Honolulu's Infrastructure Is Disintegrating

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Honolulu's Infrastructure Is Disintegrating

By Jay M. Fidell
Special to the Star-Bulletin

HOW LONG will the public be willing to suffer finger-pointing and excuses before it demands real solutions to real problems, such as deteriorating roads that ravage our vehicles and the sad state of affairs that led to the city's dumping of 48 million gallons of raw sewage into the center of Waikiki, the engine of our state's economy?

We are at a crossroads now, one at which the city must recognize its charter obligations to provide infrastructure and public safety.

Despite promises dating back to the 1970s, the city has done nothing to improve this infrastructure.

The city is steadily moving through the permitting process and toward accepting questionable reports and approving the project in a knee-jerk, same-old, accommodate-the- developer-at-any-cost fashion.

It gets worse. When residents' efforts -- including letters and petitions signed by some 1,100 people, 200 yard signs, and a dramatic meeting with the neighborhood board attended by more than 300 people and resulting in a spate of constructive recommendations -- failed to move the city, the administration provocatively suggested that the residents file a lawsuit if they wanted to get the information and access the city had denied to them.

The bottom line is that the infrastructure continues to deteriorate, effectively abandoned by the city, as so many other neighborhoods, notwithstanding the huge tax revenues the city is getting from high property taxes; the city is ignoring the requests of residents for information and involvement in processes that directly affect them and put them demonstrably at risk of life and limb.

And on top of all that, the city has adopted a policy that affirmatively punishes those who would complain about such treatment by denying consideration of any bill they would support.

Perhaps these public officials feel they are immune to the wishes and welfare of the community. Not so. Let's remember them well, and what they have done and failed to do at this critical and undeniably tragic intersection, and let's throw them out of office at first opportunity.