Hanauma Bay is barely worth the visit

Viewing the new $10.6 million improvement project at Hanauma Bay, I heard visitors comment that it seems the Honolulu mayor is trying to take us back to the Stone Age, Flintstone-style. As a longtime resident and infrequent visitor to what has become a disgraceful tourist trap, I felt the sting of these comments.

After a half-day of trying to get into the park, we were charged an entry fee, even though there was no parking due to construction. After 20 minutes of circling the parking lot, we found a possibly illegal space and proceeded past the overturned fiberglass boulders littering the scene.

Once on the beach, our ears were bombarded with lifeguards yelling repeatedly in Japanese and English via bullhorn at visitors to not walk on the reef because that would kill it even though the reef has been dead for years due to commercialization.

Despite the degradation of this once-pristine location, visitors riding the tram up the hill felt it was worth the trip, if only once. Then they commented how lucky residents are that 2002 is an election year.

Laura Brown

[Quotables] "If we can just be a part of who he was, we would all be successful." Clayton Hee Office of Hawaiian Affairs chairman, on the late Myron "Pinky" Thompson, former Bishop Estate trustee and Hawaiian voyaging pioneer, who died on Christmas Day. "I have no interest in political office, his or anyone else's, but I do, as a citizen, have an abiding interest in our Constitution and would like to see it upheld." Russell Blair Former state judge and senator, who has filed a lawsuit seeking immediate removal of Mayor Jeremy Harris from office if he continues to campaign for governor. Blair says Harris is violating the "resign-to-run" law, which requires office-holders to resign when they become a candidate for another office with an overlapping term.

Faculty trying to heal School of Social Work

I am writing in response to the Dec. 17 article on the University of Hawaii's School of Social Work. I am a graduate student in the School of Social Work, and I found the article to be not representative of the entire faculty and certainly not representative of the students' general feelings and opinions.

The school has undergone many changes, unfortunately, most of them negative. Due to cuts in the budget, the size of the faculty has dwindled to a core of overworked and underpaid educators. Yet they are dedicated people who are charged with the duty and responsibility of educating social workers to help alleviate and rectify the inequities and injustice society creates. Give the faculty members a break. Let them sort out this transition period without uneducated judgment from the community.

Tracie N. Kam
Aiea

Budget shortfall needs a long-term solution

Regarding the proposal to use the hurricane Relief Fund to balance the budget: It's amazing how the governor found this quick and final answer to balance the books when a unprecedented event occurs. It may work short-term, but what we really need is a well-thought-out process that will appeal long-term.

Michael Nomura

Corporate income tax is passed on to public

With regard to the proposed repeal of the Alternative Corporate Income Tax, any competent economist will say the Corporate Income Tax is really a tax on the public, much as a sales tax is.

A corporation requires a minimum after-tax return on its investment. To get it, the corporation will either raise prices or, if that is not possible, eventually go out of business.

In that case, its competitors will raise prices and the consumer will pay. By upping the required return on new investment, the Corporate Income Tax discourages economic growth, a fact tacitly recognized by Congress in its liberal provision of investment tax deductions.

So the Alternative Corporate Income Tax is mostly about political window dressing.

W.B. Thompson

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