II veterans. Its primary sponsor in the Senate is Kim, who is part Filipino, and who voted against the Airbnb bill.

Among the bills on the list of at-risk measures were some  items championed by senators who voted against the AirBnb tax bill Friday night:

House Bill 1068, which provides money to create a long-range plan for Heeia State Park, a measure sought on the Senate side by Riviere, Fevella and Kim, who all expressed opposition to the Airbnb bill.

Senate Bill 1314, which would provide a high-tech tax credit, and had been sought by Keohokalole, who voted against the bill.

House Bill 1552, a bill that would create new oversight of the state’s troubled Department of Public Safety, strongly supported by Nishihara, who voted against the Airbnb bill. On Friday afternoon, Nishihara was so confident of the bill’s passage that he posed for pictures with Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald celebrating it.

Popular housing-related bills on the list include House Bill 257 and Senate Bill 471, (whose sponsors include Ruderman, Chang, Harimoto, Rhoads and Riviere), which both provide money for homeless programs and Senate Bill 9, which provides money for fixing damaged low-income rental units. SB 9 had been sponsored by Chang, Harimoto, Kanuha, Kidani, Nishihara, Fevella, Moriwaki and Shimabukuro, five of whom had voted no on SB 1292.

Other bills on the list whose funding is reportedly at risk is Senate Bill 33, which raises the tax credit for movie production from $35 million to $50 million, House Bill 843, which adds three new technical education positions at Hawaii Community College; House Bill 654, which appropriates money for study of liver and bile duct cancer at the Hawaii Cancer Center; House Bill 1547, which appropriates money for student athletes at the University of Hawaii, House Bill 942, which appropriates money for claims against the state and House Bill 1548, which addresses rapid ohia death.

In the interview on Sunday, Dela Cruz indicated he was less than enthusiastic about the Airbnb bill himself but that he believes the money is needed by the state. He said the vote came up so late in the session that there are few options remaining to cut expenditures.

“This is not easy, balancing the budget,” he said. “Revenues are down and collective bargaining needs to be paid and members have different priorities.”

He said the mistake was that negotiations on the bill had been left until too late in the session to resolve them, something he blamed on delays caused by unsuccessful efforts by some legislators to negotiate stronger enforcement methods into the bill. He conceded that some legislators who lose favored programs in the waning days of the session will be unhappy.

“Some of them will feel like they are being punished but it’s a matter of money,” he said.

The post Donovan Dela Cruz Plays Hardball With Foes Of The Airbnb Tax appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

(AP) — Fire and helicopter parts rained from the sky Monday in a suburban Honolulu community as a tour helicopter crashed and killed all three people aboard, officials and witnesses said.

“All you could see was fire,” witness Melissa Solomon said, explaining that she was driving on the street when she looked up to see flames and a helicopter plummeting in front of her.

She said she had turn onto another street because she was afraid more pieces were going to fall from the sky onto her and her 16-year-old daughter sitting in the front passenger seat.

“We could have been smashed by it,” she said.

Parts of the downed helicopter along Oneawa Street in Kailua after it went down in a Kailua residential area.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Paramedics responding to an unrelated call from a patient with leg pain about 30 yards (27 meters) away heard “a horrific bang,” said Shayne Enright, a spokeswoman for Honolulu Emergency Medical Services. When they turned around, they saw a helicopter on fire.

“When they got there, neighbors were doing a heroic job trying to put out the fire and also trying to get the patients away from the burning aircraft,” Enright said.

The crash occurred in Kailua, a town of 50,000 people about a 30-minute drive from downtown Honolulu.

The crash site was on a two-lane road amid one and two-story homes.

Darel Robinson was doing construction work at a house about a half-mile from the crash site when he heard what sounded like helicopter blades thumping and then a loud boom.

“It was going nose down and parts were starting to fly off,” he said.

Megan Lacy, of Alabama, was visiting friends when they heard the crash. They went outside, expecting to find two cars after they had hit each other.

“We were really confused,” she said. “And then we heard screaming and the word ‘fire,’ and I saw smoke,” she said. Debris damaged her rental car about 100 yards (90 meters) from the crash.

A resident said he heard the morning crash then saw a ball of fire in a road when he ran from his house.

Leleo Knappenberger told Hawaii News Now that his mother heard the helicopter flying over the house, making a strange noise.
He said he later saw what appeared to be the tail end of the helicopter.

“It’s all smashed to pieces,” he said.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said the agency believes three people were on board the four-seat, Robinson R44 aircraft.

He said the circumstances of the crash were unknown.

No further details were available on those killed.

The helicopter, which was built in 2000, is registered to United Helicopter Leasing LLC of Honolulu, according to FAA records.

State business records show Nicole Vandelaar as the manager.

A woman who answered the phone at the business and identified herself as Nicole declined to immediately comment, saying she was too busy to talk.

A website for the Honolulu tour helicopter company Novictor Helicopters identified Nicole Vandelaar as founder and CEO. The website said she is an expert pilot commercially licensed to fly helicopters and airplanes.

A Novictor helicopter crashed on a sandbar in Kaneohe in October after the pilot lost consciousness twice. That crash resulted in injuries to the pilot and two passengers. It was also a Robinson R44 aircraft.

State Rep. Cynthia Thielen, who represents Kailua, said she wants the FAA to prohibit tour flights over Hawaii’s residential areas and national parks. The Republican lawmaker wants Hawaii’s congressional delegation to ask the FAA to implement such restrictions.

Thielen also called for tour helicopter flights to be grounded until an investigation into the crash is completed.

Kailua is home to a Marine Corps base. In recent years it’s become a popular destination for tourists to go to the beach, hike and shop.

Former President Barack Obama stayed at a rented beachfront vacation home in the town during the winter holidays when he was in the White House.

