News & Views
by Anthony Pignataro
Coconut Wireless PHOTO BY DARRIS HURST
Land Company ($1,500 total). And SHOPO wasn’t the only union that was generous to Arakawa: he took in $1,000 from the ILWU PAC ($3,700 total), $2,000 from the Local 3 Operating Engineers PAC and $500 from the Hawaii Operating Engineers Stabilization Fund ($2,000 total). Despite the fact that it’s doubtful any big-name, well-funded candidate will decide to oppose Arakawa, look for these numbers to get bigger.
WILL STATE START BURYING IWI ON KAHO‘OLAWE?
I'm rich!
MO’ MONEY FOR MAYOR ARAKAWA
• $1,100 from Everett Dowling ($3,100 total) • $1,000 from A&B CEO Stanley Kuriyama ($2,000 total) • $125 from A&B Properties Maui VP Grant Chun ($700 total) • $500 from Kent Smith ($1,250 total) • $250 from Honua‘ula Representative Charlie Jencks ($3,876 total) Then there was money from big development firms themselves like $1,000 from Maui Land & Pineapple Company ($2,300 total) and $250 from West Maui
Overheard “That guy has an ass like double chins. I bet there’s a word for that.” -Man talking to woman at Keawakapu Beach, Feb. 1
PHOTO BY ETHAN DOYLE WHITE / WIKIMEDIA
So candidate filing in Hawaii for the 2014 election officially began on Monday, Feb. 3. For the next few months, we’ll watch a steady stream of citizens announce publicly that they think they know best how to run our county and state governments. And you know what? More power to ‘em–if they want spend an insane number of hours each week away from the families, begging for money and votes from people they’ve never met and possibly don’t even like, all so they can join the elite law-making bodies that govern this island, county and state, then it’s their right and privilege to do so. Speaking of begging for money, The Maui News reported on Jan. 31 that Maui County Mayor Alan Arakawa filed his latest campaign spending report early. You know that guy has $379,000 sitting in his campaign bank account right now, just waiting for candidates to come at him in his reelection bid that, until now, he wasn’t able to declare officially. And while a few have said publicly that they intend to run against Arakawa (see my Jan. 16, 2014 story “Unopposed?” for more on them), a war chest of that size this early in the campaign means any opposition will face a grueling battle to unseat him. And as is very clear from the latest campaign reports (which I looked over for myself after reading The Maui News story cited above), Arakawa has been spending the last few months–and years–drawing large sums of money from a very broad cross-section of the county’s power establishment. One small but telling example is SHOPO–the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers. This is the union that represents cops statewide. Pissed that we can’t find out the names of bad cops who’ve been busted by Internal Affairs? Blame SHOPO, which successfully convinced the state Legislature (and thenGovernor Ben Cayetano) in the mid-1990s to grant police officers a special exemption in the state’s public records law. Anyway, Arakawa’s latest campaign filings show that SHOPO gave him $125 in the last half of 2013. This may not seem like much,
but we have to remember that before that contribution, the union had since 2011 given Arakawa $2,500. Given that the mayor typically appoints people to the Maui County Police Commission (who are, of course, subject to County Council approval), we can be pretty sure SHOPO will hand over more dough before the end of the year. In its story, The Maui News made a big deal about the Arakawa Campaign giving back a $4,000 contribution from Alexander & Baldwin and another $1,000 from Monsanto, but as far as I can tell, the campaign finance records show that Arakawa has kept every dollar SHOPO’s given him. Other recent campaign checks Arakawa has seen fit to cash read like a roster of the county’s most powerful land developers:
One of the reasons land developers tend to get bad press is that their hotels, resorts and shopping centers often disturb the remains of those who lived here before the arrival of Westerners. The general rule is that any bones (iwi) found during construction must stay where found. If that can’t happen, then those who dug them up must rebury them as close as possible to their original site. Apparently, this plan of action–which is actually part of state law–isn’t working too well, because now the state Senate is kicking around SB 320, which proposes that we simply bury all the bones we can’t really find a place for over on Kaho‘olawe. “Hawaii’s Senate is considering a bill that would designate the island of Kahoolawe as the resting place for unknown or ‘inadvertently discovered’ Hawaiian bones when those remains can’t be reburied nearby,” the Associated Press reported on Jan. 31. “The state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources, which includes the Historic
Preservation Division, supports the bill.” The bill actually appeared in 2013, but was deferred to this session. It’s also slightly controversial. “The Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) OPPOSES SB320, which requires that iwi kupuna in the possession of the State whose provenience is unknown be reinterred on Kaho‘olawe,” an OHA representative testified back on Feb. 13, 2013. “Iwi kupuna have been purposefully placed and their locations should be honored. In recent years, most burials have been discovered in burial sites and therefore have ancestral origin information. In these cases, iwi should either remain in place, or be reburied in the area in which they were found to honor the intent of the original decedent or ‘ohana.”
No bones about it
The Senate Committee on Hawaiian Affairs was scheduled to take up the bill on the afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 5, after press time.
MAUI FRINGE FESTIVAL RESULTS For those at home keeping score, my play War Stories–the first I’ve ever written–won Second Place at the 2014 Maui Fringe Festival. Antara Bhardwaj’s Tale of Kathaka took top honors. Personally, I’m thrilled, and owe it all to Angela Thompson, the play’s director (and my girlfriend), and actors Derek Nakagawa and Jason Takaki. I couldn’t have won anything without them. ■ anthony@mauitime.com + @apignataro For more news articles, visit our news blog at: mauifeed.com
FEBRUARY 6, 2014
5