• Invite to Koloa classroom • Put manager question on ballot • Always right time to do right thing • Is Kalapa’s writing paid advertising? Invite to Koloa classroom This letter is in response to Howard Tolbe’s opinion last Wednesday
• Invite to Koloa classroom • Put manager question on ballot • Always right time to do right thing • Is Kalapa’s writing paid advertising?
Invite to Koloa classroom
This letter is in response to Howard Tolbe’s opinion last Wednesday May 5th (“Don’t let them miss out”). I invite Mr. Tolbe to visit my classroom at Koloa Elementary to volunteer his time and to follow any of the teachers around for a week and still say that we don’t work for free already. I am sorry but I cannot agree with your opinion for teachers to work for free on furlough days.
Do you really feel that we should work more for free, do we not do enough for your children already? How much more do you want us to bend? What do I need to do to change that opinion, take another $300 a month pay cut? Are you saying that we teachers are not educating our future leaders to the best of our ability? Have you asked any other professional to work for free? Have you asked the governor herself to work for free? Please comment because I am offended that you would say those things.
Keoni Pau, Koloa
Put manager question on ballot
In response to Judge (Alfred) Laureta’s “common sense” letter of 5-16, there are “flaws, inequities, and inefficiencies” in the current system of government that I submitted to both the April and May CRC (Charter Review Commission) meetings.
Would you hire someone over 30 years of age, a U.S. citizen, and three years residency to perform brain surgery if it was needed? There are basic qualifications also needed to administer a nearly $200M budget. I want somebody with education in human resource management, fiscal management, and efficiencies in municipal administration.
Do any of us have knowledge of how efficiently our current government operates? Do we know if prescribed qualifications for county department positions are even met with present appointees? Has there ever been an independent performance audit to answer these questions?
If the elected mayor were part of the County Council, they could use their collective “Common Sense” to hire a county manager who would be competent and also have “common sense.”
The big advantage to the manager system is that he/she could be fired and replaced if the council/mayor hadn’t used “common sense” in the first hiring. Currently if someone is elected through friendship or rhetoric, we are stuck with them for four years. The mayor currently appoints his administrative assistant, who cannot be fired by the council, is not elected, and has no more qualifications than the mayor to administer the county operations.
No one individual should decide the issue. County manager has been discussed for over four years. It is time to get it on the ballot.
Rich Hoeppner, Wailua
Always right time to do right thing
With sympathy for Mr. Antonson’s inability to grasp the fact that all quotes are partial and re-contextualized by commentary (TGI “Influencing with integrity,” May 18), I believe it is always “the right time” to do the right thing, and the sooner the better.
Using Mr. Antonson’s credit-dispensing criteria he would give “most of the credit” to the duly elected patriarchs for passing the Nineteenth Amendment and “little credit” to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for making the outrageous public demand that women should have the right to vote. After continuous unladylike activism, women’s suffrage still took 72 years to accomplish. Had they expressed their concerns in private and not forcefully in public, women today would still be waiting quietly for the right to vote.
Evolutionary change is just fine for those who benefit from maintaining the status quo. However, revolutionary change is required by those oppressed by the status quo. In Mr. Antonson’s world where the greatest good is to help a board/group “appear competent before others” Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela both deserve “little credit” and “most of the credit” for ending apartheid and lessening race-based discrimination would go to government officials. Apartheid was halted and civil liberties were partially granted only when government was faced with open rebellion in the streets.
Finally, if Mr. Antonson’s idea of “Influencing with integrity” means discussing public issues in private venues out of public view without transparency, accountability, and oversight he does not know the meaning of the word “integrity” any more than the Board of Ethics knew the meaning of the words “shall not.”
To me, “integrity” means what Frederick Douglass often said, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” Consequently, I have had no dealing with Ho‘ike in years.
Ed Coll, Puhi
Is Kalapa’s writing paid advertising?
I’m curious to know if Lowell Kalapa’s incessant anti-tax writing is paid advertising? It seems to me that his relentless anti-taxation message surely must be a lobbying effort on the part of his “private funders” to cut their tax bill.
And like one of our political parties, he does overly focus on the taxation side of the budget problem rather than offering a balanced solution including the spending cuts that must be part of shrinking government.
It’s cowardly to talk about cutting taxes without pointing to specific programs to be cut when the revenue goes away, in my opinion. A lesson we should have learned in spades from 2001 to 2009.
David Camp, Anahola