By Associated Press reporter Jennifer Sinco Kelleher. Freelance journalist Marco Garcia contributed to this report from Kailua. Associated Press journalists Caleb Jones and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

The post Official: 3 Dead In Kailua Tour Helicopter Crash appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

HILO, Hawaii — The University of Hawaii’s pharmacy school on the Big Island is emerging as one of the key players as Hawaii continues to fight against rat lungworm disease.

Dr. Susan Jarvi, the head of UH’s Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy says new state funding has allowed her to add two full-time rat lungworm researchers.

As the third case of rat lungworm this year has been confirmed in Hawaii, her team has been working on is speeding up the diagnosis by developing tests based on antibodies and DNA in blood, rather than spinal fluid.

In a press release last week, the state Department of Health said that all three cases had occurred on the Big Island — two in East Hawaii and one in North Hawaii.

Rat lungworm is caused by a microscopic parasitic worm that lives part of its life-cycle in rats and part in slugs, snails or aquatic hosts such as freshwater shrimp. If humans eat raw or partially cooked seafood or accidentally ingest a slug in a salad, the worms can cause symptoms ranging from mild fever to nerve and/or brain damage, paralysis, blindness and death.

According to the DOH’s official web page on rat lungworm, the most common way to diagnose the disease is through a combination of the patient’s history of possible exposure and the symptoms exhibited, “as well as laboratory finding of eosinophils (a special type of white blood cell)” in the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid.

Jarvi’s team hopes to develop a much faster, cheaper test, using blood instead of cerebrospinal fluid.  They’ve been working with the blood of animals suspected of having the disease, with promising results: the tests so far have detected rat lungworm DNA in eight out of 16 dogs and two of six horses.

Working with federal inspectors, Jarvi’s researchers also have been identifying rat lungworm larvae in other creatures, including centipedes, greenhouse frogs, cane toads and even mongoose — and in 21 out of 24 coqui tested so far.

Researcher Kathleen Howe works with Volcano School of Arts and Sciences students on a slug-gathering project.

Alan McNarie/Civil Beat

Private funding from retired cardiologist Richard Robbins has allowed five pharmacy school researchers, led by Kathleen Howe, to work on another front. While the official DOH site only mentions “food contaminated by the larval stage of A. cantonensis worms” — chiefly by accidentally eating slugs or undercooked snails — as a vector for the disease, Howe and her colleagues recently completed a scientific paper that suggested that the parasites could also be conveyed by water.

That paper was scheduled to appear in an online scientific journal called Plos One this month. Jarvik sent Civil Beat an advance copy. Among its findings: if an infected slug or semislug fell into water and drowned, rat lungworm larvae could escape the drowned host and survive in the water itself for at least 21 days.

This could have particularly dire consequences on the Big Island, where tens of thousands of households rely on rainwater catchment water tanks.

Some catchment systems are protected by filters to designed to remove bacteria and sediments. But Howe’s team tested five such filters, including commonly used wound polypropylene fiber models, and found that some of the agile worms could wriggle through most of those filters. The only one that the group has tested so far that stopped all the larvae was a five-micron carbon block filter.

Howe has also developed a grade school curriculum unit in which students actually do research about the disease, learning how to safely collect slugs and other non-native mollusks, identify them and tally them. A pilot project involving five Big Island schools has created  “story maps” recording the data each school collected, giving some idea as to what mollusk pests are located where.

With Frannie Kinslow-Brewer of Big Island Invasive Species Council, Howe recently taught a course for teachers on how to use the curriculum.

A Victim’s Story

Mark LeRoy was the second case on record this year. The disease has cost him five ER trips and an extended hospital stay, and has left him with memory loss and nerve damage. But before he was finally diagnosed, he says, emergency room doctors repeatedly refused to consider rat lungworm as a diagnosis.

LeRoy had the exposure and the symptoms. In January, he’d found a slug — one of the most common carriers for the disease — in a salad he was eating. About 10 days later, while on a trip to Oahu, he developed severe pain and nausea and went to an emergency room. The ER doctors simply sent him home with medications for the pain and nausea.

Rat lungworm victim Mark LeRoy was hospitalized with the illness.

Courtesy: Mark LeRoy

But the symptoms persisted. Three days later, he went to the ER at North Hawaii Community Hospital. The doctors drew spinal fluid to check for eosinophils, but found only a 1% count. The DOH standards, LeRoy was told, called for a 10% count. Again, he was sent home.

“It wasn’t until between my fourth and fifth visit to the ER that they officially diagnosed me at my second spinal tap,” he says.

The eosinophils count then was still only 7%. But because it had risen so quickly, and because, he believes, his wife and his primary care doctor backed him up, the doctors went ahead and tested for the parasite itself. That test came back positive.

Meanwhile, his symptoms had gotten steadily worse, including pain so bad that “I couldn’t control it. I was screaming at the top of my lungs.”

He was hospitalized for a week, and dosed with steroids, fentanyl, Oxycontin, Ambien, and a morphine drip; after his release, it took him a full month to wean off all of the drugs except Ambien, which he still needs in order to sleep.

He believes that if his primary care physician hadn’t advocated for him, he’d never have been diagnosed correctly. He thinks many other patients who didn’t get that extra help have never been diagnosed.

When the DOH, UH Hilo and three other state organizations held a joint informational meeting on rat lungworm in North Kohala on April 22, Leroy and his wife, Maya Parish, were on stage with them, sharing their  experiences. He hopes to address physicians themselves at a meeting in Hilo in early June, to raise the doctors’ awareness of the problem.

The Hilo Medical Center has set up a support group for rat lungworm survivors and their caregivers, who meet every second Wednesday of the month at the Keaau Community Center, 16-186 Pili Mua St., from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

The post Big Island: Researchers Battle The Rat Lungworm Problem appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

When it comes to industries with the potential to help diversify Hawaii’s economy, few have greater promise than the maritime industries, especially ship maintenance and repair.

