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Under the Sun
Cynthia Oi
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For people of Hawaii, it's all about Oahu
IN support of a curbside recycling service in Honolulu, a Kailua man who wrote a letter to the editor suggested doing away with the part of the HI-5 bottle deposit law that has consumers getting back their nickels.
Instead, he proposed continuing to charge the fee and using the money to pay for curbside recycling.
That's not a bad idea, except that the curbside service was a city plan and HI-5 is a state law. As well-intentioned as the fellow's proposal, he overlooked the fact that the city and state governments aren't one and the same.
While it is certainly possible to shift state-collected funds to the city for curbside recycling -- a program badly needed to reduce landfill-bound wastes -- the service might not be cost-effective in other counties.
On Hawaii island, for example, many residents don't have the luxury of regular, twice-a-week trash pickups that Oahu residents are favored with simply because homes are spread over wider distances and providing curbside collections would be really expensive and time consuming.
So people bag up their garbage, branches and yard clippings and recyclables and haul them to dumps, or "waste transfer stations" as they are officially called, by themselves, often leaving old furniture, bicycles, unwanted machinery and other items on the side for whoever might find use for them.
The Kailua fellow's well-intended suggestion reflects a Honolulu-centric view of problems and solutions. But his was benign.
Others, like one from a Hawaii Kai man, seemed mean-spirited. This guy, expounding on Hawaii's inability to house its prisoners in state, proposed that two of the many smaller, uninhabited islands could be used as penal colonies -- one for men, one for women -- if environmentalists "could loosen up a bit."
Failing that, he glibly went on, " there's always the Big Island."
Even if he was speaking tongue in cheek, those sort of careless remarks stir up the notion that considerations given Oahu are of lesser importance for other islands, that the sensitivities of people who live outside Honolulu don't carry as much weight.
If there was a mere whisper that a prison would be built on Hawaii Kai Drive, you can bet this man would be pounding on doors at the state Capitol from dawn to dusk, wailing NIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY. Yet he thoughtlessly threw out his prison solution into someone else's backyard.
Is it any wonder that the Hawaii County Council is thinking of hiring a lobbyist to look after its island's interests at the state Legislature? Though voters are supposedly represented by their elected lawmakers, it appears that county officials feel they need more assistance.
It's understandable that Honolulu captures most of the political attention since it is the financial hub of the state and thus the focus of power brokers, moneyed interests and legislators. But Oahu's problems often aren't the same as the ones facing Molokai or Kauai.
The excise tax law the Legislature passed last year is a perfect example. It was designed primarily to give the Honolulu City Council the power to raise money for a mass transit system, and though it allows similar authority for transit projects in the other counties, the calculation was an add-on, an afterthought.
Some neighbor island residents would argue that the inattention is a good thing; the less the Legislature and administration meddle in their down-home affairs, the better. But the future of these islands depends heavily on decisions that are made far away from their communities and by men and women whose narrow perspectives are drawn from experiences in the big city.
When it comes to allocating money, Honolulu is the first hog at the trough. When it comes to projects, like prisons, that can adversely affect people's lives, out of city-sight is out of city-minds.
See the
Columnists section for some past articles.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at:
coi@starbulletin.com.