[ OUR OPINION ]

Boards, vision teams
should be merged

THE ISSUE The administration has eliminated allocations for vision teams and neighborhood boards in hopes of quelling divisiveness between them.

BY REMOVING annual funding entitlements for vision teams, the city administration redirects the groups' objectives away from spending just because they have money and more toward providing officials with guidance about community desires. As such, the teams may take up broader plans for transforming their districts instead of focusing narrowly on single projects for neighborhood signs and skateparks.

The change also lessens divisions that have developed between vision teams and neighborhood boards. The goal now should be to meld the two.

Mayor Harris set up the 19 vision teams in 1998 as a way to involve more people in setting priorities for city projects, allotting each team $2 million a year until the budget problems forced reductions of the amounts to $1 million for fiscal 2003-04. Meanwhile, neighborhood boards had been given $1 million each up until last year when funding was cut by half. As could be expected, the funding difference and confusion about their roles often pitted the groups against each other.

Beyond the financial conflict, vision teams became problematic because, unlike board members, team participants are not elected, leaving them vulnerable to special-interest groups who could control decision-making by sheer numbers. In addition, vision teams have no standard procedures for conducting business and lines of accountability are non-existent.

The City Council, attempting to rein in spending, is considering suspension of vision team and neighborhood board projects for two years or limiting their funds to road-maintenance projects. In that light, the administration last week decided to drop both groups' allocations for special projects completely, and will direct vision teams to look at long-term plans for their districts.

That's fine. However, because the teams and boards have essentially the same purposes, there's no reason why they cannot be integrated, with each team as a permanent committee within each board, since their memberships often overlap anyway. Perhaps vision committee membership also could be open to volunteers from the community.

Harris' goal for the teams was to encourage more citizen participation, the same reason the boards were established. The mayor's intent remains laudable, but the vision teams' time may have come and dismantling them would be discouraging. The Council and the administration should consider uniting them.

---

BACK TO TOP
|

Give terminally ill
option of doctor's aid

THE ISSUE Studies show doctors are illegally prescribing lethal doses to terminally ill patients, while other patients are speeding their own deaths.

OPPONENTS of physician-assisted suicide should not be under the illusion that terminally ill patients in Hawaii are not finding ways to die with dignity, or that physicians are not helping them to do so. National surveys indicate that a significant number of doctors are honoring requests for lethal prescriptions or injections, and many patients are bringing about their own deaths by refusing to eat or drink. Hawaii's lack of a "death with dignity" act means only that the terminally ill are denied the most humane method of bringing their suffering to an end.

Hawaii's House approved an assisted-suicide bill patterned after the Oregon law last year but the Senate defeated it by a single vote. Governor Lingle has opposed such legislation. As more is learned about the issue, Hawaii's Legislature and the governor should reconsider.

Of 1,902 doctors responding to a survey published this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine, nearly 400 said they had been asked by terminally ill patients for aid in dying, and more than half of those doctors told patients they would honor the requests under some conditions. One prominent condition was that the patient not be depressed at the time of the request. Eighty patients were assisted by their physicians in dying, even though it is illegal in all states except Oregon.

Although 129 patients in Oregon have been assisted by doctors in dying since that state's Death With Dignity Act went into effect three years ago, nearly twice as many terminally ill Oregonians are speeding their own deaths without physicians' help, according to a study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. One-third of the more than 300 nurses reported that they had cared for terminally ill patients who chose to stop eating or drinking to speed their deaths. Such patients usually die within two weeks of beginning their fasts.

In both physician-assisted suicides and those that are entirely self-induced, the patients are reported not only to be terminally ill but to have decided their quality of life was poor and they were ready to die, but they were not depressed. The Oregon law requires that the patient has been diagnosed to die within six months. Doctors are allowed to write lethal prescriptions but not administer the drug, which the patients swallow on their own.