But a legislative initiative to help develop a new dry dock at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard shows just how thorny it can be for the government to engineer solutions, even when the stated goal is a worthy one: to help protect good jobs, including high-paying skilled positions.

Advocates of a proposed, state-supported venture say it’s necessary to save hundreds of jobs. Opponents of the proposal, specifically some members of the very industry the plan is meant to benefit, say it’s a matter of fairness and maintaining a level playing field for all companies.

And there’s another issue: neither the Navy nor the shipyard would confirm that a significant number of jobs are even at risk.

Lawmakers say iconic Pearl Harbor is at risk of losing hundreds of ship repair jobs in coming years.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

One thing is not in dispute: ship repair is a significant industry in Hawaii — a major beneficiary of the kind of lucrative federal contracts that support a lot of jobs.

According to the website USAspending.gov, the official source for spending data for the U.S. government, the state’s ship repair industry received $208.2 million in contracts in the 2018 fiscal year. The biggest recipient was BAE Systems, a prime ship repair contractor, which got $136 million, the site reported.

The shipbuilding and repair industries produced about 2,500 jobs and $200 million in income, according to a 2015 study by the U.S. Maritime Administration. The industry added about $275 million to Hawaii’s GDP, MARAD reported.

Many of the ship repair jobs are high-paying positions for people like machinists and union welders. Among the industry’s more prominent supporters is former U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, who served on the House Armed Services Committee.

Hanabusa has long touted ship repair apprentice programs as a way to train workers for well-paying careers. She has told Civil Beat previously that the maritime industry presents young people in Hawaii a “phenomenal job opportunity.”

Could Navy Ship Repair Work Dry Up?

But some lawmakers and industry members worry a big chunk of Hawaii’s ship repair business is poised to evaporate.

They say the Navy plans to move ships to San Diego for maintenance and possibly never bring them back.

Paul Brewbaker, a Hawaii economist hired by a ship repair industry association to study the issue, estimated the negative impacts of displaced ship repair activities over the next seven years could amount to the loss of nearly $1.3 billion in Hawaii gross domestic product, $351 million in lost labor earnings, and an annual average decrease of 900 jobs each year.

Lawmakers are now citing those figures in legislation designed to mitigate the risk of losing business.

Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard is the Navy’s largest repair facility between the West Coast and Asia with four dry docks capable of working on submarines and surface ships. The bills would help add a fifth dry dock, which proponents say Hawaii needs to keep work here. Both measures are awaiting final approval by the Legislature.

Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard has four dry docks, such as this one, were the USS Port Royal came for maintenance. A trade association and some lawmakers say a fifth is needed to keep jobs in Hawaii.

Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard

One problem is that the dock would be built and owned by one private company, an affiliate of Pacific Shipyards International, a major player in Hawaii’s maritime industry known for receiving sweetheart deals from lawmakers in the past.

One of the measures would provide tax credits to the developer; the other measure calls for the state to issue special state bonds to Pacific Shipyards’ affiliated company Pearl Harbor Floating Drydock LLC to help finance the project.

The bonds total $60 million. The tax credits would be up to 35% of the cost of designing and building the dry dock, which could be as much as $21 million.

Local competitors are crying foul, saying the project represents yet another inside deal for a well-connected firm.

“They’re saying the entire industry is on board, but we’re not,” Ian Caliedo, president of maritime contractor C & S Services Inc., said in an interview. Caliedo said the bills benefit one company – Pacific Shipyards – at the expense of his and others.

Fred Anawati, president of Marisco Marine and Industrial Service Co., agreed. He accused the legislation’s proponents of falsely stating it would benefit the entire industry when the legislation is aimed at just one company.

“If you’re going to give a tax credit be up front about it,” Anawati said. “We’d like to have a level playing field.”

Tom Yamachika, director of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation of Hawaii, said such gripes aren’t unusual when the government steps in to the market, especially to benefit one company over others.

“The potential for unfairness kicks in very heavily,” he said.

Proponents of the bills were not talking to the media last week.

Iain Wood, president the Ship Repair Association of Hawaii who is also Pacific Shipyards’ chief executive, did not return phone calls. Hawaii Sen. Michelle Kidani, who authored both bills, also did not return calls. Sen. Stanley Chang, who co-authored the tax credit bill, referred calls to Kidani.

A spokesman for the ship repair association denied that the measure was intended to benefit Pacific Shipyards. Even though the measure clearly states the bonds are meant to help the company’s affiliate, Pearl Harbor Floating Drydock, construct a “purpose-built floating drydock at Pearl Harbor to service submarines and surface ships,” association spokesman Alan Hayashi said the named company is merely “a placeholder for the future holder of the asset.”

“It could be ABC Corporation,” Hayashi said.

Regardless, Hayashi said, while one company might own the dock, many subcontractors would benefit from being able to do work on ships that otherwise would be sent to the West Coast.

“Everyone gets to use it,” he said. “That’s what gets lost on how this is structured.”

Navy Says Current Facilities Are Adequate

Beyond the question of whether the measures benefit one company at the expense of others are more fundamental ones. For example, it’s not clear the dry dock is needed to prevent the Navy from moving surface ships out of Hawaii for good, as the legislation envisions.

“They’re planning to move in 2023 most of not all of the repair work to the West Coast,” Hayashi said.

But Charles Oki, a Navy spokesman in Honolulu, couldn’t confirm the Navy had such plans.

And Cameron Salony, director of congressional and public affairs for the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, said the shipyard’s assets are adequate to do the repairs that need to be done.

“Current existing facilities are sufficient to support planned surface ship maintenance availabilities in Hawaii,” he said in a written statement.

