Where were they?
Where were they?
Question: Where were the protesters when the Thirty Meter Telescope was first proposed and during its planning stages?
Seems to me, if they truly were interested in protecting the mountain, then that was the time they should have made known their wishes, not after spending millions of dollars bringing it this far.
The TMT, as I recall, was planned several years ago. That is why we have public meetings where we can express our concerns. It is a given hindsight usually is 20-20.
Ron Baptista
Mountain View
‘Traffic circles’
How about taking all available highway improvement funds and spending them on opening up another way in and out of lower Puna, such as completing Railroad Avenue from Hawaiian Paradise Park to Hilo, rather than wasting our money and creating more traffic jams by doing more widening of the Pahoa highway and making needless traffic circles that create more … car wrecks than we already have?
Also, a berm around our shopping center would be nice.
Gerald Wright
Pahoa
Aloha to anarchy?
The soap opera on Mauna Kea is taking bizarre and dangerous turns. The self-proclaimed “protectors” have turned into occupiers and outlaws who profess allegiance to a self-proclaimed new government and say the laws of the state of Hawaii, and probably the entire United States, do not apply to them. Thus, they have made themselves outlaws and anarchists.
It is amusing that after trashing the bathrooms at the Mauna Kea Visitor Information Station they now are complaining the bathrooms are closed!
Having just finished paying our property taxes, I was motivated to think of what all the taxes we pay support in our community. One has to assume these new outlaws do not agree to pay taxes either. In the meantime, all the rest of the law-abiding citizens help pay for our county, state and federal government and all services — the visitor center, the repairs for it, all the roads, including the one leading to the summit, the schools, the parks, the courts, law enforcement, public assistance, and so forth.
The new outlaws must partake of many of these modern amenities but are not contributing anything to the wider community. On the contrary, they are harming tourism and the image of the whole state, keeping fellow citizens from working and earning a living, while proclaiming there can be no compromise on their part, their demands must be met and the state must capitulate and renege on all contracts with the existing telescopes and the multinational consortium that will build the Thirty Meter Telescope. All attempts at reasonable discussion in order to reach a compromise have been rebuffed.
Many of us who voted for David Ige are disappointed with his lack of leadership. His efforts to appease the protesters were doomed from the start, and his “ compromise” solution, if it were ever implemented, would deprive UH-Hilo and UH-Manoa of their teaching telescopes, a truly benighted outcome.
We only can hope he will take a firmer hand now and not let the state of Hawaii revert to the Stone Age.
Adrienne S. Dey
Hilo