LIHU‘E — While Councilman Tim Bynum pointed to a “non-starter” 50-cent fuel tax proposal to undermine other recommendations in the final draft of the Kaua‘i Energy Sustainability Plan Wednesday, his colleagues offered much harsher criticisms of the fuel tax a
LIHU‘E — While Councilman Tim Bynum pointed to a “non-starter” 50-cent fuel tax proposal to undermine other recommendations in the final draft of the Kaua‘i Energy Sustainability Plan Wednesday, his colleagues offered much harsher criticisms of the fuel tax a day later.
“It’s ridiculous, totally ridiculous,” Councilman Daryl Kaneshiro said Thursday. “I don’t know where the hell they came up with that thinking.”
Kaneshiro specifically criticized the work of consultant Douglas Hinrichs, Vice President of Market Development and Transformation for Sentech Hawai‘i.
“He’s out of his mind, completely out of his mind,” Kaneshiro said. “It blows me away that we pay a professional consultant $200,000 to come up with a sustainability plan and that’s what he comes up with. … He’s lucky I wasn’t there at the meeting when the presentation was made.”
Kaneshiro, who said he would not support the plan with the “absurd” fuel tax section in it, was in Honolulu negotiating to stop state legislators from taking the county’s share of the hotel tax when the council received its briefing from Hinrichs at the Jan. 6 meeting.
At that meeting and at a subsequent public information meeting where the fuel tax proposal drew fire from concerned citizens, Hinrichs said he crafted the plan after receiving input from “hundreds of people in the community” and argued that attaining sustainability — the overarching goal of the plan — will require a “shock to the system” and a “paradigm shift.”
The final draft states that the tax would raise nearly $200 million over the 20-year life of the plan, and that money would be used to financially incentivize the purchase of fuel-efficient hybrid-electric vehicles.
Councilwoman Lani Kawahara agreed with the goal of the fuel tax but said it is too much, too soon.
“I think it did what it was supposed to do. It was a wake-up call for people to begin thinking about things that might come to pass, but in my opinion, it’s not something that I’m going to pursue at the moment,” Kawahara said Thursday. “I wouldn’t rule it out (forever) because it would be a responsible thing to start thinking about doing, but 50 cents is a little high.”
She said such a proposal would not be feasible in the “near future” because the county needs to first improve on its infrastructure to support alternate transportation.
“I don’t think we’ve provided enough options besides automobile transportation for us to be able to even consider doing a 50-cent gasoline tax right now,” she said. “Unless we get a bus system that runs 24 hours or every day including Sundays, that would be something that should happen first, I would think.”
Councilman Dickie Chang echoed those sentiments, saying he would be more open to an expansion of the bus system and an improvement of the roads with funds raised by a smaller county fuel tax.
“The plan probably went through a lot of research, and I’m sure it’s the right way to go, but it’s such a radical statement to say that you’re going to raise the tax 50 cents,” Chang said Thursday. “It’s way way way too much of a radical change at a very bad time at our state of the economy.”
Chang pointed to recent announcements that Hawai‘i parents would soon need to spend more to send their students on the school bus and buy school lunches.
“Any kind of an additional burden you’re putting on people at this time is in my opinion unreasonable,” he said. “Futurists will buy into it, saying you’ve got to start sometime, somehow, but I don’t believe this is the time. … Fifty cents at this point is pretty absurd.”
Councilman Derek Kawakami, choosing his words carefully to avoid overly harsh criticism of the KESP and Hinrichs, said if fuel tax is a funding mechanism to make the whole plan feasible, it might instead render the whole plan “moot.”
“There’s a lot of value in the plan itself, there’s a lot of good tools we should be looking at, but unfortunately the 50-cent gas tax increase is not one of them we should be looking at at this time,” Kawakami said Thursday.
“I just think that it’s out of reach for the majority of the people to be able to absorb a tax increase of that magnitude,” he said. “If you look at the people who need to drive, most of them are working-class people. How can we hurt them?”
Attempts to reach Council Chair Bill “Kaipo” Asing and Vice Chair Jay Furfaro via telephone for comment were unsuccessful Thursday afternoon.
A phone message left for Hinrichs Thursday evening was not returned as of press time.