Meanwhile, a Navy report on long-range plans for maintaining vessels for the 2020 fiscal year comfirms that one asset, Pearl Harbor’s Drydock 2 is moving toward obsolescence, but not until 2030.

There’s also a final, even more basic question: If it is true that the Navy plans to move ships from Hawaii, what guarantee is there that the Navy will agree to lease and use Pacific Shipyards’ floating dry dock?

“Who are they to say the Navy is even going to do that?” Caliedo asked.

Hayashi acknowledged the Navy had made no promises, but he said Hawaii needs something concrete to take to the Navy.

“This solidifies our position,” he said.

“Hawaii’s Changing Economy” is supported by a grant from the Hawaii Community Foundation as part of its CHANGE Framework project.

The post Why Plans For A New Navy Dry Dock Leave Ship Repair Industry Divided appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

State lawmakers are poised to vote Tuesday on a pair of bills that would strengthen the court’s ability to order a person with serious mental illness to undergo intensive psychiatric treatment while remaining in the community.

If the measures are approved they would go to Gov. David Ige for his consideration.

The legislation strengthens Hawaii’s Assisted Community Treatment Act, which provides court-ordered psychiatric treatment to people with serious mental illness who may be homeless or cycling through the emergency medicine or criminal justice systems. Often these people do not seek out psychiatric treatment of their own volition because their illness prevents them from knowing they are sick.

The law has been difficult to implement because mental health advocates who have taken the lead in petitioning for court-ordered treatment on behalf of people with mental illness don’t have enough funding or resources to fulfill the requirements.

To that end, Senate Bill 567 would provide state health regulators with up to $100,000 for legal assistance with ACT petitions and related court proceedings.

A third of homeless adults on Oahu have a debilitating mental disorder.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Last summer, the Institute for Human Services successfully petitioned to get a person into the program who has been arrested more than 30 times. The nonprofit next took up the fight for outpatient treatment for someone who has been arrested on more than 80 occasions.

But the petition process is lengthy and onerous, and IHS doesn’t have adequate staff or funding to take on more cases.

“There’s a lot that goes into a successful ACT petition — paying for the psychiatrists to do the assessment, educating the lawyers who represent the client, gathering all the research and documents to build a case with evidence that shows the court that this is a person that has a history of serious mental illness and it’s in their best interest to have access to this treatment,” said IHS spokesman Kimo Carvalho.

“We don’t have the funding to do this level of intervention.”

This lack of resources is partly why fewer than 10 people have received outpatient treatment through the program since the law passed in 2013.

Better Evaluations

Also up for a final vote Tuesday is Senate Bill 1124, which directs hospitals to evaluate patients who receive emergency psychiatric treatment to determine whether they are a viable candidate for the ACT program before releasing them from hospital care.

The bill would funnel people who meet the criteria for long-term outpatient mental health treatment into the ACT program, thereby reducing instances where people with serious mental illness fall into a cycle of costly short-term emergency hospitalizations.

The bill also clarifies some of the language in the ACT law to make it easier to use.

For example, the bill would more clearly define what it means for a person to be “dangerous to self” — an important requirement for a successful petition. The term is re-defined as a person who has threatened or attempted suicide or bodily harm, or behaved in a manner that indicates they are unable to provide themselves with food, shelter and medical care — including treatment for a mental illness.

The bill similarly clarifies other criteria and processes to improve the law’s potential to help people with serious mental illness obtain appropriate treatment that is in their best interest.

Carvalho called the bills a huge victory for the state’s mental health and homelessness systems. But he emphasized a need for other vital support — such as a shelter for homeless ACT petitioners to stay in at the onset of their treatment when their psychiatric symptoms are still pronounced.

“If this is still our community’s number one complaint, the legislature needs to really build some political will to help serve this population,” he said. “Because it takes a lot of resources to get someone stabilized and off the street.”

The post How These Bills Could Help Those With Serious Mental Illness appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

On Wednesday, Japan will change its calendars to the Reiwa Era, according to Japanese tradition when a new emperor ascends to the Japanese Chrysanthemum throne. The previous 30-year Heisei Era began after the passing of the Showa Emperor and end of the “bubble” economy.

The 59-year old Reiwa Emperor may be unaware that the first foreign head of the state who met his great-great-grandfather Emperor Meiji, enthroned during Japan’s 19th-century modernization period, was the Kingdom of Hawaii’s King David Kalakaua.

In hindsight, Emperor Meiji viewed Kalakaua as a model of a Westernized, independent Asia-Pacific nation-state.

Japan was the first stop of the “Merrie Monarch’s” 10-month extraordinary world tour in 1881. But why did King Kalakaua choose Japan?

During the 1603-1868 Tokugawa Era, no Japanese were allowed to travel abroad under “sakoku,” or the 250-year “Closed Country” policy.

In 1868, the first year of the Meiji Emperor’s reign, 153 immigrants known as “Gannenmono” arrived in Honolulu. King Kalakaua must have spoken to these hard-working kanaka kepani pioneers — and led to his policy to promote Japanese emigration to Hawaii to work on sugar plantations.

In July 1881 King Kalakaua, aged 45, met the Meiji Emperor, who was barely 29 years old, several times during a two-week stay in Japan. The Meiji Emperor “pulled all the stops” for the Hawaiian monarch, including a Japanese Imperial Army band playing “Hawaii Pono,” the Kingdom anthem.

Emperor Meiji of Japan admired Hawaii King David Kalakaua.

Flickr: Robert Huffstutter

From the Meiji Emperor’s viewpoint, Hawaii was an Asia-Pacific “success story.” When in 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Yokohama Bay to pressure the then-ruling Tokugawa warlord to “open” Japan to Western trade and diplomacy, Japan was exposed as a weak feudal state that was defenseless to resist Western industrialized power.

