Helicopter tours shouldn’t
play by own rules
Last week or so, I heard a tour helicopter owner talking on NPR about why they shouldn’t have to fly over the ocean to take their customers to see the lava and other natural features. It’s just too expensive for them, and scary to crash in the ocean.
For some reason, helicopter tour companies think they own the skies above us all, and subject us to their noise and the resulting PTSD anger minute by minute, and we are supposed to feel sorry for them, that it would cost more money for them to fly over the ocean like the law says. They continue to fly anywhere they want, as low as they want, showing our backyards and front yards to their paying customers.
Doesn’t matter what time in the morning on Thanksgiving Day or any holiday or day of the week, slews of them fly back and forth day in and day out ad nauseam. Those of us in the flight path face a mental health crisis daily because of their uncaring, selfish operations. Why do tour helicopters get to make their own rules and hurt tens of thousands of residents on a daily basis?
Sara Steiner
Pahoa
County needs to interact
with public better
Mayor Harry Kim’s administration has done a poor job interacting with the public over the first year he’s been in office. It hasn’t helped that he’s repeated the same mistakes that plagued his last term. These mistakes include imposing restrictions on how I interact with Department of Public Works employees.
I believe his administration really needs to reevaluate how public inquiries, and dissemination of information is handled. He promised to run Hawaii County in a more transparent, and honest, manner. I have yet to see his administration fulfill the latter campaign promise. Transparency in county government has actually taken two steps back from the previous administration, it seems.
The first step in addressing this issue is doing a better job acknowledging and responding to public feedback. This could be done by leveraging social media, blogs, newspapers, etc., to get the word out to constituents. For example, the mayor of Maui has an Ask The Mayor column in the Maui newspapers, which posts frequent questions posed by the public to his office.
Aaron Stene
Kailua-Kona
