Big Isle report on marijuana
By Rod Thompson
eradication fails to please
Council critics
Star-BulletinHILO -- Hawaii County police are meeting the goals of federal grants to suppress marijuana growing, and procedures are available to handle public complaints about it, a new county report says.
The study was written by the county legislative auditor for the County Council after marijuana legalization advocates testified in December that the County Charter requires a "mandatory program review" of various programs at least every four years.
The report was prompted by two federal grants totaling $353,294.
The conclusion about meeting the goals of the grants appeared to satisfy neither the marijuana activists nor county officials who produced the report.
The report is "flawed by design and fraudulent by intent" says a previously filed court document in which marijuana advocate Roger Christie and others seek to impeach Mayor Stephen Yamashiro and six members of the Council who voted to accept the federal money.
Councilwoman Bobby Jean Leithead-Todd said, "It looks like the stated goals are being met adequately. Not superbly, but the best we could do (with the money available)."
Legislative auditor Constance Kiriu wrote, "An examination of 'the effectiveness of each program grant' is somewhat hindered by a lack of well-defined and quantifiable measurements and benchmarks."
A new federal evaluation system is scheduled to go into effect in the future, she noted.
County police have been conducting marijuana eradication efforts since 1978.
Throughout the 1990s, critics complained whenever the Council accepted federal money for the effort.
They finally got the Council to do a report in December, but immediately disagreed with the limited nature of the report.
"It's another smoking-gun piece of evidence of malfeasance on the part of the County Council," Christie said yesterday.
Councilwoman Leithead-Todd said the marijuana advocates want a report which shows that limiting the availability of marijuana forces drug users to turn to more dangerous drugs.
The report would be larger, more expensive, more difficult to produce, and probably wouldn't show that the lack of marijuana leads to harder drugs, she said.
Another complaint is that eradication helicopters fly too low and disrupt the lives of people and livestock.
Staff from the legislative auditor's office flew in a helicopter, then deliberately dropped to within 200 feet of grazing cows, the report says.
"A few cows lazily turned their heads to observe us but were otherwise unperturbed," the report says.