In contrast, in the 1790s Kamehameha the Great deployed state-of-the-art rifles and cannons in amphibious assaults on Maui and Oahu — creating the unified Kingdom of Hawaii; a century later King Kalakaua represented an independent state, not a feudal fiefdom or a colony.

Western Influence

The king wore Western clothes, traveled in steam-powered ships, and knew about the telegraph, photography, and electricity — all startlingly innovative to Japan, which resembled medieval England.

Japan was largely illiterate with only a few temple schools; King Kamehameha the III launched a Kingdom-wide school program in the 1840s, before many European states.

To catch up with the West, Emperor Meiji explored adopting English as Japan’s official language and accelerated engineering programs, including at now top-ranked Tokyo University. He was impressed that King Kalakaua — dressed in a European-style uniform covered with medals — conversed with his officials, including William N. Armstrong (the kingdom’s attorney general), in fluent English.

(To Emperor Meiji, the fact that Armstrong, a Yale law graduate, and Charles H. Judd, the King’s chamberlain, were the king’s Royal School classmates was unimaginable).

Since King Kalakaua, who studied military tactics under a Prussian officer, was to Emperor Meiji a “modern” monarch leveraging Western language and education to keep his nation free of Western domination, the emperor changed his meeting schedule to listen to King Kalakaua’s several proposals.

Emperor Meiji viewed Kalakaua as a model of a Westernized, independent Asia-Pacific nation-state.

In one meeting, King Kalakaua, strategizing to sustain his kingdom’s independence, “pitched” to Emperor Meiji the idea of a pan-Asia diplomatic and economic “league” aligned against European powers. Unbeknownst to Kalakaua, Japan was considering other options: in a dozen years Japan would wage war with Qing Dynasty China, and annex Korea and Taiwan.

If Emperor Meiji listened to the King, perhaps there would be an early Asia regional economic “market” group that would resist colonial encroachments by all powers, perhaps changing history.

In an oft-quoted story, Kalakaua proposed to Emperor Meiji that his 5-year-old niece Kaiulani become the bride of Prince Sadamaro, a teen-aged student at the Imperial Naval Academy.

Like a chess player, Kalakaua was thinking several moves ahead when a Hawaii-Japan monarchal linkage may bring Japanese warships to defend the Kingdom against a U.S. marine landing. However, although the Emperor wanted rapid modernization, an infusion of Hawaiian (and European) blood into the 1,500-year Imperial family line was a stretch for the homogeneous Japanese state.

Reflecting his interest in tech innovation (he would meet Thomas Edison and discuss electricity generation) Kalakaua mentioned a Hawaii-Japan joint venture for an undersea cable linking Hawaii and Japan. This idea would bear fruit in the early 20th century with the first undersea telegraph cable linking Japan to Hawaii, and in 1964 the first Japan-Hawaii telephone cable operated successfully. Kalakaua was indeed a futuristic thinker.

After a busy week in Tokyo, the king toured Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Nagasaki. At an exhibition the King examined industrial machines producing textiles and paper products. He was given engineering textbooks, enjoyed kabuki plays, and visited Buddhist temples.

Clearly, King Kalakaua acquired in-depth insights to a rapidly industrializing non-Western society while keeping ancient traditions — ideas that aligned with his quest to install electric lights at Iolani Palace, simultaneously reviving Hawaiian hula and music.

Of the questions asked by Japanese to the king, one bothered him: “Why didn’t you choose Hawaiians to be Cabinet members and travel companions?”

This latter question was the trigger for the King’s unique program to develop a “Hawaiian” cadre of technocrats (speaking foreign languages) educated abroad for what we would call a “Global M.B.A.”

Robert Wilcox traveled to Italy to learn civil engineering; Prince Jonah Kuhio studied sustainable agriculture in England (and learned Japanese in Tokyo, along with two other kanaka maoli students); others learned marketing and exports in Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China. This innovative program ended in 1887, the year of the “Bayonet Constitution” that severely restricted the king’s powers.

Four years later on a trip to San Francisco King Kalakaua passed away, aged only 54.

As for Emperor Meiji, he died in 1912 (he never traveled abroad), ushering in the Reigns of Taisho, then Showa, Heisei, and now today the Reiwa Era. Emperor Meiji gained much from the idea-rich King Kalakaua in search of global “best practices” — the Emperor’s first foreign head-of-state dialogue.

In a reversal of roles, instead of continuing innovator King Kalakaua’s advisory role for Japan, Hawaii in 2019 looks to other regions for ideas, capital, and tourists – while searching for its mid-Pacific identity. Like King Kalakaua’s experiment, Hawaii should train its own children to create its own bright future.

The post From Meiji To Reiwa: The ‘Modern’ King Kalakaua And Japan appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

If you happen to be around the State Capitol around 10 a.m. tomorrow, stop into the Senate gallery for a little fireworks.

There is chance that House Bill 1326, known informally as the water rights bill, will get a vote. If it passes, land owner Alexander & Baldwin, several utility companies and a handful of farming and ranching operations would get a seven-year extension on divert public waters.

It’s by no means certain that this will happen. But the Senate has the support of Gov. David Ige, who has shown his cards in supporting the measure that is opposed by a lot of environmental groups, Native Hawaiian activists and others. Many call HB 1326 the “water theft” bill because they say it benefits A&B more than any other entity.

To bring the bill out of the Senate Ways and Means committee, where it was deferred (that is, shelved) nearly three weeks ago, nine members of the 25-member Senate would need to vote in favor. It is not clear whether there are nine votes, but it is very possible and horse-trading is said to be going on behind closed doors.

Senate President Ronald Kouchi in the Senate chamber in January.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The higher hurdle, should HB 1326 get a floor vote Tuesday, is that a majority of votes are needed to pass it and send it to Ige for his expected signature. If 25 senators are on the floor, that works out to 13 “aye” votes.

