Health care with aloha
I have been a patient at Kona Community Hospital since 1968 — my family has been treated there for births and bumps.
Recently, I was there for a minor operation, for one day. On entering the front door, I was immediately lost. The building has really grown. Services and technology are greatly improved.
What hasn’t changed is the real Kona aloha that the good folks working there share with their patients. In this time of take a number and impersonal health care, Kona Community Hospital is all heart and aloha.
To the blessed nurses Barbara and Lili, thanks a million times. For everyone there, me ke aloha pumehana.
Richard Fowler
Kahaluu
Decedents gazed at stars, too
Regarding the stalled Maunakea telescope project, we are living in the 21st century, yet superstition and religion may still triumph over science.
The irony is that these islands’ earliest settlers relied, in part, on their knowledge of astronomy in order to successfully arrive here. May these ancient scientists’ decedents eventually prevail in the face of their current day detractors.
Robert Hofmann
Captain Cook
Short-term rentals cause
problems across country
I am here visiting your beautiful island, and just happened to see a letter to the editor regarding short-term rentals (Joy, April 16). I, too, live in a resort town and she is absolutely correct in saying that other resort towns are experiencing the same thing.
I am actually in the rental business myself and have refused to get involved in the short-term thing because I can see what it is doing to my small town by Lake Tahoe. There is nowhere for the average Joe to live! The average Joe, who works at the restaurant, who dry cleans your clothes, who cleans your house, who fixes your kitchen sink, etc.
The rents in my area have gone crazy (which, ironically, yes, benefits me in the rental business). Whenever I list a property for rent, I get at least 10 responses, because there is nowhere for these people to go. And it breaks my heart.
Consider this a challenge to those who have taken your long-term rental off the market so that you can “score” with the higher dollars from the short-term — do what is right for your local economy and revert back to long-term renting.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in the long term, with all these short-term rentals, but I can only think it will not be good in the end.
Toree Warfield
Staying at the Kona Billfisher;
Incline Village, Nev.
Not all rental owners the same
In her letter (“Short-term rentals affecting island economy”) Joy Sommer makes some sweeping assumptions that are simply not true. She apparently does not understand that owners of short-term rentals pay not only property and income taxes but also general excise taxes and transit accommodation taxes (4 percent plus 10.25 percent of the rent).
For whatever reasons, the county has been remiss in collecting the GET and TAT even though a quick comparison of tax rolls and websites would make it easy to identify the scofflaws.
I can also assure you that my vacation-rental guests have incurred much less wear and tear on my home than my former long-term renters caused.
Also, it is not true that all owners of short-term rentals are irresponsible. We provide plenty of parking for our guests, and we insist that they stick to our house rules. We live on site, and we maintain good relationships with our neighbors by enforcing those rules the few times we have guests who violate them.
Please don’t paint all of us who own vacation rentals as greedy scofflaws. Many of us need the income in order to continue to live here. Most of us are responsible, and we are in fact positively affecting the island economy and helping to fill the county and tax coffers.
Kerrill J. Kephart
Kamuela
