I’m happy to see that the charter commission voted to place the codification of the 2% land fund into the Hawaii County charter on to the 2010 ballot .This would prevent future raids on this fund by the administration if the citizens of this island vote for it. However the commission voted for an amendment that prevents the Mayor or the council from reducing the percentage of funding for the land fund below .5%.
The charter commission also failed to pass the four year county council term charter amendment .
I would highly recommend reading The Wave Hawaii. It has had a lot of fascinating articles such as “Leaving Home is an Economic Indicator” and especially this article titled “The Blue Wave Revisited.”
The latter article is a painful reminder that Hawaii is simply spinning its wheels and lacking serious leadership to guide our local economy out of these boom and bust cycles.
“Despite the efforts of DBEDT and island economic development boards, there is not much steering of the economy going on at the leadership level. As a result, the State continues to spin in the lazy circles of the boom and bust cycle.”
Hawaii’s woeful broadband infrastructure is a great place for Hawaii’s politicians to start improving to help our 21st century tech competitiveness with the rest of the world. There has been a number of surveys done placing Hawaii’s Internet speeds nearly dead last.Thus there is no question my mind that something needs to be done to improve this. For example, 1Gbps speeds are available in Japan.
Lastly, it looks like the incomplete timeshare project above the Royal Kona Resort on Alii Drive has been put up for sale when I drove by last night.
Clearly having top notch broad band infrastructure is essential to our island community’s future. We need this for our existing business community and for our youth. By developing this sector — we will provide the island’s youth something to aspire to for employment here on their island– other than hotel jobs…
A “killer app” is needed to motivate full-tilt broadband availability on this island. I suggest that to be holographic delivery of medical-scientific data and conferencing sessions. Lest that sound too “far out” conceptually, just think of the medical-surgical aspects alone as making this mid-Pacific respite the “place to go” for medical care and healing services. Hawaii will never be a medical-healing center until it can trump the logistical problem of having all the pros residing in major metro areas far east of us. The same thing applies to “research parks,” such as NELHA is dreaming of, for development of innovative energy or agricultural production ideas; “virtual presence” and affordable broadband conferencing with and among continent-based professionals is the only way anyone competent and financially adequate is ever going to set up and be sustainable here. Holographic presentations and/or conferencing is probably 5 – 10 years out, but so is getting anything done.
I understand that the recently installed optic lines done by Sandwich Isles Communications, for DHHL, are first-rate capacity, and paid for by federal dollars for this targeted user group. If the state or county could “lease” “excess capacity” from this provider, and auction it off as sub-leases, we’d probably have a huge improvement immediately.
I think people – especially this island’s business leaders – need to actual see a demo of this technology to understand or even begin to imagine what Hawaii could do with this to offset the logistics of our physical mass locations. University of the Nations is quietly preparing its own avant-garde tele-communications/conferencing capability. They may be our applications leader.