The draft of the bill senators would vote on, by the way, would be the last version approved by the House, known as the HD 2. A proposal by Sen. Kai Kahele, known as the SD 1, is not expected to get a vote. It called for carving A&B out of the mix and shortening the water permit extension to just three years.

But anything could happen. Look no further than last Friday, when senators split 12-12 on whether to force operators of short-term vacation rentals to pay state taxes.

Surprise, surprise! That measure, Senate Bill 1292, is said to be in play as well Tuesday on the Senate floor. Click here to read more on that story.

Officially, Senate leadership is not commenting on either bill. But practically everyone who follows the Big Square Building in Beretania is, if only on background.

There is even talk of a change in Senate leadership, where some of the members of the so-called Opihi Club may be picked off and swallowed like tasty limpets.

About That Lawsuit

The legal challenge that led to the Legislature passing a three-year extension for the water rights is called the Carmichael case.

I won’t go into the legalese in this space, but in short a Circuit Court judge that the state Board of Land and Natural Resources should not have allowed A&B et al to keep diverting water.

Thus, the revocable permits were invalidated and the case is on appeal to the state’s Intermediate Court of Appeals.

That was in December 2016. The ICA still has not heard the case. But there have been some developments, and the timing is certainly interesting.

Judge Keith Hiraoka

Earlier this month Chief Judge Lisa Ginoza recused herself from Carmichael. She was replaced by Keith Hiraoka, who Ige appointed late last year to the court.

Hiraoka was Ige’s high school classmate and former campaign manager.

At the time of the nomination, I opined that Hiraoka was a good pick. I still feel that way. But not everyone does.

Many are whispering that there is an inherent conflict of interest in Hiraoka presiding over a court case that has resulted in the governor getting directly involved in approving related legislation (that is, HB 1326).

At least one person familiar with the case is brave enough to go on the record — the same person who raised concerns about bias when Hiraoka was nominated to the ICA.

“I think it is so totally inappropriate for Hiraoka to hear the Carmichael case,” said David Kim Frankel, who was an attorney with the Native Hawaii Legal Corp. when it represented the plaintiffs suing the BLNR. “Just from a good government perspective there should be no appearance of impropriety. And it is totally inappropriate given Hiraoka’s relation to Ige and Ige’s public proclamation about the Carmichael decision.”

David Kimo Frankel

Attorney Jeff Portnoy, however, who has been a member of the Judicial Selection Commission, sees no conflict.

“The governor nominates all judges, including judges that are for and against the state as well as parties all the time.”

Ginoza is not the only member of the six-judge ICA to recuse herself from the case. Judge Katherine Leonard recused herself in 2018. In both cases no reason was given.

Portnoy is an attorney with Cades Schutte, which represents A&B in the Carmichael case, but I did not ask him to comment on the merits of the case. He did allow that the Carmichael case seems to be moving slowly, but it could be for any number of reasons, including how complicated the case is. 

I asked the Judiciary about the case and got this answer back: “In response to your inquiry about the status of Carmichael v. Alexander & Baldwin, CAAP-16-0000071, it will be decided as soon as reasonably practicable,” said Jan Kagehiro, director of the Communications and Community Relations Office for the courts.

But Wait, There’s More

Here’s another other development in the Carmichael case, which includes not only the BLNR and A&B as defendants but also several of the entities seeking water permit extensions.

On April 18 the ICA decided that oral arguments would not be necessary. If any party felt otherwise, it needed to let the court know.

The order was issued at 8 a.m. that day, the same Friday that Ige asked lawmakers to reconsider taking up HB 1326 again.

I should note as well that the NHLC — still the attorneys for Healoha Carmichael, Lezley Jacintho and Na Moku Aupuni O Koolau Hui — disagrees with Ige’s rationalization for reviving HB 1326. The governor relied on an analysis of his administrative director, Ford Fuchigami, who found the legislation sound and the need for the bill critical.

In a memo to all legislators April 21, the NHLC characterized the executive branch as using its power and influence “to misstate the law and champion a manufactured water crisis that has no basis in fact.”

New legislation, NHLC lawyers argued, is not needed, as there are other avenues for recourse while the lawsuit wends it way through the courts.

“Neither the Department of Land and Natural Resources nor the Department of the Attorney General is constrained by any law or court order to continue to provide all new and existing water permittees the water to which each of them is lawfully entitled,” the April 21 memo says.

The memo continues:

See you Tuesday in the Senate. And if SB 1292 is pulled, see you again on Thursday when a final vote would come.

The post Chad Blair: Last Chance For The Water Rights Bill appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

The Senate voted 13 to 12 Tuesday to pass a bill that will allow the state to begin collecting transient accommodation and general excise taxes from short-term rentals.

Under the bill, hosting platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway will act as tax collectors on behalf of the state.

Short-term rentals of less than 30 days are generally illegal in the state and many owners are operating them outside the law without paying taxes.

Many lawmakers have been eager to tap into that money stream, frustrated that county governments, who control land-use regulation and zoning, have been slow to enact measures to identify them and limit their growth. The state estimates the taxes will generate $46 million per year.

The bill now goes to Gov. David Ige for his consideration.

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz made a strong push for Senate Bill 1292.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The measure, Senate Bill 1292, was voted down, 12 to 12 on Friday night but Senate Ways and Means Chairman Donovan Dela Cruz, a supporter of the bill, made it known that about 15 other unrelated bills would be placed at risk if the state failed to pass the measure, which has come to be known as the Airbnb bill.

Opponents said the bill would accelerate the process of pricing middle-class residents out of the housing market.

“Our community is hurting, we’re losing this battle,” said Sen. Kurt Fevella, a Republican from Ewa Beach. He said high-income vacationers are driving local people out of their hometowns.

