[ OUR OPINION ]

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Go forward with plan
for campus at Kapolei

THE ISSUE The University of Hawaii Board of Regents has approved a plan for a campus for UH-West Oahu at Kapolei.

KAPOLEI has long been the desired location for the West Oahu campus of the University of Hawaii, and the UH regents have taken an important step toward achieving that objective. They approved a long-range plan for such a campus, to be developed under the concept of a private-public partnership. The university should go forward without distraction in its design and construction as early as 2007.

Former Gov. Ben Cayetano was a strong proponent of a UH campus a Kapolei, envisioning it on the foothills of the Waianae Range east of Makakilo. He finally agreed to a plan for putting it instead on 500 acres of state land makai of the H-1 freeway, next to the Kapolei Golf Course. The idea embraced by the Board of Regents is to finance the construction cost of $69 million to $88 million by selling the development rights to 169 adjoining acreage.

The action taken by the regents is preliminary, authorizing Jan Yokota, the university's director of capital improvements, to inquire into whether developers would be interested in building commercial and residential structures in exchange for erecting the first four buildings on 97 acres and building sewer, water and electrical infrastructure. The rest of the 500 acres reserved for the campus would be used for the university's expansion and for parks, an elementary school, roads and utilities.

UH President Evan Dobelle, whose firing has been delayed pending mediation, has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Kapolei campus as a way to provide affordable and accessible education. More than one-fourth of the students at the Manoa campus live in Central and West Oahu, and their attendance at a Kapolei campus not only would be convenient for them but would reduce traffic congestion.

Acting President David McClain also supports a new campus at Kapolei. "West Oahu really has a role in the system as a very special kind of university that can grow into being a full, comprehensive university," he told the Star-Bulletin's Craig Gima. McClain said the university can be especially useful in providing students a solid undergraduate program, especially to fill a growing need for teachers and nurses. That would allow UH-Manoa to focus on being a superior research university, he said.

UH-West Oahu has been operating from portable buildings next to Leeward Community College since 1976 as a two-year upper-division school. The first phase of the new campus would allow the school to nearly double its current student body of 800.

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Honor privacy rights
in airline security

THE ISSUE The federal government is backing away from plans to use commercial databases as part of its security system at airports.

PRIVACY concerns have prompted the Bush administration to back away from plans to use commercial databases in its computerized system to identify potential terrorists trying to board commercial airlines. The Transportation Security Administration instead is planning a more modest system of relying on government records and perhaps a voluntary, registered traveler program. A proper balance is needed to provide adequate security without hassling ordinary passengers.

The plan initially proposed, called CAPPS 2, for Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening, called for the use of databases that included credit, home ownership, telephone records and car registration in evaluating whether the name given by a passenger was true. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups concerned about privacy charged the the plan was intrusive.

The administration now is developing a system that would select about 4 percent of passengers for intense scrutiny, compared with 14 percent in the current system. Some passengers are subjected to the scrutiny for reasons that are believed to include booking at the last minute, buying one-way tickets or paying with cash.

The government could achieve more success by adopting a voluntary registered traveler program for frequent fliers. Those passengers, who account for a large percentage of the daily passenger list but a small percentage of the population, could pass quickly through airport security lines, allowing security guards to concentrate instead on other travelers. That system is being tested in a 90-day pilot program this summer at several large airports, but not Honolulu Airport.

The government has a list of people who are supposed to be stopped from boarding airplanes and another list of those who are designated for automatic secondary screening at airports. Those two lists include fewer than 10,000 names, but the new computer system reportedly would add a much larger list of names, which might also include addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth. That information is not intrusive, but more personal information, such as financial records, would be. The administration apparently has come to recognize those concerns.