Wasting without worry
No Hele-on grants applied for since 2014 and $1,000,000 spent in December and January alone for rentals?
Does no one ever go to jail in this county for malfeasance? There is a never ending call to raise our taxes, yet, it seems, our tax dollars are wasted and stolen continuously!
Jim Lomonaco
Kailua-Kona
Really lost in translation
On Friday, Fox News interpreted Ocasio-Cortez’s statement, “We should all try to use train travel more than planes because of CO2 emissions being much heavier with planes” as, and I quote, “She wants to ban airplanes!”
The trouble with trumpets, like Jim Higgins, only using the propaganda of faux news is they just get the very biased, and often fake news, of a network that has provided heavy doses of misinformation, lies and unadulterated adoration of a TV barker who lies continually.
Dan McRoberts
Naalehu
Hawaii turns away free money, and yet we pay
It was just a little over one year ago that Hawaii had the chance to have Airbnb collect vacation renter taxes. Instead, Gov. David Ige vetoed that.
Back then Matt Middlebrook, public policy manager for Airbnb in Hawaii, said “It is frustrating that the Ige administration expressed interest in negotiations with Airbnb late in the 2017 session of the Legislature but that Ige refused to sign off on the final proposal.”
He went on to say “Unfortunately, as a result of the governor’s flip-flop, the state will lose out on $30 million in tax revenue that would have been generated by Airbnb hosts.”
Now the state has tried to sue Airbnb for past vacation rental information in an effort to collect lost taxes. That did not work out. The state lost out on $30 million taxes and possibly more as a result of many vacation renters not paying their taxes.
Since the tourists are not paying their fair share of taxes to support Hawaii, the residents of Hawaii get the burden to cover for these unpaid taxes. We get to have our GET, sewer, gasoline and property taxes increased to cover the governor’s light rail, the devastation to our county from storms and volcanoes, schools, emergency rescues for stranded people, our roads and even housing for the homeless.
Ted Johnson
Kailua-Kona