Sen. Laura Thielen said the Airbnb bill put the state in the position of allowing “internet platforms to act as a shield for illegal operations,” because the bill does not permit information that is collected from vacationers to be given to local governments to aid them in enforcement efforts.

Dela Cruz said the state needed the money and that the debate over the Airbnb bill had been delayed so late in the session that the senate had no choice but to pass it for financial reasons.

On Tuesday, Sen. Stanley Chang, who had voted against the measure, made a motion for it to be reconsidered, which permitted a new vote to occur. Chang then voted against the measure again.

The senator who switched his position Tuesday was Sen. Clarence Nishihara, who chairs the Senate Public Safety, Intergovernmental and Military Affairs Committee.

One of the bills that Dela Cruz had identified as vulnerable was House Bill 1552, a package of measures establishing oversight of the troubled Department of Public Safety. Nishihara had helped shepherd that measure through the Legislature and co-authored the Senate companion bill on the oversight commission.

Dela Cruz pointedly said on the Senate floor that “these needed programs will get funded” as a result of the vote to pass the Airbnb bill.

After the meeting adjourned, in comments made to reporters, Senate President Ronald D. Kouchi scoffed at criticism that the state would be party to any illegality or responsibility for injuring neighborhoods by encouraging short-term rentals.

“The counties are devastated already,” he said, noting that in the 20 years since vacation rentals began proliferating in Hawaii, county governments did little to solve the problem because they got more income when property values rose as homes were sold off as vacation rentals. Since then, he said, many state residents have found employment as landscapers and housekeepers at vacation rentals, and that those people would be hurt if anything was done to clamp down on them now.

He said he hoped the counties would do something soon about the proliferation of rentals.

“We are at the point we are because of the unwillingness of counties to enforce their own ordinances,” he said.

Thielen told reporters that lawmakers in the House declined to negotiate on the bill in good faith despite many efforts to reach out to them and that leadership of the House and Senate decided they wanted the bill to pass in the way it did. She said they would not consider alternatives, saying that “leadership on both sides rejected it.”

She said that Dela Cruz was left at the end of the session with a limited menu of options.

“He was doing his job to do a balanced budget,” she said. “None of us were happy to be in this position at the end of the day.”

The post Hawaii Senate Narrowly Votes To Tax Airbnb Rentals appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Hawaii would become the first state in 50 years to impose corporate income taxes on real estate investment trusts under a measure headed to Gov. David Ige for his consideration.

On Tuesday the state House voted overwhelmingly, 44 to 7, in favor of Senate Bill 301, which would impose the state’s 6.2 percent corporate tax on real estate investment trusts, also known as REITs. The bill passed the Senate in early April with a near-unanimous vote.

Real estate investment trusts swept into Hawaii in a big way in the past decade, and now own more than $18 billion in real estate, including such marquee properties as Ala Moana Center, Hilton Hawaiian Village and the International Market Place in Waikiki.

Hilton Hawaii Village and other real estate investment trusts would face higher taxes under a law headed to the governor’s desk.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

REITs are securities that hold real estate and distribute at least 90 percent of their taxable income to shareholders annually in the form of dividends. Shareholders pay taxes on that income in their home state and countries, but few of them live in Hawaii and pay little in the way of corporate income taxes.

A group of grassroots advocates and small businesses organized a few years ago to raise public awareness to what they called the injustice of REITs not paying their fair share. Proponents were thrilled Tuesday by their victory, which many had considered unlikely against such well-funded adversaries.

“It will result in fairer taxation,” said Mike Fergus, a Hawaii real estate developer who lobbied for the bill’s passage.

REIT operators said that passing the tax would stifle investment in Hawaii and potentially lead to revenue and job loss if construction and remodeling projects withered.

“Hawaii needs investment from companies who are long-term investors and not ‘flippers,’” said Dara Bernstein, senior vice president and tax counsel for the National Association of Real Estate Investors. “If this measure is enacted, it will discourage long-term investors in affordable and student housing.”

A trade group representing the REIT industry spent heavily on lobbying, outreach and advertising to convey that message broadly and block the bill, but were unable to convince lawmakers, who voted for the measure in large numbers.

Only one other state, New Hampshire, taxes REITs, under a law passed in 1970 when REITs made up a very small part of the nation’s real estate market. REITs continue to operate in New Hampshire despite the tax.

It is unclear whether Gov. David Ige will veto the measure or sign it.

Gov. David Ige now gets to decide if he’ll support legislation taxing large real estate investment trusts.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism last week sought to discourage lawmakers from passing the bill, circulating a memo that the measure could create unintended consequences by making Hawaii a less attractive place for investment. The department is headed by a close ally of the governor, Mike McCartney, who faces a confirmation hearing Thursday.

Evelyn Azcon Hao, president of Faith Action for Community Equity whose members, dressed in blue T-shirts, had lobbied hard at the Capitol for the measure, said she wants to discuss the bill with Ige as soon as possible.

“We’re hopeful we’ll get a chance to meet with him and he will sign it into law,” Hao said.

The post Iconic Hawaii Properties Could Soon Pay More Taxes appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Weeks before a tour helicopter crashed onto a major street in Kailua, Hawaii Congressman Ed Case expressed concerns to federal aviation leaders about such craft flying virtually unrestricted above neighborhoods, national parks and other occupied areas.

The helicopters, which make dozens of daily local trips through the federally controlled airspace, are “virtually unregulated,” Case wrote in an April 4 letter to the Federal Aviation Administration.

“This current situation is unacceptable. Commercial air tour operators are not or should not be entitled to exact widespread and virtually unlimited disruption and risk as a result of their operations,” Case wrote to Raquel Girvin, the FAA’s Western-Pacific Regional Administrator. “There has been no material effort by operators to mitigate disruption and risk on a voluntary basis and none can be reasonably expected.”

