Timing is everything
So this is about repaving Mamalahoa Highway in South Kona. It started in August, right for the beginning of the school year (as always, for the past 30 years, not that it was ever needed urgently, other than to annoy the commuters, or so it seems). Instead of the two months it usually took, we are now in the fourth month of repaving and it’s still not finished.
Not only don’t they have the good sense to start after 8 a.m., so people can get to work first, they also were not capable of putting the yellow double lines back in the middle where they belong. In some stretches the lines moved about a foot from where they used to be to one side, making an already narrow highway with a lot of traffic ridiculously and dangerously lopsided.
Who is in charge of this? And why is it not possible to move the whole operation to January and February, when there is less rain and coffee harvest is mostly done.
Brigitte Sperka
Honaunau
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Unreliable, inaccessible and incompetent
We have lived in South Kohala since 2012. In many ways we feel fortunate to be in Hawaii. However, in many ways we are starting to feel shortchanged by every level of our government.
The newspaper is replete with these stories day after day. The state allowed a clearly dysfunctional couple to foster and adopt children who turn out to have been abused for years, with one dying. Over a year ago, a neighbor filed a complaint of elder discrimination at a hotel in Maui. They have recently been told that the backlog means nothing will be examined until at least late in 2022. Our county claims that the huge backlog of building permits will be cleared up in another nine months. Our leaders give big low-income housing contracts to developers with a history of project failure and bankruptcy. Stories of police corruption and malfeasance abound. Public transit on our island is barely functional. And let’s not talk about the Honolulu rail system.
I’m starting to feel as if every level of government services are unreliable, inaccessible, and incompetent.
This isn’t a feature of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the way it has always worked. Frankly, I’m at a loss on how to fix it, but fixing it is vital to our future. I’m tired of highly paid government workers not performing their jobs efficiently and correctly, relying on “shaka” culture to get them by. Our elected leaders need to embrace performance metrics to ensure we’re getting the performance we’ve paid for, and have the right to expect.
Jim McMIllan
Waikoloa
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