Meet the new decade… same as the old decade. We’re not even 10-days into the new decade and yet the stench of some 2010-2019 issues is already wafting into the room, just as we were about to celebrate moving forward. So, as I re-write Pete Townshend’s fantastic final line from The Who’s 1971 masterpiece, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, (“Meet the new boss… same as the old boss”), here are three early indications that we’ll still be dealing with the same old, same old.
A fallen tree closed a portion of the Pali Highway on New Year’s Eve. This was only after a rock slide completely shut down a portion of the Pali Highway tunnel on Christmas Day. So after nine months of repair work, we deal with the realities of nature… again!
You can remove, repair, reinforce, re-surface all you want (or need), but redundant rain, erosion, and aging tree roots inevitably dictate what happens on and to our roads any place where steep slopes and time prove that you can only be so pro-active topographically with what you can see or test, this decade or any other.
And then there’s OHA. Turned into an anagram and repeated three times, it becomes HOA, HOA, HOA. Now that sounds seasonal but might be much funnier (as in “ho, ho, ho”) if we didn’t have yet a snafu (noted on December 30) with the mandated state audit and an OHA refusal to release requested meeting notes. It will be nice when OHA cleans things up internally for the people who so depend on it externally. The first line under the “About” section on OHA’s home page says: “The Office of Hawaiian Affairs is a public agency with a high degree of autonomy”. Well…. apparently not right now as we head into the roaring ‘20s with an audit on hold…
And finally, Hawai`i’s population dropped for the third straight year in 2019. We saw the biggest numerical drop here since 2015. 20% of U.S. states lost population in 2019, but we’ll focus on Hawai`i, as this disturbing trend will soon leave us with an inadequate number of people to fill other jobs beyond the already understaffed areas of teachers and doctors.
OK, party time is over, now let’s get back to work to resolve/solve issues that we can and must fix.
Think about it…