The cause of Monday’s fatal crash, which dropped debris on some Kailua properties before the Robinson R44 helicopter slammed into Oneawa Street, remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. All three people on board were killed.

Wreckage from Monday’s tour helicopter crash rests along Oneawa Street in Kailua. Congressman Ed Case raised concerns about the flights over neighborhoods and other occupied areas several weeks earlier.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The Honolulu Medical Examiner on Tuesday identified the pilot as 28-year-old Joseph Berridge, who had arrived in Hawaii about two weeks earlier. One of the two female passengers was identified as Ryan McAuliffe, 28, of Chicago, Illinois. Identification of the third victim is pending, according to the city.

The medical examiner determined cause of death for all three victims to be multiple blunt force injuries sustained in the crash.

In an April 4 letter to the FAA, Congressman Ed Case wrote that tour helicopters in Hawaii are “virtually unregulated.”

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

On Monday, Kailua Rep. Cynthia Thielen called for a ban on all such commercial flights until an investigation could be completed. Four state senators followed her lead Tuesday and made the same request.

Case said he and other locals have watched such helicopters routinely dip below their 1,500-foot altitude limit on clear, sunny days. Federal rules only allow those craft to dip lower for safety reasons such as poor visibility in clouds, his letter says.

Local tour companies conduct thousands of annual helicopter flights over Hawaii Volcanoes and Haleakala national parks without the federally required management plans in place for those air tours, Case said.

In a separate letter Tuesday, Case asked Girvin and the FAA to list any options to protect the public now and after the crash investigation wraps. He further asked Girvin to address Thielen’s request to halt the flights.

“Just one day after this tragedy which narrowly avoided impacting residences as well, tour helicopter operations are continuing throughout Hawaii, including overflights of residential and occupied areas,” Case wrote.

Five of the past 10 helicopter incidents in Hawaii have involved the R44 model, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Tuesday.

Read Case’s and Thielen’s letters here:

The post Case Called Out Risk Of Low-Flying Tour Helicopters Weeks Before Crash appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Born to former farmers who now own a business exporting perishable herbs from Hawaii to the continental United States, my family has witnessed first hand how climate change has impeded crop development in the past 40 years.

The agricultural industry is among the first to confront the effects of global warming. Climate change may include torrential rainfall, extended periods of drought, and in extreme cases, human mortality.

I believe that at the rate temperatures are rising, agricultural productivity will inevitably decline. This is a critical issue for many developing countries that depend on agriculture for economic development and domestic consumption.

Developing countries often have weak central governments and are plagued with internal ambivalence; an economic crisis caused by the effects of global warming may become a breeding ground for state collapse in the developing world.

For example, South Sudan is an impoverished, war-torn country with substantial reliance on its agricultural sector to sustain its fragile economy. According to the Climate Change Vulnerability Index 2017, South Sudan will feel the effects of global warming at about 2.5 times more than the global average and is amongst the worst performing states in the world.

With up to 95% of the population relying on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries for their day-to-day living, the dry spells from global warming will be especially detrimental to South Sudan. In its current weak state, South Sudan doesn’t have the capacity to combat an economic crisis induced by global warming without a high probability of collapsing from the lack of profitable and sustainable agriculture.

This problem, however, extends beyond South Sudan. State economies are globally intertwined because of trade. Many developing countries have arable land that cannot be replicated in developed countries.

Meanwhile, developed countries have abundant capital to produce advanced technology. Comparative advantage exists amongst developing countries and developed countries in order to delegate the production of goods and attain maximum efficiency.

Mass Displacement And Death

In the United States, we rely on imports from developing countries to help supply domestic demands. For example, Mexico is our largest supplier of agricultural products, exporting $26 billion worth of goods in 2018.

However, Mexico’s cropland is expected to decline by 40% to 70% by 2030 due to climate change. If developing countries are unable to export enough goods, prices of agricultural produce and other imported commodities will skyrocket in our own domestic markets.

So if global warming has such profound effects on the future of every country, why haven’t we done more to decrease carbon emissions?

After all, we are potentially anticipating mass displacement and death tolls far greater than war if we don’t do anything about climate change.

First, there are leaders like President Donald Trump who don’t believe in the severity of climate change. As the world’s only superpower, the United States has a duty to hold ourselves and others accountable in environmental protect treaties, agreements, and policies.

But President Trump withdrew the United States out of the Paris Agreement, creating a global message that environmental protection isn’t at the forefront of United States policy agenda.

“There are leaders like President Donald Trump who don’t believe in the severity of climate change.”

Secondly, the World Trade Organization doesn’t take into consideration repercussions on the environment when settling trade disputes between countries. Some of their previous rulings have caused countries to roll back their domestic environmental protection policies.

For example, Mexico contested the United States’ environmental protection policy regarding dolphin-safe labeling for tuna imports. WTO allowed Mexico to impose trade sanctions until the dispute is resolved, forcing the United States to either roll back its environmental protection policies for Mexico or be fined millions of dollars annually.

In order to stop climate change, world leaders and institutions cannot deny the catastrophic effects of global warming on Earth and that this occurrence is a result of human activity. We also need international institutions, like the WTO, to take environmental implications into consideration when settling disputes or creating new policies.

Lastly, domestic governments need to take the initiative to implement more environmental protection regulations and encourage environmentally-friendly habits amongst their citizens.

Some people may object to my solutions, claiming that high enforcement procedures will impose significant costs upon states. While that may be true, it is the collective duty of states to ensure the survival of Earth and this starts with the preservation of the developing world’s agricultural economy.

The incurred costs of protecting the environment is a short-term issue when compared to the long-term consequences of climate change. The more carbon emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, the closer we are to a catastrophic period of horrific human suffering.

The post Global Warming Is A Global Problem appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.